Vol. 75/No. 24      July 4, 2011

The following greetings were sent to each of the Cuban Five by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, on behalf of participants in the party’s Active Workers and Socialist Education Conference held in Oberlin, Ohio, June 9-11.

The Cuban Five are Gerardo Hernández, René González, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and Ramón Labañino. They are Cuban revolutionaries who were framed up and convicted by the U.S. government in 2001 on “conspiracy” charges for monitoring the activities of armed counterrevolutionary Cuban American groups with a long history of assaults and acts of sabotage against Cuba, in collusion with Washington.

The five are serving sentences ranging from 15 years to double-life plus 15 years, the term handed down to Hernández, who was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Below is the letter Barnes sent Hernández.
 

June 16, 2011

Dear Gerardo,

Proletarian greetings from the 350 participants in the Active Workers and Socialist Education Conference in Oberlin, Ohio, June 9-11.

Our conference this year was deeply marked by the experiences members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party, together with young socialists, have had as we went door to door in towns and cities across the country talking with a wide cross-section of fellow working people, urban and rural, about the devastating impact of the last three years of crisis-ridden capitalist rule and the need for an uncompromising working-class response to it.

We won more than 3,000 new subscribers to the Militant with an ease that surprised us all. Even more striking was the hunger among these new readers for books on revolutionary politics, and the number of books purchased together with the Militant in these straitened times. The breadth of this is unprecedented.

We were able to measure the cumulative consequences of high and long-term joblessness, with no end in sight, loss of homes and medical coverage, rising food and oil prices, crushing levels of debt, and the toll of Washington’s brutal wars. Above all, the insult to human dignity that has become the daily fact of working-class life under capitalism.

Our discussions stretched from jobs and foreclosures, to racism, defense of immigrant workers, a woman’s right to choose abortion and the battle for women’s equality, opposition to government intrusions on our privacy and our rights, and imperialism’s murderous wars. Most importantly, our experiences registered something new: a growing openness among working people to consider—and invite us into their homes to discuss—that the problem is the capitalist system itself, and that the necessity of taking a revolutionary course toward the fight for workers power is inescapable.

Even a year ago, what we are describing would not have been the fact.

What is occurring among working people in the United States today increases the openings to demonstrate why we need to emulate what workers and farmers in Cuba did more than fifty years ago—to end the dictatorship of capital and its state, and replace its bloated and brutal government with the power of workers and farmers. These shifts increase the possibility to win a hearing for the truth about the trumped-up conspiracy and murder charges against you, why the Cuban Five are being held hostage to punish the Cuban people for their refusal to surrender to Washington’s imperial demands that they “change.” And how this assault by the U.S. rulers threatens the rights, space, and very humanity of all of us.

On the second day of our conference, four young workers from the United States and United Kingdom left for Havana to represent the Young Socialists as they took part in the Third International Youth Conference in Solidarity with the Cuban Five. We go out from this conference with renewed confidence in the possibilities to expand the ranks of the worldwide fight to win your freedom and that of Ramón, Antonio, Fernando, and René.

Your steadfast integrity and unbreakable revolutionary determination remain a source of strength to fighting workers and farmers here and the world over. May we return this in kind.

Comradely,

/s/Jack Barnes
National Secretary
Socialist Workers Party
 
 
Related articles:
Havana: int’l youth meeting backs effort to ‘Free the 5!’
Transforming the party as it goes more broadly to the working class  
 
 
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