Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, René González, Fernando González, and Gerardo Hernández are serving draconian sentences on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage against the U.S. government and other trumped-up charges. In the case of Hernández this includes “conspiracy to commit murder.” The five Cubans were in Florida gathering information on U.S.-backed rightist groups that have carried out deadly attacks against Cuba.

The featured speaker was Salim Lamrani, editor of Superpower Principles: U.S. Terrorism Against Cuba, a book on the Cuban Five and Washington’s hostile policies against the Cuban Revolution. Lamrani, a Paris university researcher, has been touring the United States to speak about the book. He presented the case for the release of the five and condemned Washington’s refusal to meet Venezuela’s request for extradition of Luis Posada Carriles, a mastermind of the 1976 bombing of the Cuban airliner.

Lamrani was joined on a panel by Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana; Piero Gleijeses, of Johns Hopkins University; and Saul Landau, author of Assassination on Embassy Row, a book on the 1976 assassination of former Chilean official Orlando Letelier by a hit squad that included Cuban-American rightists.

“The embargo [against Cuba] and the imprisonment of the Cuban Five are motivated by Washington’s desire for revenge” against revolutionary Cuba, Gleijeses said. Gleijeses is the author of Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976. The book is an account of Cuba’s internationalist policy in Africa in support of anti-imperialist struggles from Algeria’s fight against French colonial rule to the aid given by Cuban troops in driving back invasions of Angola by the apartheid regime in South Africa.

“Cuba dealt Washington an enormous humiliation in Angola,” said Gleijeses, summing up the impact throughout southern Africa of the defeat of South African troops at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1987.

Three of the Cuban Five, René González, Fernando González, and Gerardo Hernández, served as volunteer combatants in Angola in the late 1980s.  
 
 
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