ICAP, 65 Years of Friendship: The Example of the Friendshipment Caravans

There are countless examples of the Pastors for Peace project, a U.S.-based initiative of the Interfaith Foundation for Community Organizing (IFCO) in support of the Cuban people since their first visit of its caravans in 1992, during the difficult years of the Special Period.

That year, IFCO extended its hand in solidarity with Cuba by organizing the first of many US-Cuba Friendshipment Caravans, which in a defiant journey crossed the border at Laredo, Texas, after traveling through 90 U.S. cities and collecting 12.5 tons of medicines, powdered milk, bicycles, school supplies, and Bibles, thus circumventing the blockade laws because, as the caravan members repeatedly say, “love doesn’t pay taxes.”

History records the admirable resistance of the pastors to U.S. pressure. One example was the caravan members’ prolonged hunger strike—which greatly concerned Fidel Castro—on the Mexican border in 1993 to demand the return of a bus that was to be sent to Cuba but had been confiscated.

Upon receiving the strikers, Fidel remarked: “You can see that, when reason is absent, any lie, any absurd argument is used to justify the unjustifiable. I believe that one day it will no longer be a school or a church bus to take the elderly to a museum and become a modern-day Rocinante, with its thin, worn iron frame, a symbol of friendship, solidarity, and brotherhood among peoples.”

At the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), longtime host of the caravans, the memory of and tribute to the work of Reverend Lucius Walker (1930-2010), leader of the Pastors and tireless fighter for justice rooted in biblical and theological principles, and a close friend of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro, are a constant presence.

Fidel Castro's words on August 25, 1993, after the caravan's hunger strike in Laredo, are unforgettable: “…not a single word of hatred for anything or anyone came from Lucius's lips; only reasons, arguments, truths, hard truths, but simply truths, because Pastors for Peace fight precisely for that, for peace; the Friendshipment Caravan fights precisely for that, for friendship between the peoples of the United States and Cuba, between the people of the United States and all the peoples of the world.”

On his end, the reverend, who considered Fidel Castro a great man, a great statesman, and a generous person, said: “We are in Cuba not because Cuba needs us, but because the world needs Cuba”.

The history of these fraternal relations has been enriched over the years by the legacy of Lucius and the Commander-in-Chief, creators of the scholarship program for young Americans at the Latin American Medical School (ELAM), from which 244 have graduated up to 2025 and another group is still studying.