With these convictions reversed, the U.S. government should now release the five Cuban revolutionaries, who have already spent seven years behind bars. Washington, which for years has callously refused visas for Adriana Pérez and Olga Salanueva to see their jailed husbands, Gerardo Hernández and René González, should immediately grant them entry.

The appeals court accepted the defense argument that they were denied a fair trial because of the pervasive prejudice in the Miami federal courtroom. But that was only part of the travesty of justice. That the U.S. government had no case against the five was shown by the fact that they were accused of “conspiracy” to commit espionage and other charges. Even so, the federal prosecutors never proved their case during the trial.

The source of the frame-up, however, is not in Miami but in Washington. What is the real “crime” of Hernández, Fernando González, René González, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino? They carried out a mission in defense of their country by monitoring the activities of counterrevolutionary Cuban-American groups that have a long record of conducting violent attacks on Cuba from U.S. soil with Washington’s complicity. The U.S. billionaire rulers have waged a brutal economic—and sometimes military—war against Cuba for 46 years. This is not the result of the influence of a handful of rightist Cuban-American businessmen in Miami, but because of the “dangerous” example of Cuba’s socialist revolution that Wall Street seeks to crush. Cuban workers and farmers made a revolution, took state power, broke free from imperialist domination, and began to build a society based not on exploitation but on working-class solidarity—extending their hand to others fighting oppression around the world.

The Cuban Five are exemplary fighters who have devoted their lives to defending the gains of Cuban workers and farmers in face of imperialist aggression. Three of these internationalists were among the tens of thousands of Cuban volunteer combatants who helped defend Angola from invasion by the racist South African regime in the 1970s and 80s.

The Cuban Five have continued to carry out political work behind prison bars: telling the truth about the Cuban Revolution, extending their support to other struggles for justice—and learning firsthand about the brutal capitalist “justice” that millions of working people face in the U.S. prison system. That is why the U.S. authorities have tried to isolate and break them, and why those attempts have failed.

We join with democratic-minded people around the world in demanding: Free the Cuban Five! Grant entry visas to their spouses!
 
 
Related articles:
Cuban Five win new trial as U.S. court voids convictions  
 
 
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