The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 75/No. 42      November 21, 2011

 
NY meeting demands
‘Free the Cuban Five’
 
BY DEBORAH LIATOS  
NEW YORK—Some 175 people attended a meeting here November 5 to back the fight to free the Cuban Five. The five revolutionaries, René González, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino and Fernando González, were arrested in 1998 and framed up on a number of trumped up charges, including “conspiracy to commit espionage.” Hernández was falsely convicted of “conspiracy to commit murder.”

Among the speakers were Thenjiwe McHarris, Amnesty International Northeast Field Organizer; Rev. Luis Barrios, co-director of IFCO/Pastors for Peace; Esperanza Luzbert from the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples; Richard Klugh, an attorney for the Cuban Five; civil rights attorney Michael Warren; Gloria La Riva from the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five; Alicia Jrapko from the International Committee to Free the Cuban Five; and Evelina Deulofeu of the Martin Luther King Center in Havana.

Carmen Acosta of Service Employees International Union Local 1199 welcomed participants to the event, held in the union’s Martin Luther King Jr. Labor Center.

At the time of their arrests the five had been gathering information for the Cuban government on the activities of counterrevolutionary groups in Florida with a long history of violent attacks against Cuba with Washington’s complicity.  
 
Impact of international campaign
The five were convicted in 2001. Amid an international campaign to free them, the sentences of three were reduced in 2009. Guerrero’s prison term was reduced from life plus 10 years to 21 years and 10 months, Labaniño’s sentence was reduced from life plus 18 years to 30 years, and Fernando González’s from 19 years to 17 years and 9 months. But the Court of Appeals refused to vacate the double life sentence plus 15 years imposed on Hernández.

Released from jail October 7, René González is now serving three additional years of “supervised release” in the U.S. He has dual Cuban and U.S. citizenship. The court refused to let him return to his home country Cuba despite the fact that this is common practice for citizens of other countries.

“René is free from the small jail, after an unjust sentence of 15 years, yet they still force him to remain in this country, against his will,” wrote Labañino in a message to the meeting on behalf of the five read by Nancy Cabrero, president of New York’s Casa de las Américas.

“We are living through the most egregious attacks on immigrants and anyone that the government does not like,” Labañino said. “They spend millions of dollars daily to hunt down human beings in order to separate them from their families, their children, from their lives here and ship them to their countries of origin.”

“The extreme punishment against our brother Gerardo continues with all kinds of extreme cruelties,” Labañino wrote. “They do not even allow him to see his wife Adriana, they interfere and delay his process of legal appeals and they put him in solitary confinement using any excuse.”

When the five are free, Labañino concluded, “we will all be together, defending other just causes and demanding the freedom of other brothers who are in similar circumstances.”

McHarris presented Amnesty International’s main concerns on the case: that the U.S. government denied the five access to their attorneys and placed them in solitary confinement prior to the trial, that it refused to grant a change in venue in spite of “pervasive hostility to the Cuban government” in Miami, and that it continues to deny visas to Olga Salanueva and Adriana Pérez, the wives of René González and Hernández respectively, preventing them from visiting their husbands in the U.S.

“Amnesty International will continue to monitor this case and the human rights violations the U.S. government is responsible for,” she said.

Participants discussed the frame-up conviction of Hernández for conspiracy to commit murder. Government prosecutors claim Hernández bears responsibility for the Cuban government’s Feb. 24, 1996, shoot down of two planes that had invaded its airspace and refused to turn back despite repeated warnings. The aircraft were flown by Brothers to the Rescue, a counterrevolutionary Cuban-American group that for years had organized provocative flights over Cuban territory and other hostile acts.

If you look at the evidence, said Klugh, “you see how ridiculous it is, you can’t find a way to find him guilty.”

Klugh noted that during the trial the judge stated she would issue an instruction to the jury that to find Hernández guilty, government prosecutors would have to prove that he not only participated in planning to shoot down the planes, but that this would occur over international waters. Prosecutors complained that this placed an “insurmountable hurdle” to convicting Hernández and unsuccessfully attempted to overturn the judge’s ruling. In reviewing the trial transcripts, Klugh said, Hernández’s lawyer at the trial realized the judge never gave this instruction to the jury.

“The government frequently turns to conspiracy charges when they have no facts,” added Klugh. “Conspiracy to commit some kind of espionage. These men were here for years and never attempted to commit espionage.”

“We have to have more people know about this case,” Luzbert, of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, told the meeting. “We have to have more connections with the unions. We have to wage this battle in the United States in order to get the Cuban Five out of jail.”

“As long as we have an avenue to fight legally we need to take advantage of it,” said La Riva, of the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, referring to habeas corpus motions to vacate their convictions and sentences recently filed by the four revolutionaries still in jail.

Jrapko, from the International Committee to Free the Five, told the meeting that it’s important to not portray the five “as languishing in prison. They’re not. They’re fighters and they are fighting every day for their freedom too. They know you are fighting too and 11 million people in Cuba are behind them.”  
 
 
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