Vol. 75/No. 8      February 28, 2011

About 60 people came to hear Luis Rumbaut, director of communications for the Cuban American Alliance Education Fund, which opposes the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba; Kathryn Striffolino, International Advocacy Director (Latin America) for Amnesty International; Kamau Benjamin from the D.C. Metro Coalition to Free the Cuban Five; and Carl Gentile, chair of the U.S. Labor for Friendship with Cuba.

The Cuban Five—Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, René González, Antonio Guerrero, and Fernando González—have been imprisoned in the United States for more than 12 years.

They were in Miami in the 1990s monitoring right-wing groups that, with the complicity of the U.S. government, have carried out violent attacks against Cuba. Arrested by federal authorities in 1998, they were convicted in 2001 on a series of frame-up charges and given draconian sentences.

Rumbaut gave a brief history of the measures the U.S. government took in the 1990s to increase economic pressure on Cuba and how the case of the five was a political frame-up.

Amnesty International “has serious doubts about the fairness and impartiality of their trial,” said Striffolino. The U.S. government’s continued refusal to grant visas to Adriana Pérez, wife of Gerardo Hernández, and Olga Salanueva, wife of René González, to visit their imprisoned husbands is “unnecessarily harsh and constitutes additional punishment and inhumane treatment,” she added.

A lively question-and-answer period followed the presentations. Dmitry Robertson, 22, a student of Spanish and political science at Howard, asked what he can do to help free the five.

Moderator Omari Musa, an activist in the D.C. Metro Coalition and leader of the Socialist Workers Party, encouraged Robertson to reach out to professors and student groups to organize presentations on the case. More than 30 people signed up to get involved in future activities.

Camera crews from CNN Español and Univisión, the Spanish-language cable network, filmed the event. The Cuban Interests Section provided a display of political cartoons by Hernández.  
 
 
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