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Vol. 72/No. 41      October 20, 2008

 
Cuban Five defended revolution
against U.S.-backed attacks
(feature article/Third of a series)
 
BY MARTÍN KOPPEL  
Ten years ago last month, FBI agents arrested and framed up Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González. In a case marked by violations of basic constitutional rights, the U.S. government obtained convictions against them on false charges ranging from “conspiracy to commit espionage” to “conspiracy to commit murder.”

The Militant is running a series of articles on the growing international campaign to win the release of these five working-class fighters, known as the Cuban Five. The previous article, in the July 14 issue, explained how their frame-up and imprisonment is part of the broader assault by the U.S. capitalist rulers on the rights and living standards of working people in the United States over the past decade and a half.

The “crime” for which the five men were imprisoned was that they kept the Cuban government informed about the activities of U.S.-based counterrevolutionary groups that have a long record of launching attacks on Cuba.

The violent actions of those outfits are part of the nearly 50 years of economic and military aggression, under 10 Democratic and Republican administrations, through which the U.S. government has sought to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and reimpose capitalist rule.

Washington’s hostile policies against Cuba are neither irrational nor dictated by short-term goals. The billionaire families that rule the United States aim to punish workers and farmers in Cuba for having the audacity to take state power and make a socialist revolution. What they hate and fear above all is the political example this revolution sets for working people around the world, including right here in the United States.

“What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees’ hatred of the Cuban Revolution?” asked the Second Declaration of Havana, a manifesto adopted in February 1962 by a million-strong assembly of the Cuban people.

“What unifies them and incites them is fear,” was the answer. “Not fear of the Cuban Revolution, but fear of the Latin American revolution… . Fear that the plundered people of the continent will seize the arms from their oppressors and, like Cuba, declare themselves free peoples of the Americas.”  
 
Revolutionary measures
On Jan. 1, 1959, workers and farmers in Cuba, led by the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement, overthrew the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. The revolutionary government immediately began taking steps to meet the needs of the majority. Within months it approved laws that reduced rents by 30-50 percent and slashed the onerous electricity and telephone service rates charged by the U.S.-owned monopolies. Racist discrimination in employment and public facilities was outlawed. Steps were taken to integrate women into the workforce, the unions, and political activity. In May 1959 a sweeping agrarian reform expropriated the largest landed estates and gave land titles to 100,000 landless peasants.

Public education and health care were expanded to all social layers. In 1961 more than 100,000 young teachers mobilized throughout the country to teach 1 million workers and peasants to read and write, wiping out illiteracy.

Workers mobilized to combat economic disruption by the capitalists and, by the end of 1960, major U.S. companies and virtually all large-scale Cuban-owned industry was nationalized. These and other measures established the socialist character of the revolution.

Cuba’s revolutionary leadership also extended its solidarity to anti-imperialist struggles around the world. As early as 1963 Cuban volunteer troops went to Algeria to defend the newly independent government there against an imperialist-backed assault. This proletarian internationalist course continues to this day, with thousands of Cuban volunteer medical personnel providing quality health care throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

These deep-going measures infuriated the wealthy U.S. rulers and Cuban capitalists. Unlike other governments, Cuba’s revolutionary leadership was not beholden to their interests. Most alarming to them, revolutionary Cuba was setting a dangerous example to millions around the world—that it was possible for working people to overturn capitalist rule and make a socialist revolution.

In July 1960 Washington cut off virtually all sugar imports from Cuba. In January 1961 it broke diplomatic relations with Cuba and restricted travel by U.S. citizens to the island. By February 1962 the John F. Kennedy administration ordered a total embargo on U.S. trade with Cuba. In April 1961, the U.S. government launched a mercenary invasion of Cuba, which workers and farmers, organized through their popular militias, Revolutionary Armed Forces, and revolutionary police defeated at the Bay of Pigs. In October 1962 Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island and brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust after Cuba accepted missiles from the Soviet Union in face of Washington’s preparations to invade Cuba.  
 
U.S.-organized terror campaign
Between 1959 and 1965, nearly 4,000 counterrevolutionary bandits—armed, trained, and financed by the U.S. government—waged a campaign of sabotage and terror in Cuba, especially in the Escambray mountains. They tortured and killed hundreds of people, including literacy volunteers and peasants benefiting from the land reform. Cuban working people organized to defeat the bandits, succeeding by the mid-1960s.

