For more than three weeks the Rev. Lucius Walker and four companions have staged a hunger strike at the world's busiest border crossing aimed at ending the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba. The demonstrators are part of a larger group, Pastors for Peace, that aims to reshape U.S. foreign policy through people-to-people diplomacy. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes on labor and immigration.

SAN YSIDRO, CA. -- Here at the world's busiest border crossing a small steel-and-canvas tent now occupies center stage. As helicopters bristling with electronic gear clatter overhead, hundreds of border patrol and customs agents keep watch on the tent as though it held the advance guard of an invading army.

But the threat presented by the tent's five inhabitants is a moral, not a military one. Inside the tiny structure the Rev. Lucius Walker and four companions are challenging the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. For more than three weeks, they have gone without food while the 400 personal computers they sought to bring with them to Cuba sit locked inside a U.S. Customs warehouse.

"We are for a face-to-face, a people-to-people foreign policy," Walker explains. "We take our mandate from Matthew 25:35 -- give water to the thirsty, and food to the hungry. Those who do this are carrying out God's work. They are obeying the highest mandate, higher than sanctions against a people who never did us harm."

Walker's arguments have a moral fervor which recalls the anti-Vietnam war movement. Supporting their tactics of civil disobedience, the fasters quote Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist who declared that "power concedes nothing without a struggle."

Over the past three years, Pastors for Peace, the organization Walker leads, has sent shipments of school books, Bibles, medical supplies, pencils and other articles of daily life to ordinary Cubans in whose name the economic blockade is being carried out. The first shipment, three years ago, was stopped at the Mexican border in Laredo, Texas. But after ministers and other supporters fasted for 23 days, the U.S. Customs eventually let it pass. Pastors for Peace never filled out applications to exempt their shipments from sanction regulations, arguing that to do so would give legitimacy to an action they regard as immoral.

In January, the group assembled computers -- older PCs -- to enable the Cuban medical system to share information from clinic to clinic on the island. But when trucks carrying the computers arrived at the Otay Mesa checkpoint, they were met with 1500 border guards, police, sheriffs and national guardsmen. When participants in the caravan sought to carry the computers across, they were tackled and the computers wrestled from their arms.

When Pastors for Peace tried to cross a second time at San Ysidro, they met a similar response. Pastors and supporters then set up their tent and declared they would not eat until the government released the computers.

They are still waiting. Meanwhile, in cities like Duluth, Chicago, San Francisco and Denver, supporters have joined the fast. Demonstrations have spread to 40 cities throughout the Americas and Europe, evidence the group says of widespread public support for lifting the embargo policy against Cuba.

Since the fast began, however, Congress has passed and the president signed a bill aimed at tightening the blockade. Once considered a political non-starter because it was so extreme, the Helms-Burton Bill was revived within hours after the Cuban air force shot down two small planes belonging to the Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue, killing both pilots.

Founded by Cuban exile Joe Basulto, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1963, Brothers had mounted more than 1700 flights over the island, buzzing Havana. The flights first dropped leaflets urging people to leave, then sought to rescue those who tried to cross the Florida straits in response to their appeals.

"A third of those who listened to the Brothers' siren call wound up at the bottom of the ocean," Walker says. "The embargo they support has created the economic misery which led people to try to come to the U.S. Who has the responsibility for those who perished if not those who applied the noose?"

Walker believes the hunger strike is turning public opinion against the embargo policy. "It's because of our success that the government has come after us."