Vol. 79/No. 36      October 12, 2015

“After the victory winning the release of Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, and Antonio Guerrero last December,” she said, “many of us froze.”

The three were the remaining members of the Cuban Five still held in U.S. prisons, framed up for carrying out an assignment in Florida to monitor the actions of paramilitary groups with a record of assaults against Cuba and supporters of the revolution. “What do we do now?” she said. “We focus on ending the embargo and return of Guantánamo to Cuban sovereignty.”

“The blockade remains in place,” Cuban Ambassador José Ramón Cabañas told the conference. Cabañas became ambassador after the historic agreement between Cuba and Washington last December that freed the three revolutionaries and opened the door to re-establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries. He said Cuba needs more solidarity.

“The entire blockade must be lifted,” Cabañas said. “Guantánamo is Cuba’s best bay — they have to return it.”

One conference panel featured graduates and students from the Latin American Medical School in Havana. Cuba has sponsored thousands of students from all over the world to attend who have returned to their countries to provide medical care. Adriano Rodrigues from East Timor noted that before the program there were no doctors in his country. “Now there are 1,080 graduates,” he said. “We were not only trained as doctors. We learned values — solidarity, humanism, equality, altruism, sacrifice and what it means to be truly revolutionary.”

Another panel was dedicated to the fight to free Puerto Rican independence fighter Oscar López Rivera, imprisoned in the U.S. on frame-up charges for more than 34 years. “The fight of the Puerto Rican people for sovereignty is what makes Oscar who he is,” said Rafael Cancel Miranda, who spent more than 27 years in U.S. prisons for his actions for Puerto Rican independence. “Cuba is an example. Cuba shows that you have to fight to be free.”

The conference was preceded by two days of lobbying Congress, an ecumenical service and an excellent photo exhibit titled, “The Cuban 5 Return: An Entire Country Celebrates.”

All events were sponsored by the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity for the Peoples, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, Institute for Policy Studies, and endorsed by the National Network on Cuba and a number of other groups.

Martín Koppel contributed to this article.
 
 
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