Vol. 77/No. 16      April 29, 2013

Some 200 people heard from a panel of speakers that included Martin Garbus, lead attorney for the Five; Rodolfo Reyes, Cuba’s ambassador to the U.N.; Julio Escalona, Venezuela’s deputy ambassador to the U.N.; and Luis Rosa, Puerto Rican independence fighter and former political prisoner. Civil rights attorney Michael Warren and N.Y. Casa de las Américas President Nancy Cabrero co-chaired the meeting. Ike Nahem gave remarks on behalf of the July 26 Coalition, which along with Casa and the Popular Educational Project to Free the Cuban Five endorsed and helped promote the event.

Last week’s issue included an article on the meeting. This week the Militant is printing talks by students Randolph Carr, Imani Brown, David Luna and Gerardo Romo. Carr and Brown refer in their presentations to a successful fight waged by the students to prevent the university administration from imposing strict limits on attendance from outside the campus on the pretext of “public safety.” While dozens were turned away, most of those who wanted to attend from outside the university were able to do so.

Randolph Carr Black Students Organization; Students Against Mass Incarceration

This is an event about the confinement of people, individuals: Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, René González, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino. But also the confinement of a certain type of politics. Whether or not you come to this event with prior knowledge, it is our hope today that all will learn, not only about the Five as people, but about the political, legal structure that acts against them, the family and communities they have been separated from, and the struggle that continues today. That struggle we are all a part of.

I would like to take a moment to thank each and every one for being present. Presence is sometimes the most radical act we can have. It is a necessary precondition for the fight that we carry on.

For the story of the Five is one that is, unfortunately, similar to the story of the many unseen and forgotten that sit, waiting and waiting, behind the walls of America’s dungeons. Similar to the Five, people are swept into the system of incarceration by whatever means and forced to bow down to the weight of that machine. The Five have been swept into that system, and to this day remain unbowed. It then slowly attempts to grind down on the individual, locking them in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Still they remain unbowed. We can learn from the Five a lesson for our own struggle of how to stand tall and never bow.

How do we stand up? I think, is the first question we must ask ourselves. How do we rise from underneath the legacies of colonialism? How do we stand side by side with those who live under the American criminal justice system? What do we have to learn about how to live free, from those forced to live in cages because of their politics?

These questions I hope will be answered tonight along with the many other questions on our minds.

A lot has gone into making this event what it is. It’s been challenging in many ways to secure a space and promote this event. The empty seats you see are people turned around or denied access. Regardless, the event will go on.

Imani Brown Caribbean Students Association

This is an event that we were really hoping would increase the visibility and increase the action around the gross human rights violations that have been enacted on the Cuban Five.

We have run into some difficulties along the way, as events like this that are centered around things that others deem to be controversial often are. However, that’s not going to stop us when it comes to making our voices heard about this important topic.

When first conceiving what this event would look like, it was important for us as a Caribbean student group to really ground ourselves in the historical and political context of the Cuban Five’s fight for freedom in a way that would allow us to identify the intersections of their struggles with our own. In other words, why do we as a Caribbean students association stand in solidarity with the Cuban Five?

As an integral member of the Caribbean community, Cuba’s social, cultural and economic history has had deeply lasting effects on the rest of the region and has provided an almost unparalleled model for alternative modes of development in the region.

In the history of independence struggles and movements to end the reign of colonialism and neocolonialism worldwide, Cuba has not hesitated to lend its support and strategic partnership to what it has seen as its Caribbean and African family: ranging from sending freedom fighters to Angola — fighters who include three of the Cuban Five, I should note — in order to end South African apartheid, to providing scholarships to Cuban medical schools from the rest of the Caribbean. Cuba has given new meaning to ideals of solidarity, unity and support within its community.

At the same time, our support of the Cuban Five is not solely based on what Cuba has done for, or has meant for, the Caribbean. The Cuban Five had what is now widely agreed an unfair trial based on insufficient evidence and received sentences that can only be described as cruel and unusual by virtue of the length of these sentences, the refusal to allow them contact with their wives and families, and their treatment in the separate maximum-security prisons in which they remain to the present day.

Cuba’s history of resistance against American neocolonial systems of power have reserved them a place of infamy in the nation’s narrative. This is an important thing to note for a number of reasons. Not only has resistance to American neocolonial systems of power influenced the imprisonment of the Cuban Five, but it is a driving force of the prison-industrial complex, which has enacted violence on millions of brown and black bodies in the U.S. and throughout the world.

So this is not solely a Cuban problem, nor is it solely a Caribbean problem. It is indicative of a wider systemic problem. The arbitrary imprisonment of individuals as a solution to the socio-political and economic problems of a society does not sound characteristic of a nation that claims freedom and liberty as the very building blocks of its foundations. Yet it is, and necessarily must be, to enact the very discriminatory and hostile aggression that in the same breath it insists that it abhors.

As Caribbean students, we come to this institution with an awareness that our region’s legacy of colonialism often finds insidious ways of inserting itself into our current narrative. What was once a resistance to explicit independence by former colonizers is now the call for neoliberalism and development of the so-called Third World on the terms of the world’s hegemonic powers for their profit. What was once the unchecked plundering of lands that belonged to others is now deemed “nation-building” or the business of ensuring national security. And what was once slavery is now termed the prison-industrial complex that allows for and encourages the arbitrary detention of those it views as its opposition.

This is why we stand in solidarity with the Cuban Five. Because, as the forces of colonialism and imperialism reimagine themselves, we must reimagine the forms of resistance that we enact in order to ensure our own liberty and freedom.

One thing that does not change, however, is that we are stronger when we are united than when we work apart.

For these reasons and more, we support the call for freedom of the Cuban Five and for reevaluation of the wider societal systems in place that affect us and our communities and the living of our day-to-day lives.

David Luna, Gerardo Romo Chicano Caucus

The Chicano Caucus of Columbia University stands in solidarity with the Cuban Five and stands against any manifestation of the United States corrupt justice system. A system that disproportionally targets Black and Latino youth in New York City. A system that violates basic human rights by using emotional, physical and sexual violence to break and permanently silence those whose politics are too threatening. A system that harasses and disproportionately arrests Latina trans women and leaves them extremely vulnerable to physical and sexual violence once incarcerated. A system that capitalizes on immigrant labor by day and detains undocumented persons under the harshest conditions by night.

The detention and deportation of immigrants is a multibillion dollar industry that separates families and violates basic human rights. In 2010, half a million people were detained in more than 300 [immigration] detention centers around the country and the number is increasing every day. The Chicano Caucus says no to a system that labels some politics, cultures, skin colors — entire human lives and their survival — as illegal.

Winning freedom for the Cuban Five would not only strike a blow to the severe human rights violations done to those men. It would also deal a blow to a system that profits off the violence and dehumanization suffered by immigrants and people of color every day in this country.”

Related articles:
Chicago exhibit wins support for Cuban 5 and Oscar López
Who are the Cuban Five?
 
 
 
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