Seventy-one

delegates, age 17-78, from 28 states, are currently visiting Mexico, Nicaragua,

Colombia and Cuba on a summer's peace mission. The Cuban delegation is

meeting with community leaders and government officials and plan to observe

a broad spectrum of Cuban society, including schools, health centers and

churches. Their primary purpose is to study the effect of U.S. economic

and trade embargo upon the Cuban people for the past 42 years.

"Obviously,"

Nelson says, "U.S. foreign policy has created immense human suffering,

economic hardships, and social deprivation in Cuba which most religious

leaders and persons of conscience around the world believe is immoral

and unethical. In his visit to Cuba in 1998, Pope John Paul II denounced

the U.S. embargo as 'unjust and ethically unacceptable.'"

While staying

in Havana at the Martin Luther King. Jr. Memorial Center for Internal

Peace and Non Violence, Witness for Peace will be looking for signs of

police brutality, political oppression, and denial of basic human rights

to Afro-Cubans, Chinese and Jews living in Cuba.

The delegation

is composed of students, writers, pastors, college professors, homemakers,

counselors, Latin American specialists, social workers, a lawyer, historian,

environmental chemist, college chaplain and a Catholic nun. The group

will lobby with congressional leaders in Washington, D.C., upon their

return to the United States.

For 22 years,

Nelson was the campus minister and director of the Wesley Foundation at

Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville. He also is a retired

pastor of the First United Methodist Church of East Point, former pastor

of Hopewell United Methodist Church in Tyrone, and, from 1966 until 1968,

served as religion columnist for the Fayette County News .

He has worked

in Methodist churches across the North Georgia conference for 45 years

and says he has been a "progressive and prophetic voice for the Methodist

Social Creed and Principles, civil rights and liberation theology."

He also has been a longtime advocate for children, youth, women, minorities

and the poor.

Nelson currently

is a retired member of the North Georgia Conference, living part-time

in Peachtree City.

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