Although the lockdown at Victorville does not appear to target Hernández alone, it is no accident that he was transferred to this new penitentiary four months ago. Prison authorities made sure to place him under the strictest conditions of incarceration because he is one of the Cuban Five.

The five men—Gerardo Hernández, René González, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, and Fernando González—have been locked up for six years on frame-up charges of conspiracy to commit espionage for the government of Cuba and, in the case of Gerardo, conspiracy to commit murder. Washington uses these smears to turn the truth on its head and present the Cuban Revolution as a danger to U.S. “security.”

In fact, the five revolutionaries were in the United States on an internationalist mission to defend the sovereignty of their country and the Cuban Revolution. They were gathering information on the activities of counterrevolutionary groups in Florida that have carried out violent attacks on Cuba from U.S. soil. Washington allows these groups to operate with impunity, often granting them funding, training, and other forms of aid.

Because the U.S. government could not prove that Hernández and his comrades committed any illegal acts, or find any “secret” documents in their possession, it framed them up on phony “conspiracy” charges. The five were handed sentences ranging from 15 years to a double life term, which Hernández received.

Hell-bent on breaking their will as revolutionary fighters, Washington has separated the men in five prisons thousands of miles apart from each other, subjected them to solitary confinement, and denied visas to family members who have tried to travel from Cuba to visit them.

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 national liberation and socialism. Prior to coming to the U.S., three of the five carried out missions of international solidarity in Angola. There, tens of thousands of Cuban volunteers fought shoulder to shoulder with Angolan freedom fighters and helped crush the invasion of that African country by the South African apartheid regime in the 1970s and ’80s.

Behind prison walls the last six years, the Cuban Five have also conducted themselves as exemplary revolutionists with a keen interest in the U.S. class struggle. They have been passing on to fellow inmates revolutionary literature they get their hands on and study. They have received messages of support from and extended their solidarity to workers involved in union-organizing and other struggles in the United States. A year ago, René González wrote a letter to the Progressive magazine responding to the anti-Cuba “Statement Protesting Repression in Cuba” signed by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Cornell West, and others (see Oct. 6, 2003, Militant).

The U.S. rulers’ fear of workers’ resistance to their system of war, racism, class exploitation, and imperialist domination drives them to devise more and more brutal methods to try to strip working people of our humanity. The torture Washington has meted out to its captives from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Abu Ghraib in Iraq mirrors the lockdowns, solitary confinement, and physical abuse spread throughout the prison system inside the United States.

The Cuban Five demonstrate the kind of tenacity and discipline needed to take on this barbarous, profit-driven system and win.

Working people should demand:

End the lockdown at the Victorville prison!

Grant visas to the relatives of the five to visit their loved ones in jail!

Throw out the frame-up convictions! Free the Cuban Five!
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. prison holding Cuban militant ‘locked down’  
 
 
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