Dividing up political prisoners and sending them to separate jails as Washington has now done is something that even many dictatorships and repressive regimes have not imposed on those they have thrown in prison for political reasons. The decision serves as a reminder of what imperialist democracy is all about and of the future the superwealthy rulers have in store for all working people--if they get their way.

It can also serve as an opportunity to widen the support for the five, and others Washington has incarcerated on charges of spying for Cuba, such as Ana Belen Montes. The issues in this fight are of broad concern to working people, who more and more face similar assaults by the employers and their government. By explaining the facts of the case on the job, among those joining social protest actions and strike picket lines, and to students, supporters of the five Cubans can respond effectively to Washington's assault.

Working people in the United States have an important stake in demanding that the frame-up convictions of five Cuban citizens in a U.S. court be thrown out. The trial was a miscarriage of justice.

The five Cubans and the Cuban government acknowledge they were collecting information on rightist and terrorist groups who, with the complicity of Washington, are responsible for attacks and provocations against Cuba. The Cuban revolutionary government has made it clear it will not stand by while these outfits plan, organize, and launch assaults against their country. The defendants and their lawyers did an effective job of exposing the extent and character of these actions through court testimony.

The U.S. ruling class, with its four-decade-long bipartisan policies against the Cuban Revolution, is responsible for creating the rightist outfits that operate on U.S. territory and carry out attacks against the island. These terrorist groups have been one aspect of Washington's wide-ranging war against the Cuban Revolution, which has included a mercenary invasion, war threats, an ongoing economic embargo, a drive to politically isolate the country in the world, and assassination attempts on government leaders. The U.S. government also maintains a travel ban that denies the right of most U.S. residents to visit Cuba.

These convictions and sentences are an attack directed not only at revolutionary Cuba but at workers' rights in the United States. FBI agents broke into the Cubans' homes repeatedly over the three years prior to the arrests, violating the Fourth Amendment protection against arbitrary search and seizure. The prosecution's "evidence" consisted of information the FBI claimed to have collected in these raids, and from short-wave radio transmissions government agents asserted they intercepted between Havana and the defendants. The judge refused a defense motion to move the trial out of Miami, even after several potential jurors, particularly Cuban-Americans, disqualified themselves for fear of reprisals if they voted "not guilty." No evidence of any military secrets being stolen from the United States and turned over to Cuba was ever presented by the prosecution.

As with Washington's attacks on workers' rights under the guise of fighting terrorism since September 11, and the interrelated humiliating treatment of the Taliban and other prisoners held by the U.S. Government in Guantánamo, Cuba, the U.S. rulers have used the "spy scare" case against the five Cuban revolutionaries as a means to justify broader powers for the FBI. Such moves have included sanctioning break-ins and electronic eavesdropping, frame-up trials on scanty evidence, and harsh prison conditions, including extended solitary confinement based solely on the character of the charges against the defendants.

The frame-up trial and trampling of justice in the federal court in Miami is not an aberration--it is how imperialist justice works in the USA. It is the same as the supposedly airtight case Washington had assembled against Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian pilot imprisoned for five months in a maximum security prison in London because Washington asserted it had incontrovertible evidence that he was part of the plot to target the World Trade Center on September 11. Raissi was freed on bail this week after Washington's case collapsed. Frame-ups of fighting unionists such as the Charleston Five dockworkers who won their freedom as a result of an international campaign--that's how imperialist justice works.

The conditions of the transfer of the five Cubans to different jails reveal a further attempt by Washington to bring them to their knees and intimidate their supporters and all defenders of workers' rights and civil liberties. But as has repeatedly happened since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the five are showing Washington what a revolutionary people are made of.

The tenacious stand of the "young pines," as Víctor Dreke so eloquently describes them, provides an opportunity for all working people and youth who defend workers' rights and the Cuban Revolution to join in demanding the convictions of the five be thrown out and that they be freed from prison.
 
 
Related article:
U.S. shackles and separates five Cuban revolutionaries  
 
 
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