The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 76/No. 24      June 18, 2012

 
New Zealand exhibit backs
5 Cuban revolutionaries
 
BY MIKE TUCKER  
AUCKLAND, New Zealand—Some 200 people packed the Satellite Gallery here May 12 for the opening of a two-week exhibition of political cartoons by Gerardo Hernández, one of five Cuban revolutionaries framed up and imprisoned in the United States for more than 13 years.

Titled “Humour from My Pen,” more than 30 cartoons by Hernández were on show accompanied by displays about the case of the Cuban Five, how they came to be framed up and jailed, and urging support for the campaign to win their release.

An art exhibition titled “Art to Aid the Cuban Five” filled the other half of the gallery. More than 30 New Zealand artists contributed over 50 artworks in support of the five, including prominent painters John Walsh and Gerda Leenards, and illustrator Anna Crichton. Income from the sale of these works will help meet the cost of staging the exhibition.

The evening event was chaired by Malcolm Evans, a prominent cartoonist who contributed three original cartoons about “the five men who set out to do something decent.”

Jane Kelsey, a law professor at the University of Auckland, compared the frame-up of the Cuban Five to the frame-up of 18 Maori rights supporters in New Zealand, arrested in 2007 on charges of “terrorism.”

Both cases involve an abuse of rights and hinge on accusations of conspiracy in which the government “doesn’t have to prove anything illegal happened,” she said.

Robert Reid, general secretary of the First Union, said the union had helped sponsor the exhibition because the fight to free the five is a union issue.

Maria del Carmen Herrera, Cuba’s ambassador to New Zealand, described the history of counterrevolutionary attacks on Cuba since the 1959 socialist revolution and why Cuba sent the five to southern Florida in the 1990s to gather information about the groups organizing these attacks. The arrest, prosecution and conviction of the five was “politically manipulated from the beginning,” she said.

Also speaking were Kathryn Lehman, from the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Auckland, and Malcolm McAllister, the exhibition’s curator. The 30 cartoons by Hernández “satirize the 60-year campaign by U.S. governments to get rid of the Cuban Revolution,” said McAllister.

Fourteen copies of the Pathfinder booklet The Cuban Five: Who They Are, Why They Were Framed, Why They Should be Free were sold at the opening.

Following the two-week exhibition, Hernández’s cartoons were displayed at the University of Auckland May 30, introducing hundreds of students to the case. The cartoons will also be displayed at other venues in the country.
 
 
Related articles:
Advocates of Maori rights sentenced in frame-up trial  
 
 
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