BY MARITHELMA COSTA
In days marked by the Paraguayan coup, the Mexican student movement for transparency, Yo Soy132, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the crisis in Greece, and the bailout of the Spanish banks and their restructuring on the backs of citizens, news of the launch of Tito Kayak’s Admirable Voyage on the summer solstice this year has been a bit eclipsed.
Because my father scoured the Island’s press for news of the Voyage and found hardly any stories, I decided to describe the first stage of a trip in which Tito Kayak will row across the 1,400 miles between Venezuela and Puerto Rico in a bid to raise attention to the need to free Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera.
I follow the Admirable Voyage from New York thanks to Roso Grimau, who is covering it from Venezuela and has posted articles by investigative journalist Jesús Dávila on his blog; the messages posted on the Internet by Salvador Tió – one of the Voyage organizers – ; the website Amigos del Mar; and phone calls to the Isla Verde Encampment and Elisa Sánchez, one of the coordinators.
This trip is a cherished dream for environmentalist Alberto de Jesús Mercado. As he explained in an interview sponsored by the Mayoralty of Sucre, a municipality in Venezuela’s northeast region, Tito aims to follow the path of the Arawak ancestors who settled Puerto Rico and the Caribbean islands, and above all, to seek international support and urge Barack Obama’s government to grant an unconditional pardon to political prisoner Oscar López Rivera, who as of this May has served 31 years in U.S. prisons. Read the complete article here.
Follow Tito in real time here.
View the video interview here.