Vol. 73/No. 22      June 8, 2009

Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, René González, and Fernando González—internationally known as the Cuban Five—were arrested by FBI agents in south Florida in September 1998 and sentenced to long prison terms on false charges ranging from “conspiracy to commit espionage” to, in the case of Hernández, “conspiracy to commit murder.” They had been in the United States keeping tabs on counterrevolutionary groups that have carried out violent attacks against Cuba. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide this month whether or not to hear their appeal.

Panelist Saul Landau, who is making a documentary on their case, urged participants to join the fight to protest their unjust imprisonment. Armando Navarro, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University and coordinator of the National Alliance for Human Rights, announced that participants were invited to a follow-up meeting on June 27 to discuss the next steps in the fight to end the U.S. embargo of Cuba and campaign to free the five.

“To my knowledge we are the first university to organize an event of this kind, but there needs to be more meetings like this,” said Navarro. “This calamitous embargo is anachronistic, and it needs to be ended.”

A broad range of academic departments and programs, and student groups on the campus, sponsored the meeting.

Latin American Perspectives, a theoretical journal for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas, also sponsored the event. Ron Chilicothe, the journal’s managing editor and an economics professor at UCR, explained that the most recent issues were “a celebration of 50 years of the Cuban Revolution.”  
 
Big boost in libraries in Cuba
Rhonda Neugeleaur, a bibliographer in Latin American Studies at UCR, said, “Percentage-wise, there are more libraries in Cuba today than in California.” Before the 1959 revolution, she noted, Cuba had 32 public libraries. Now there are nearly 400 in addition to school libraries. She showed slides of her July 2008 trip on a bookmobile with fellow librarian Dana Lubow to Granma Province in the Cuban countryside. The bookmobile was filled with 3,000 donated books.

“The embargo creates real shortages of basic resources for Cuban librarians,” she said. “Librarians in the U.S. are also limited by the U.S. embargo, because we cannot share databases and resources with our Cuban counterparts.”

Other speakers at the meeting included Miguel Salas, a history professor at Pomona College; Paul Ryer, an anthropology professor at UCR; and Blaise Bonpane, the host of “World Focus” of KPFK radio.

In the discussion, UCR student Jesus Meza reported that students who do not have health insurance have to pay an additional $700 to attend college. “On top of that tuition just went up by 10 percent. What can we learn from Cuba about health care and education?” he asked.

“Millions of people are asking themselves that same question as the capitalist crisis deepens,” said James Harris, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Los Angeles in the recent elections. “The example Cuba offers is that in order to solve our most basic problems, workers need to make a proletarian revolution and take political power.”
 
 
Related articles:
Relatives of Cuban Five speak on frame-up case
Youth tribunal condemns attacks on Cuba
FBI wanted Cuban 5 to become traitors
Gerardo Hernández: Fear, intimidation didn’t work, so they put us in ‘the hole’  
 
 
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