Let Cuba Live mourns the death September 7 of Rev. Lucius. Walker Jr, Executive Director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) and Pastors for Peace, organizations he founded.

The message from Pastors for Peace said: "With immeasurable sadness we write to let you know of the passing of our beloved, heroic, prophetic leader Rev. Lucius Walker Jr. this morning."

The loss of Reverend Walker is devastating to his friends, who are legion; to the Cuban people; and to lovers of peace and justice everywhere.

Lucius Walker was in the forefront of struggles against oppression in Haiti, South Africa, and sweatshops along the US-Mexican border, and years ago, against remnants of the Ku Klux Klan. He inspired Pastors for Peace and many more to reach out to victims of U.S. aggression in Honduras, Nicaragua, Chiapas, El Salvador, and Cuba.

"You are all Pastors," he would say, practicing a "peoples' foreign policy." His tools were solidarity, love and civil disobedience. Rev. Walker and the Pastors Peace Caravan were there in Cuba in 1992 and every year from then on. That was the year the U. S. government passed legislation aimed at finishing off the Cuban revolution, on the ropes after the fall of the Soviet Union.

"Cubans, in gratitude, have to say that we don't want to think of a world without Lucius Walker," according to the Granma newspaper there. While serving as Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations in the 1990's, Ricardo Alarcon, President of Cuba's National Assembly, came to know Lucius Walker well. Alarcon writes, "Lucius was an example unsurpassed of solidarity and of loving thy neighbor. His life was an authentic realization of the true Christian spirit. Let the struggle continue and multiply until we've won a world of peace and brotherhood for all. Lucius will be with us every day."

Alarcon recalls that "more than once" Lucius Walker asked him: "How do we live without Cuba. How do we go on and fight without the Cuban Revolution, without what Cuba means for us?" Reverend Lucius Walker served as Associate General Secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ and, until he died, as Pastor of the Salvation Baptist Church in the Ft. Greene section of Brooklyn. Over a decade ago, he undertook a four day speaking tour in Maine. In 2001 before a large crowd in Monument Square in Portland, Lucius Walker spoke out against the anti-Cuba blockade. Three weeks later, he and Pastors for Peace colleagues joined over 100 Let Cuba Live supporters at the border station in Coburn Gore Maine, as we sent humanitarian aide to Cuba via Montreal - against the rules.