PRESS RELEASE OF HERMANOS AL RESCATE

May 16, 1996.

With a sudden action responding to political pressures from the Castro regime, President Clinton's Administration revoked today the pilot's license of Jose Basulto, the president of Hermanos al Rescate (Brothers to the Rescue).

Brothers to the Rescue is a voluntary, non-profit, pilot's human right activist organization which searches the Straits of Florida for Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro's dictatorship. Promotes and supports nonviolent dissidense to bring democracy to Cuba. The pilots are responsible for saving the lives of thousands of Cubans escaping from the brutal regime in Cuba. It is financed by over 120,000 individual contributions received to this date.

The "Order of Emergency Revocation" is totally unjustified and is in response to Havana's fears that Hermanos al Rescate could be planning an activity that could endanger the stability of Cuba's dictatorship, such as dropping leaflets with the Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which Cuba is a signatory, and which are described by the dictatorship as "subversive propaganda".

Hermanos al Rescate had filed a flight plan for today.

We did not expect that Washington would play the role of the preventive policeman of Fidel Castro, in less than 24 hours, without basis nor legal principle. In response to which of Castro's threats has Washington acted upon?

The text of the revocation implies that Brothers to the Rescue has some sort of responsibility in Cuba's Air Force shooting down of Brother's two aircrafts in international airspace last February 24^th. Brothers to the Rescue rejects such implication.

We consider the Administration's implication of the guilt to anyone but Castro, as moraly wrong , as it transfers guilt to the victims and inocence to the the criminal.

Specially , when shortly the United Nations will publish the results of its impartial investigation of this act of international terrorism by Cuba's dictatorship.