The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 72/No. 40      October 13, 2008

 
UK actions to demand freedom for Cuban Five
(front page)
 
BY JONATHAN SILBERMAN  
LONDON—Protests outside the U.S. embassy in London October 7, and the U.S. consulate in Edinburgh, Scotland, October 9, will demand the release of five Cubans who have been unjustly jailed in the United States for a decade.

The protests, called by the Cuban Solidarity Campaign, are part of activities around the world to mark the 10th anniversary of the imprisonment of Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, René González, and Antonio Guerrero, known as the Cuban Five.

The Cuban Five were arrested in 1998 on frame-up charges that included “conspiracy to commit espionage” and in one case, “conspiracy to commit murder.” The five had been keeping the Cuban government informed about rightist groups that have a long record of carrying out bombings and armed attacks against Cuba from U.S. soil.

Adriana Pérez and Olga Salanueva, the wives of René González and Gerardo Hernández respectively, will participate in the London and Edinburgh actions. The protests will demand that the U.S. government grant visas to Pérez and Salanueva, who have not been allowed to visit their husbands.

Pérez and Salanueva addressed hundreds of people at a September 21 meeting during the Labour Party’s national conference. The meeting heard messages of support from British trade union and Labour Party leaders and from Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers union, which organizes workers in the United States and Canada. Shane Enright of Amnesty International pledged his organization’s support for the campaign for visitation rights.

Among the many here who have added their names to an appeal demanding justice for the five are union leaders, including Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson of Unite and Brendan Barber of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) along with writers Iain Banks and Harold Pinter, and actors Julie Christie and Susannah York.

At its congress in September the TUC condemned the continued imprisonment of the five and adopted a call for “a prompt retrial of the Five in any venue other than Miami” and “full visiting rights for all of the families.” Cuban trade union leaders Reynaldo Valdés Grillo, deputy general secretary of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC) and Manuel Montero, European officer of the CTC, addressed a session of the congress alongside prominent officials of British unions.

A July 2007 BBC radio broadcast of an interview with Gerardo Hernández from his maximum security prison in Victorville, California, was a significant crack here in what has been an almost total media blackout on the case. The BBC correspondent in Havana, Michael Voss, subsequently interviewed Adriana Pérez for BBC TV.

The October 7 protest is from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. The October 9 Edinburgh action is from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. outside the U.S. consulate at 3 Regent Terrace (see ad).

 
 
 
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