This is an attack not only on the Cuban Five and their relatives but on the rights of all working people—both behind bars and outside prison walls.

Partisans of the campaign to demand freedom for the five can also use this appeal as an opportunity to spread the truth about the case in its entirety.

The five men—Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, René González, and Antonio Guerrero—were framed up and convicted in June 2001 on spying and other conspiracy charges. What was their real crime? Gathering information on the activities of ultrarightist groups that, operating on U.S. territory with the knowledge and complicity of Washington, have a record of carrying out violent attacks on Cuba. In other words, defending their country in face of attacks that are part of the U.S. government’s four-decade-long campaign of aggression against the Cuban Revolution.

All five men are examples of revolutionaries who have devoted their lives, not only to the defense of Cuba, but to the worldwide fight for liberation from imperialist oppression. Prior to taking on their mission in the United States, three of the five served in Angola as part of the 300,000 Cuban volunteer combatants who fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Angolan freedom fighters and helped crush the invasion of that African country by the apartheid regime of South Africa in the 1970s and ’80s.

Consistent with their lifelong records, the five Cuban patriots have set an example from behind prison walls, refusing to bend their knee to Uncle Sam despite the draconian sentences and harsh treatment imposed on them. And they have been “model prisoners,” as their attorneys point out.

After sentencing them on frame-up charges, the U.S. authorities, in one of their many efforts to isolate them, dispersed the five men to separate penitentiaries thousands of miles from each other. At the end of February, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons threw them into solitary confinement for a month on orders of the Justice Department. International solidarity was instrumental in getting them out of the “hole.”

Likewise, such solidarity can force the hand of U.S. authorities to let Salanueva and Pérez visit their husbands in jail. Let the five Cuban patriots see their families! Free the Cuban Five!
 
 
Related articles:
Appeal is issued demanding visas for wives of Cuban militants in U.S. prisons  
 
 
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