Vol. 71/No. 16      April 23, 2007

BY CALLUM WILLIAMSON  
AUCKLAND, New Zealand—Young Socialists from here and the United States campaigned March 14 at Auckland University to win support for five framed-up Cuban revolutionaries locked up in U.S. prisons.

The five—Gerardo Hernández, René González, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, and Fernando González—were arrested by the FBI in 1998 and convicted three years later on charges that included conspiracy to spy for Havana. They are serving sentences ranging from 15 years to a double-life term.

Ben Joyce, a Young Socialist from Albany, New York, spoke at a meeting of the Student Representative Council, open to all members of the Auckland University Student Association (AUSA).

Young people should defend the five, said Joyce, noting they are not only political prisoners but revolutionaries. Behind bars, the five “are continuing their political work on the frontlines of the U.S. class struggle.” A student officer then moved that the “AUSA support the campaign to free the Cuban Five,” which carried.

Later that afternoon, 11 people attended a campus meeting hosted by the AUSA International Affairs Officer. Joyce spoke there about the history of imperialist aggression against the Cuban Revolution. The five went to Miami and entered rightist Cuban American groups—which have a long record of violent attacks on Cuba carried out from U.S. soil with Washington’s complicity—in order to disclose information on such activities to defend Cuba’s sovereignty. Three of the five, he said, served in Cuba’s internationalist mission in Angola to defend that country against invasion by South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Joyce urged people to join the January 10-April 30 international campaign of solidarity with the Cuban Five, initiated by the Union of Young Communists and other youth organizations in Cuba.

Ben O’Shaughnessy contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
Protests in N.Y., L.A.: ‘Free Cuban 5!’  
 
 
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