Vol. 71/No. 45      December 3, 2007

Panelists included César López, winner of Cuba’s National Literature Award in 1999; Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press; and Ben O’Shaughnessy, organizer of the Young Socialists National Steering Committee in the United States. Some thirty people attended.

The Cuban Five—Gerardo Hernández, René González, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, and Fernando González—were arrested in 1998 for “conspiracy to commit espionage” and other frame-up charges, including, in the case of Hernández, “conspiracy to commit murder.”

The five revolutionaries had been tracking the activity of counterrevolutionary groups in Florida that have carried out murderous assaults in Cuba with Washington’s complicity. Convicted in a 2001 federal trial in Miami, they were given sentences ranging from 15 years to a double life term.

López described Washington’s imprisonment of the five as “another turn of the screw, not just against Cuba, but against Latin America, against humanity.” From Solitude and Hope came about, he said, through the initiative of Cuban writers and artists who wanted to make the fight for freedom of the five more broadly known. The book will soon be published in English, he said, because “the work to free them has to be worldwide, and the language to communicate with the majority of the world is English.”

“There are well over 2 million prisoners in the United States,” said Waters, “and the five Cuban revolutionaries now find themselves in the midst of this giant population of the working class in the United States.” She talked about the political questions the five Cubans get from other prisoners and read excerpts from some of the letters they have written her looking for books to help them answer issues raised—from the origin and character of ultrarightist, racist, and anti-Semitic groups in the United States, to the history of the U.S. Civil War and the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, to the impact of the Cuban Revolution within the United States.

O’Shaughnessy described the work inside the United States to free the five, detailing meetings and other activities. “Many young people who hear about the case for the first time readily identify with the compañeros,” he said. He pointed to the support they have won from student groups, academic departments, immigrant rights groups, and others.

In closing the program, López read a poem he had written included in From Solitude and Hope.
 
 
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Africa solidarity festival opens in Venezuela
Cuban 5 win new support at Midwest events
Luis Miranda: 50 years of organizing support for the Cuban Revolution  
 
 
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