I would like to thank all those who made this book possible, starting with the authors.

If one needs a single word to describe how one feels reading this book, it should be “moved”. It has a feature, perhaps unique, in that none of the authors ever thought that their words would form a book. It is an insurmountable testimonial that reveals feelings, and to a certain degree, the intimacy of a number of people that do not give themselves to rhetoric, to proselytizing, to didactics, but present us with a very real group of admirable human beings, who have been writing to each other and who became the focus of this work.

One of the last letters in the book is written by Gerardo to Adriana in which he affirms the following: “I’m conscious of the fact that while we sacrifice ourselves all this time, many others have taken advantage of it to live their lives, because they want to take all they can out of life over the years. But I can say that what interests me is not what I can take, but what I will leave behind.”

I think this sentence of Gerardo’s is interesting because it’s repeated by Ramón, René, Antonio and Fernando and is perhaps the most important message we can gain in the struggle to free these compatriots. I remember the last song of the Beatles which said that in the end the love you have will be the same as the love you give.

In the end the love these five compatriots and their families will receive must be vast because of the vast love that they have given not only to their people, but to all of humanity.

With its poignant words, this book should help us to move the cynical mainstream press to question why it is possible for the terrorist government of the United States to receive terrorists (the reference is to the recent release of four Cuban-American terrorists by Panama – three of whom flew straight to the United States) with open arms, and at the same time prevent the wives and one of the children of two of the Cuban Five to visit their husbands and father, so unjustly incarcerated in the US.

It should help to move someone to find out that in the United States there are five heroes imprisoned for fighting terrorism, and that the US government practices torture in its cruel and unusual treatment of them, their wives, their mothers and their children, by imposing absolutely unjustifiable punishment upon them.

I sincerely hope that this book moves some people – if only for a moment – to tell the US government to stop this cruel and unusual treatment of the five Cubans that violates their most basic human rights and those of each and every member of their families. These five men should not be in prison at all - they should never even have even been arrested.