By Nancy Kohn
(Taken from Granma.cu) -- The Second Days of Action against the Blockade of Cuba in Washington DC ended on April 22 with a successful community forum at the UDC Law School. From April 18, participants from cities across the United States, including Hawaii, and also from Brazil and Canada, attended a variety of activities.
The Days of Action was designed this year to bring a number of Cuban guests to participate and to share the Cuban perspective with U.S audiences. The expectation of the organizers was that it would be easier to get visa approval for them after the favorable announcements about improved relations between the two countries were made on December 17, 2014.
As it turns out, in this new period of "thaw" the exact opposite is true. Two Cuban medical professionals who had participated in the Cuban brigade to fight Ebola in West Africa were invited to participate. Also Luisa Campos, the Director of the Havana Literacy Museum who has come to the US before, a representative of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) and Jorgito Jerez -all of them representatives of Cuban civil society. They were all set to come but of the five Cuban invitees only Jorgito got his visa, and that came after the first leg of his tour in New York had passed. He arrived in DC just 2 hours before he was to speak at American University.
