Vol. 79/No. 23      June 22, 2015

Perez was one of a number of speakers at the one-day exhibit who highlighted the relevance of Guerrero’s paintings to working-class struggles today.

The May 30 event was sponsored by the Friends of the Richmond Public Library. It featured recent paintings by Guerrero contained in the book Absolved by Solidarity that depict the 2001 frame-up trial of the Cuban Five, as well as earlier ones that portray the 17 months they spent in punishment cells in the Miami Federal Detention Center awaiting trial.

After 16 years in U.S. prisons, the final three of these Cuban revolutionaries returned to Cuba in December in a victory for the Cuban Revolution and the international campaign to free them. Since then Guerrero and his four comrades — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González and René González — have continued defending Cuba’s socialist revolution and supporting other working-class struggles internationally. Guerrero’s prison paintings are a contribution to those efforts.

Librarian Catherine Ortiz, who helped organize the exhibit, welcomed the more than 80 people who attended.

Anita Wills, executive director of the Inter Council for Mothers of Murdered Children, announced plans to build the Movement for Black Lives national conference in Cleveland, July 24-26. She invited people to preregister. “It’s about what’s going on not just in Cleveland, but with Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and all these young and old people being killed by the police,” she said.

“What do we do next?” asked Vylma Ortiz. “We are all going to work to free Oscar López Rivera!” Ortiz and Willye Rivera, who also spoke, have been active in the campaign to free López, a Puerto Rican independence fighter who has been jailed in the U.S. for 34 years, 12 of them in solitary confinement. They urged everyone to join the campaign and to sign a petition requesting a presidential pardon. The Cuban Five have been speaking out in support of López and other political prisoners.

Tarnel Abbott, one of several members of the Richmond/Regla (Cuba) Friendship Committee at the exhibit, spoke about the work of the group.

Patti Iiyama, who recently visited Cuba with Tsukimi Kai, a predominantly Japanese American group that organizes cultural interchange with Japanese Cubans, reported on visiting the museum in Cuba where the originals of Guerrero’s paintings are exhibited.

Iiyama noted that “120,000 Japanese Americans were put in concentration camps; the Cuban Five were also framed up. Both groups were imprisoned unjustly, and both had similar responses — to use art to assert their humanity.”

“The five Cuban revolutionaries are examples of how it is possible to stand up and prevail against brutalities and injustice and emerge from 16 years in prison stronger than ever,” said Betsey Stone, a member of the Socialist Workers Party and editor of Women and the Cuban Revolution, who helped organize the exhibit. She described the decades of attacks by the U.S. government on the Cuban Revolution, including supporting violence by counterrevolutionary groups that the Cuban Five were sent to the United States to prevent. “The economic embargo is still in full force,” she said. “We should join in demanding that it be ended.”

Participants took time to study the prints and read the explanatory captions.

“I admire the Cuban Five,” said Inga Frolova, originally from Vladivostok, Russia. “They went through hell and kept their dignity in a situation where there is no dignity left.”

Areceli Guizar, a participant in the fight against solitary confinement whose fiancé is in prison, looked carefully at each painting. “My favorite is the one with the bird,” she said, “because it shows how you can be in solitary confinement and still rise above it.”
 
 
Related articles:
‘We have history of winning,’ one of Cuban 5 tells meeting
Cuba debated at Latin American studies conference
 
 
 
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