The signers included the Nobel laureate and Holocaust historian Elie Wiesel, the financier and philanthropist George Soros, members of the committee established by Mr. Clinton to study race relations in America and three Roman Catholic bishops.
In a letter released on Thursday, the 123 signers, including the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A)., the Unitarian Universalist Association and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., urged retail giants like Wal-Mart, Target, Sears and Gap to sign on to the factory safety plan that more than 30 European retailers embraced this week.
"We share the opinion that the isolation of the people of Cuba benefits the most inflexible interests of its government, while any opening serves to inform and empower the Cuban people and helps to further strengthen our civil society," said the letter, whose signers included the blogger Yoani S?hez, above, the hunger striker Guillermo Fari? and the human rights leader Elizardo S?hez.
Signers included the editors of the The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and leading journals in Denmark, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.
The signers include several of the most outspoken critics of the NSABB's late December recommendation, including virologists Peter Palese and Adolfo García-Sastre García-SastreSinai Schofl of Medicine in New York Cithe
The signers include 98 of the 171 living Nobel winners in science and officials of dozens of national academies of science.
The group's signers include officials of the New York Urban League and the Education Law Center of New Jersey, along with scores of teachers, principals and administrators from around the country.
The signers include nine Roman Catholic archbishops and the primate of the Orthodox Church in America.
Thus the petition's signers include not only familiar faces like the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the movie directors Bertrand Tavernier and Claude Lanzmann, the theater directors Patrice Chereau and Ariane Mnouchkine and the former culture minister, Jack Lang, but also thousands of unknown intellectuals and professionals.
