Vol. 80/No. 18      May 9, 2016

 

Wash. showing of Cuban 5 prison paintings: ‘Fighting for the future’

 
PUYALLUP, Wash. — “Unlike most artists whose work graces the walls of museums around the world, Antonio Guerrero has not exactly been classically trained as a painter,” said an article on the Pierce College website promoting the opening there of “I Will Die the Way I’ve Lived,” a series of his paintings. “With the help of his fellow prisoners, Guerrero managed to create works of art that portray the struggles he faced during his incarceration.”

The watercolors depict the experience of Guerrero and the rest of the Cuban Five in the “hole” during their first 17 months in prison after their arrest by the FBI in 1998 on frame-up charges, including conspiracy to commit espionage. The five revolutionaries had been gathering information about paramilitary groups in Florida, to help prevent violent attacks on Cuba. The last of the Five were released and returned to Cuba in December 2014.

“The way they survived prison is by drawing on their training as products of the Cuban Revolution,” Mary Martin told the college online news service. “They were fighting not just for themselves, but for the future.”

Kathy Swart, a teacher and librarian, brought the exhibit to the college and chaired the April 12 opening, which featured Marisela Fleitas-Lear, professor of Hispanic Studies at Green River College, and Martin of the Socialist Workers Party.

Fleitas-Lear told how Washington made Cuba into a virtual colony through military occupation and the Platt Amendment, signed by the Cuban government essentially at gunpoint in 1903, which allowed the U.S. to intervene in Cuban affairs, take over Guantánamo Bay and set up a naval base in perpetuity.

The establishment of U.S.-Cuba diplomatic relations is a victory for the Cuban Revolution, Martin said. She noted that three of the Five served in Angola as part of Cuba’s internationalist mission that defeated repeated Washington-backed invasions by the white supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa.

A student asked, “Are the Cuban Five all alive and well today and what are they doing?” Martin said the Five are still on the front lines defending their country, strengthening the revolution and speaking across Cuba.

“These ‘conspiracy to commit a crime’ charges when they have no evidence, like the Cuban Five had, are getting more widespread,” Brenda Bresnahan told the Militant as people viewed the exhibit. Her son is serving eight years on a federal conspiracy conviction in the penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, where Guerrero spent many years.

“These paintings speak to the experiences my son relates to me,” she said, “the nighttime flashlights, the roaches and the serial number assigned to inmates. Like Guerrero explains, ‘they try to make you become a number and attempt to strip your identity from you.’”  
 
 
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