Tightened restrictions on those in the maximum security prison include a prohibition on leaving their cells, a ban on visits, no phone calls, and no hot meals. The lockdown has been in place since November 1 and prison authorities have given no indication of when they will end their crackdown.

The lockdown is apparently a typically arbitrary action by the federal jailers that has been imposed on all the prisoners at the facility, not just Hernández. “I don’t think they have targeted Gerardo,” said Alicia Jrapko, a representative of the National Committee to Free the Five, in a December 3 phone interview from San Francisco.

Jrapko said Hernández continues to write letters to the committee every week and remains in good spirits.

He recently wrote his wife, Adriana Pérez, about the conditions he faces. “I can’t talk to you because I’m still kept in lockdown. I don’t know how long this will take, but don’t worry about it. Everything’s fine,” he said in his letter, quoted in the December 1 issue of the Cuban paper Juventud Rebelde.

Hernández, along with Fernando González, René González, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino—known as the Cuban Five—are Cuban revolutionaries serving prison terms of between 15 years and, in the case of Hernández, a double life sentence based on a frame-up and conviction in June 2001 in a federal court.

Hernández and his four comrades were in the United States on an internationalist mission to defend the Cuban Revolution from U.S.-backed assaults. They were gathering information on the activities of counterrevolutionary Cuban-American groups based in Florida that have a history of launching violent attacks on Cuba from U.S. soil. These outfits have operated with training, funding, and other resources from the U.S. government.

These attacks are part of Washington’s more than 45 years of cold—and sometimes hot—war on Cuba. Since workers and farmers took political power there in 1959, the U.S. rulers have viewed the Cuban Revolution as a threat to their interests because of the example it continues to set for working people throughout Latin America and around the world.

The five Cubans were arrested in 1998. Unable to prove any illegal acts by the five, U.S. prosecutors pushed through convictions on a series of conspiracy charges, including conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign power and to commit espionage. Hernández was handed the harshest sentence—two consecutive life terms—based on those charges plus the allegation of conspiracy to commit murder.

Aiming to isolate them from supporters and each other, U.S. officials have placed the five men in separate jails across the country. On Feb. 28, 2003, all five were thrown into solitary confinement by order of the Department of Justice, which argued that the support they were receiving and the limited visits they were allowed posed a “national security risk.” They were released from the “hole” a month later following an international protest campaign.

In March of this year, the five appealed their convictions at a hearing in Miami of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has yet to rule.

The U.S. government continues to maintain its inhumane refusal to grant visas to Adriana Pérez and to Olga Salanueva, the wife of René González, to come to the United States from Cuba to visit their husbands. Washington claims the entry of Salanueva and Pérez to this country to visit their jailed husbands, whom they have not seen in six years, would be a threat to U.S. “national security.”
 
 
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Free the Cuban Five!  
 
 
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