Vol. 77/No. 30      August 19, 2013

The young combatants sought “to completely transform the national picture, in which 600,000 Cubans were unemployed; 500,000 peasants were living in miserable homes; they worked four months a year and starved the rest of the time,” Oscar León, Cuba’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, told the meeting.

“We have been together for 15 years in one of the most important struggles in the history of our revolution,” León said, “the release and return to Cuba of Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez, Fernando González Llort, Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, Ramón Labañino Salazar and René González Sehwerert. That is still an unfinished task and we will not stop until our other four comrades finally return to their homeland.”

A video prepared for the New York event featured René González, the only one of the Five who has been freed and is back in Cuba; his mother Irma Sehwerert; Rev. Luis Suárez from the Martin Luther King Center in Havana; and Kenia Serrano, president of the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples. Serrano called on meeting participants to keep fighting for the freedom of the Five, an end to the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, for the right of U.S. citizens to travel freely to Cuba, and for the return of the U.S. military base at Guantánamo to Cuba.

Rafael Cancel Miranda, who spent 25½ years in U.S. jails for carrying out an armed protest action in the U.S. Congress in 1954 to support independence for Puerto Rico, also spoke. The Cuban and Puerto Rican people “are one and the same,” he said. “We are fighting the same enemy.”

The New York event, held at the Service Employees International Union Local 1199 hall, was organized by a coalition of 32 organizations. Other speakers included Julio Escalona, Venezuela’s deputy ambassador to the U.N.; Rosemari Mealy, a professor at City College; and Jonna Baldres of the Philippine Forum.
 
 
Related articles:
Cuba solidarity conference held in Caracas, Venezuela
Discusses fight against US imperialist domination, stepping-up international campaign to free Cuban 5
Cuba’s internationalist solidarity: from Venezuela to Colombia to Haiti
Cubans celebrate 60th anniversary of July 26 assault
 
 
 
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