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Vol. 77/No. 36      October 14, 2013

 
Art by Cuban 5 revolutionary
shows experience of 5 in ‘hole’
Encounters with ‘justice’ system resonate with millions
(feature article)
 
BY SETH GALINSKY  
The international fight to free the Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González and René González — has garnered growing support among working people, unions, defenders of political rights and prominent individuals in the U.S. and worldwide. Among the arsenal in the defense campaign for the five Cuban revolutionaries, who were framed up and railroaded to jail by the U.S. government more than 15 years ago, is the most recent collection of paintings by Guerrero depicting the Five’s first 17 months of imprisonment awaiting trial in Miami, including six months in solitary confinement.

This year supporters of the Five have organized conferences, meetings, panel discussions, rallies and book presentations, including most recently around publication of What Lies Across the Water by Stephen Kimber. In addition to these events, showings of political cartoons by Hernández and paintings by Guerrero at art galleries and other venues have helped reach broader audiences.

The facts of the case — the work they were doing to prevent violent attacks against Cuba and supporters of the Cuban Revolution, the attempts of the U.S. government to break them, their refusal to plea bargain and the conditions of their imprisonment — resonate with working people in the U.S., millions of whom have their own experience with the capitalist frame-up and lockup “justice” system.

It’s these themes, in particular the fight for dignity of workers behind bars and those who support them, that comes through in the vivid images of Guerrero’s collection of 15 watercolors, titled “I Will Die the Way I Lived.”

Guerrero, who learned to paint in prison, named the exhibit after a line taken from the 1992 song “El Necio” (the stubborn fool) by Cuban singer/songwriter Silvio Rodríguez. The song was seen as a defiant response to those, particularly outside the island, who were warning that the revolution was on its last legs and that its supporters should give up the fight and accept a capitalist future in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the abrupt loss of 85 percent of the foreign trade. “Those of us who didn’t know the words to the emblematic song of Silvio, El Necio, learned them,” Guerrero writes in an introductory note on the paintings and their initial days in prison.

In the introduction, he says that the Five plan “in the near future to enrich this work with writings, poems and other art by us Five and thereby make known, with these memories, that first period of lockup, which we could characterize as the roughest and cruelest.”

The watercolors give a sense of the routine harassment faced from prison guards and officials, the lack of privacy, the arbitrary searches of cells, the shackling of prisoners every time they are taken to court, the brutality of solitary confinement. But they also show the resilience and creativity of workers behind bars, from the board games the Five invented to the elaborate methods of communication and exchange they learned from fellow inmates to bypass the draconian prison rules and maintain a sense of social solidarity.

In his note about “The Number,” Guerrero describes how “they don’t only take away your freedom, they turn you into a number … they never ask your name.” But the paintings bear witness to the fact that prison authorities utterly failed in their attempts to break the spirits of the Five.

In “The Air Vent,” Guerrero shows the vents the Five used to communicate with each other when they were in adjoining cells while in solitary confinement. “I used to read my new poems to my brothers this way,” he says.

Gerardo Hernández and Ramón Labañino, in five articles in the online magazine CubaDebate, commented on the paintings.

“We spent about six months totally alone in our cells,” Labañino writes. “And it was only after a lot of legal controversies with our jailers through our lawyers and internal requests that we succeeded in them putting us two to a cell. Of course since we are five, one of us was always alone.” They rotated every three weeks.

“After 17 months we were finally able to join the general population,” Labañino writes in a description of how they fought to get out of the hole.

Prison ‘sports’

Commenting on paintings showing games they created to pass the time, Hernández describes how they experimented with ingredients until they found the right mixture of bread crumbs and toothpaste to create usable dice and how they hid them from the guards. One night when Hernández and Guerrero were sharing the same cell, cockroaches ate the dice, the subject of “The Cockroach Cell.” Those cockroaches must have had “the best breath of any animal species,” Hernández says.

Hernández also comments on Guerrero’s painting “Fishing,” which shows a weight and a line device invented by prisoners to pass magazines, coffee and other items from cell to cell. Using the line “is a ‘sport’ that requires a lot of practice,” Hernández notes. “But when you have to spend 24 hours a day in a cell the size of a bathroom, sometimes without even a book to read, there’s lots of time to ‘invent.’”

An exhibit of the original 15 watercolors opened in Havana Sept. 11. High-quality reproductions of the paintings were shown for the first time at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., as part of Five Days for the Five, a weeklong activity organized by the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban 5 in June. They were also on display at Obsidian Arts in Minneapolis in September.

“When you look at all the works Antonio has done since he began painting in prison, these are really the first ones done from his own imagination,” Alicia Jrapko from the International Committee, told the Militant. “They’re very moving.”

Those interested in organizing an exhibition can contact the International Committee at info@thecuban5.org to get the files, Jrapko said.

“The paintings don’t have to be exhibited in an art gallery,” she said. “They can be displayed anywhere people will see them.”
 
 
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Who are the Cuban Five?
Sales strong of ‘The Cuban 5’ at Paris festival
 
 
 
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