Vol. 73/No. 36      September 21, 2009

Federal agents showed up at the offices of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) August 4, shortly after the group’s 20th Friendshipment caravan returned from Cuba. The FBI agents said they were doing “community outreach,” according to an IFCO statement. IFCO staffers declined to talk to the agents—a right guaranteed under the Constitution.

Pastors for Peace, an IFCO ministry, organizes annual Friendshipment trips to take supplies such as hurricane reconstruction materials, medical and educational equipment, computers, and school buses to the island, and to protest Washington’s travel ban.

According to IFCO, the FBI also visited the home of Ignacio Meneses, who recently traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, another organization in the United States that travels yearly to Cuba to protest the travel ban. Meneses heads the U.S./Cuba Labor Exchange and is an advocate for the right to travel to Cuba.

In a related development, Lucius Walker, IFCO’s executive director, is being dragged back into court September 10 by the special commissioner of investigation for the New York City School District. The commissioner, Richard Condon, is pressing the New York State Supreme Court to hold Walker in contempt of court for refusing to provide information related to trips to Cuba made by high school students. The investigation is targeting four trips made by students at Beacon School between 1999 and 2007 that Condon says were illegal. He alleges that Walker and IFCO helped organize them.  
 
 
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