Over the years U.S.-backed counterrevolutionaries burned sugarcane fields, bombed Havana department stores, and carried out hundreds of attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Cuban authorities have offered evidence that Washington has carried out biological warfare against the Caribbean nation, including outbreaks of African swine fever in 1971 and hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981.

The U.S. government has tightened its economic embargo against Cuba, including through the 1992 Torricelli Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which among other things penalize companies abroad that do business with Cuba.

CIA-trained counterrevolutionaries also carried out murderous attacks on U.S. soil and in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico. Eulalio Negrín, a Cuban American businessman who favored moves to normalize U.S.-Cuban relations, was killed on Nov. 25, 1979, in Union City, New Jersey. Félix García Rodríguez, a diplomat at the Cuban mission to the United Nations, was killed on a New York street on Sept. 11, 1980. Carlos Muñiz Varela, a leader of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, an organization of young Cuban supporters of the revolution, was killed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on April 28, 1979.

In October 1976, CIA-trained counterrevolutionaries blew up a Cuban airliner over Barbados, killing all 73 people aboard, many of them teenage members of the Cuban fencing team. Among those implicated in the horrendous crime were Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, who were arrested in Venezuela. Posada Carriles, formerly a mercenary at the Bay of Pigs, had worked as chief of operations for the Venezuelan secret police. Although convicted for the bombing of the airliner, he was allowed to escape from prison in 1985.

In a 1998 New York Times interview, Posada Carriles bragged about his involvement in a series of bombings of Havana hotels in 1997, including one that killed an Italian tourist, Fabio Di Celmo, at the Hotel Copacabana. Posada Carriles was also implicated in a November 2000 failed assassination attempt in Panama against Fidel Castro. Today both Posada Carriles and Bosch walk freely in the streets of Miami. Washington has refused the Venezuelan government’s request for the extradition of Posada Carriles.  
 
Brothers to the Rescue
One of the U.S.-based Cuban American counterrevolutionary groups is Brothers to the Rescue, an outfit that has falsely portrayed itself as a “humanitarian” group rescuing Cubans who leave the island on rafts. Its leader, José Basulto, is a CIA-trained Bay of Pigs invader with a history of armed attacks on Cuba.

Brothers to the Rescue repeatedly violated Cuba’s airspace, provocatively sending small planes over the island and dropping flyers calling on the Cuban people to revolt against the government. Cuban authorities report that Brothers to the Rescue conducted 25 such illegal incursions between mid-1994 and February 1996, and on numerous occasions Havana filed protests over these provocations. The protests were ignored.

On Feb. 24, 1996, Basulto led three Cessna planes into Cuban airspace heading toward Havana. The pilots ignored unambiguous warnings by Cuban air traffic controllers to turn back. Cuban air force jets then shot down two of the planes with four Brothers to the Rescue members, while Basulto’s plane got away. After that decisive action by Cuba to defend its sovereignty, all provocative flights from the United States stopped.

In response to the shootdown, the Clinton administration stepped up its hostile actions against the Cuban Revolution. That included passage of the Helms-Burton Act as well as the arrest and frame-up of the Cuban Five in 1998.

The U.S. government targeted one of the five, Gerardo Hernández, for particular retribution. Hernández was sentenced to a double life term on charges of “conspiracy to commit murder,” on the outrageous claim that he was responsible for the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes.

In justifying their violent actions against Cuba, outfits like Brothers to the Rescue claim to speak for all Cuban Americans. But the Cuban population in the United States is class-divided. The right-wing groups represent only the interests of a small handful of wealthy businessmen, including the former capitalists and their henchmen who after 1959 were deprived of their ability to exploit the working people of Cuba.

The large majority of Cuban Americans are workers. Today, many if not most—especially among those who immigrated in recent decades, as well as the new generations born here—oppose the U.S. embargo and travel ban, especially the restrictions on the right to visit their families on the island.

Some Cuban American organizations, such as the Alianza Martiana in Miami, speak out against the embargo and in favor of the release of the Cuban Five.

The next article in this series will tell the stories of each of the five imprisoned Cubans and what they have accomplished.
 
 
Related articles:
Court halts Florida restrictions on Cuba travel  
 
 
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