González sent the letter below to Joanne Landy and the Progressive magazine on July 15. In his letter, the Cuban revolutionary responds to a “Statement Protesting Repression in Cuba” by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (CPD) cosigned by Landy, Thomas Harrison, and Jennifer Scarlott—the three co-directors of the CPD. The Progressive published the statement along with an appeal to professors, writers, and others to join the group in its campaign denouncing the Cuban government for alleged repressive measures. Well-known social democrat Stanley Arronowitz, self-described anarchist Noam Chomsky, historian Howard Zinn, and prominent African-American academic Cornel West were among the many individuals who lent their names to this anti-Cuba campaign. The statement appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and various web sites, in addition to the Progressive.

This campaign was launched in March and April after the Cuban government arrested and convicted 75 individuals for receiving funds from and collaborating with U.S. government officials in Cuba to advance Washington’s economic war on Cuba. At about the same period, three ringleaders of a hijacking of a passenger ferry in Havana were arrested, tried, convicted, and executed in Cuba. Washington used these incidents to launch a campaign of slanders and threats against the Cuban Revolution. A number of liberal critics of U.S. foreign policy, like those mentioned above, joined the big-business chorus denouncing Havana.

The Cuban Five, as they are known, were carrying out an internationalist mission to gather information on ultrarightist organizations with a record of violent attacks on Cuba carried out from U.S. soil with Washington’s complicity. They were arrested by FBI agents in 1998. Each was charged with “conspiracy to commit espionage” and “conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent.” Hernández was also charged with “conspiracy to commit murder.” They were convicted in a federal court in Miami in June 2001, given sentences from 15 years in prison to a double life term, and locked up in five federal prisons spread out across the country.

On February 28 the five men were thrown into solitary confinement—“the hole”—after an order by the Justice Department charging that the extensive solidarity they had received in the form of correspondence and the few visitors they were allowed made them a “national security risk.” An international campaign of protests was launched against this unsuccessful attempt by Washington to break them. They were released from the hole a month later.

On July 8, the San-Francisco based National Committee to Free the Five issued an appeal for protest letters to be sent to U.S. authorities demanding that visas be granted to Olga Salanueva, wife of René González, and Adriana Pérez, wife of Gerardo Hernández, to be able to enter the United States and visit their husbands in prison. The two have been denied entry into the U.S. repeatedly. Letters demanding that visas be granted to Pérez and Salanueva can be sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2201 C St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20520, tel: (202) 647-4000, fax: (202) 261-8577; Homeland Security Director Thomas Ridge, Washington, DC 20528; and Attorney General John Ashcroft, 950 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20530-0001, tel: (202) 353-1555, e-mail: askdoj@usdoj.gov

Amitabh Pal, managing editor of the Progressive, informed the Militant September 19 that his magazine has received González’s reply and “we’re considering whether to publish it.”
 

Being a Cuban revolutionary all my life, having fought in Angola against the South African invasion and being, at the present time, incarcerated in a U.S. federal prison for protecting the Cuban people from the terrorist actions supported, encouraged, and silenced by the United States government, I hope that—if being progressive is still to fight for a better world—I might be entitled to the benefit of being considered a progressive person.

So when I opened a magazine called precisely The Progressive and read an ad by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy requesting signatures in order to condemn Cuba for its alleged “repression of dissidents,” I was, at best, in disbelief.

I can’t imagine that somebody can consider himself a progressive person and then take at its word the endemic slandering and lies of the U.S. media with regard to Cuba. It would only take a little bit of intellectual honesty and some research to discover that the money to pay “dissidents” is appropriated, overtly and openly, by the U.S. authorities to be distributed through entities like NED and USAID among whomever on the island decides to make a living as a dissident.

Who gives any moral authority to the U.S. government to create a paid opposition in Cuba? What international principle of law applies to this behavior? Since when is it the role of a U.S. diplomat to tour the island organizing the “opposition” and giving out money?

Anyone who, in their own country, receives money from a foreign power to undermine their government is considered a traitor, be it in Cuba or in any other nation of the world, including the United States.

These so-called “dissidents” have—contrary to what appears in the ad—all of the rights to express their opinions in Cuba. All they have to do is to stand up at a nomination meeting and explain to their neighbors that they want to take the country back to 1959, return the Cuban land to the United Fruit Company, recall the terrorists that now live in Miami to the island and give them their properties back, sell the country to the transnationals and become themselves the political class that will take care of all those people’s petty interests. If their neighbors agree with them, they will be nominated without having to spend a dollar.

But if they find themselves in front of a revolutionary constituency—and their neighbors are committed to their country and support the government of the people, for the people, and by the people; and having fought and died for their society, don’t want to betray the memory of the patriots who have given their lives for the sovereignty and independence of Cuba—no “dissident” will be nominated nor will he obtain any vote.

And if they don’t deserve the confidence of their people, they don’t have the right to go to the American embassy—the last place I would think of as a haven for democracy—to find a source of sovereignty that only lies in Cubans.

Cuba, for more than 40 years, has faced a state of hostility and war that has led to more than 3,000 deaths and more than 2,000 injured on account of terrorist and armed actions carried out by traitors paid, trained, and supplied by the U.S. government. Those mercenaries were dealt with through the legal system. They weren’t arbitrarily declared “enemy” or “illegal” combatants, or disposed of through a drone-launched rocket so that Fidel could pose to the cameras declaring them “no longer a problem.” Nor were they subjected to secret military tribunals, nor were their families’ homes demolished by the Cuban military.

They were given sentences according to their involvement in their terrorist activities instead of the irrational punishment accorded here to the Puerto Rican patriots, just for their affiliation to a given organization, or the vindictive treatment given to me and my co-defendants for protecting Cuba from those mercenaries who now, with their money and connections to the U.S. administration, sponsor schemes like the one of the “dissidents” or encourage illegal immigration from Cuba in order to justify the aggressive policy against Cuba.

The Cuban people have had no other option than to take their losses and to keep building the socialist society that so many have fought for, leaving it to history to settle questions of justice and relying on extreme patience and enormous courage.

I don’t know how many real progressive people are adhering to this campaign against Cuba. Things here are so relative that somebody can be labeled as liberal just for eating a hamburger with the left hand. And I’ve grown used to see some on TV advertised as leftist just because they are a little to the left of George Wallace.

But I assume there must be some genuine progressive people among them; people who really care about human rights and who honestly believe in justice, misguided by a perverse media which leaves them without any other reference when it comes to knowing what happens around the world…. I’ve always had the greatest respect for honest Americans who, overcoming the immense power of the most sophisticated machinery of deception ever designed, have been able to look beyond all of that to have a view of world events that pays homage to this country. It takes a lot of intelligence, curiosity, courage, and, above all, a lot of sensitivity.

I want to appeal to that sensitivity and, with all due respect, invite you to think of this: It was one thing to be a Roman citizen, with all privileges accorded to full citizenship, discussing democracy and liberty on the senate or on the streets of Rome; and another thing, completely different, to be fighting for that democracy and that liberty, in the field, against all odds, under the siege of Pompeii legions, defending your very life together with Spartacus.

Very truly yours,

René González Sehwerert
Federal Correctional Institution
Edgefield, South Carolina

cc: The Progressive  
 
 
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