‘Keep up fight to end US embargo, return Guantánamo Bay to Cuba’

BY BEVERLY BERNARDO

MONTREAL — “Some think that now the struggle is over, but that’s not true. Cuba needs your support more than ever to end the blockade,” Gerardo Hernández told 150 people at a meeting here April 6. Supporters of the Cuban Revolution need to work “to assure the U.S. government returns Guantánamo to Cuba, ends its campaign of subversion against Cuba, and pays compensation for the damages their policies have caused,” he said.

Hernández is one of five Cuban revolutionaries who were framed up and imprisoned in the U.S. for 16 years for their actions to defend Cuba from violent attacks.

He was invited to Canada by the United Steelworkers, which backed the fight to free the Cuban Five, to address the union’s National Policy Conference April 7. He spoke at meetings across Canada, including in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver, during his visit.

The Cuban Five “refused to be victims and were always fighters,” said Colette Lavergne, representing the Table de Concertation de Solidarité Québec-Cuba, at the April 6 event, which the group sponsored. Alain Croteau, Steelworkers district director for Quebec, and Alain González González, Consul General of Cuba in Montreal, gave greetings.

Hernández spoke about the international campaign to free the Five. “During the first years it was an unpopular cause to defend ‘those Cuban spies,’” Hernández told the meeting. “But we were on the right side of history.”

“Some people think we are free because of the negotiations” with Washington, he added. “But if we weren’t known, it wouldn’t have been an uncomfortable issue for the U.S. Your efforts made us known.”

Hernández recognized diplomats from Venezuela and El Salvador who attended the meeting and stressed the Cuban government’s commitment to oppose Washington’s threats against Venezuela and other countries. “You can count on Cuba, and Cuba counts on your solidarity,” he said.

“After the trial we were sent to five different prisons very far from each other,” Hernández said during the discussion period. “I was in California. Thanks to Pathfinder Press and the Militant and other newspapers we became known and received respect from other prisoners.”

Fellow prisoners “knew we were there for a cause so we got respect, especially in the case of Afro-Americans, because three of us had been in Angola. They would say, ‘you have any problems, come see us,’” he said. Hernández, along with Fernando González and René González, were among the 375,000 Cubans volunteers who fought to defend Angola from invasions by the racist South African government between 1975 and 1991.

“We met Cubans in prison who had come because of economic reasons and then had to face the reality of U.S. society,” he said. “They’d say we know you did things to defend our families who are still in Cuba.”

When asked if he noticed differences in prison between the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, Hernández replied, “Not really. It was the economic crisis that began in 2007 where things deteriorated. They no longer took care of the lawn on the baseball field, so it became unusable, and there was a lowering of the quality of the food. We saw the brutality of the capitalist system.”

Related articles:
New Zealand events build support for Cuban Revolution
Events on Cuba
‘Return Guantánamo to Cuba now!’

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