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Vol. 72/No. 26      June 30, 2008

 
Cuban Five conference projects fall actions
(front page)
 
BY LAURA GARZA  
BRONX, New York—More than 120 people participated in a June 14 working conference to win broader support in the campaign to free the Cuban Five, who have been locked up in U.S. prisons on frame-up charges for nearly 10 years.

The gathering, held at Hostos Community College, drew supporters of the defense campaign from New York and New Jersey, as well as from Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut. Some participants came from as far as San Francisco, Miami, and Beaumont, Texas.

Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González have been jailed since September 1998. The five Cubans had been monitoring counterrevolutionary Cuban-American groups in Florida that have carried out deadly attacks in Cuba with Washington’s complicity.

In 2001 a federal court convicted and sentenced them on charges of “conspiracy to commit espionage” and other false charges—including “conspiracy to commit murder” in the case of Hernández—in a trial marked by basic violations of rights.

The regional conference projected a range of activities for a stepped-up campaign in the fall to win new support for the Cuban Five. Among the actions projected is a national demonstration in Washington, D.C., September 13, as well as a national petition campaign over the next several months to introduce and win support for the case from those who do not yet know about it.

Leonard Weinglass, one of the defense attorneys for the five, gave a succinct explanation of the June 4 federal appeals court ruling. The judges upheld the unjust convictions of the five, he said, but they also threw out the sentences of Guerrero, Labañino, and Fernando González as excessive by legal standards, and sent those three cases back for resentencing.

“We’re going back to seek a petition to overturn this decision,” Weinglass said. “The court endorsed the use of secret evidence, it endorsed allowing the judge and the prosecutors to have a private meeting without the defense attorneys present, it endorsed eliminating seven African-American jurors from the jury pool,” and other aspects of an unfair trial, he explained. He pointed out that even one of the judges who upheld the convictions acknowledged the entire case should have been overturned because the original judge refused defense motions to move the trial out of the prejudicial atmosphere of Miami. (See the June 23 Militant for coverage of the decision.)

Another speaker at the opening plenary was Rodrigo Malmierca, Cuba’s representative to the United Nations. Part of a new film, produced by Jennifer Wager and Sally O’Brien, Against Silence in Our Own Voices: Families of the Five Speak Out, was shown.

Gloria La Riva, director of the San Francisco-based National Committee to Free the Five, called for stepping up the campaign to demand that the U.S. government grant visas to Olga Salanueva and Adriana Pérez, the wives of René González and Gerardo Hernández, respectively. They have not been allowed to travel to see their husbands. She highlighted plans for the September 13 demonstration and the petition campaign.

The previous night, as part of the conference, Alicia Jrapko from the International Committee to Free the Cuban Five gave a presentation on the defense campaign at a reception hosted by the Pastors for Peace Friendshipment.

Discussion took place at seven conference workshops on winning new support among labor, religious groups, students, artists, legal professionals, academics, and community groups.

“What happened to the Cuban Five tells us what could happen to us as union members,” said Wellington Echegaray during discussion at the labor workshop, where participants planned to produce a labor-oriented petition and fact sheet to gather support from coworkers and union activists. They also agreed to form an ongoing Labor Campaign for Justice for the Cuban Five. Several people at the workshop cited facts that could be used to win broader support, such as the FBI’s secret searches of their apartments, the use of secret evidence, long periods of solitary confinement, and disproportionately harsh sentences.

At the final plenary session, Soffiyah Elijah, an activist who works at Harvard Law School, reported that those at the legal/civil liberties workshop proposed producing a fact sheet and organizing a speakers bureau to address the issues in the case, reaching out particularly to students and faculty at law schools.

Jean Weisman, an academic advisor at City College of New York, reported that participants in the academics workshop planned to get an article on the Cuban Five into the newsletter of the 5,000-member Latin American Studies Association and to involve faculty members in organizing speaking engagements at CCNY, Hostos Community College, and a few other campuses in the New York area in conjunction with student groups.

The youth/student workshop, which drew participants from six universities and three high schools, discussed several activities, including plans for events during Latino Heritage Month at Rutgers and Columbia universities, as well as New Jersey participants organizing a bus for the September 13 national demonstration. Two participants reported on a film showing they are helping organize at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.

“I came to the conference to hear more about the case of the Cuban Five,” said Juan Pleitez, a shop steward at an industrial laundry in Somerville, Massachusetts, and a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. “It was good to learn some things I didn’t know about the case and how the laws are used” to frame up fighters for justice. He said he planned to work with other unionists and supporters of immigrant rights to win their support for release of the five.
 
 
Related articles:
New Zealand protest: ‘Free the Cuban Five’  
 
 
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