Vol. 80/No. 19 May 16, 2016
(In Review, special feature )
Book by Cuban 5 is powerful indictment of
capitalist ‘justice’
The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class: “It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System. 135 pages. Pathfinder Press, 2016.
The book, an interview by Socialist Workers Party leaders Mary-Alice Waters and Róger Calero with five revolutionaries who spent 16 years in prisons in the United States, is a powerful indictment of mass incarceration in the U.S. As Stiner points out, it’s a book about resistance, including the solidarity the Five extended to their fellow prisoners and the support they received in return. And, above all, it gives a picture of the values and human character that are the product of the Cuban Revolution.
All of the Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González — became revolutionaries growing up in Cuba, where workers and peasants overthrew capitalist rule in 1959 in a massive movement based on solidarity and internationalism.
They were framed up by the FBI in September 1998 for working to monitor counterrevolutionary Cuban groups in Florida to prevent violent attacks on Cuba. From that moment until December 2014, when the last three were freed, the Five were subjected to many of the cruelties they describe in the book.
A ‘microcosm’ of capitalist society
The U.S. prisons are a “microcosm” of the dog-eat-dog system of capitalism, Hernández says in the interview. A place that fosters violence, gangs and racism, where “the road to rehabilitation does not exist.”“The American system of justice” is “used by the US government to enable a powerful minority to control a vast majority,” Labañino says. “A person who is poor — Black, Latino, Native American, white — faces the enormous savagery of what’s called American justice. It serves above all to sustain a system that has no solution for the poor, present or future.”
The Five do not gloss over what Labañino calls the “brutal mentality” of many of those they lived with, a product of the values that permeate capitalist society as a whole. But the book is filled with examples of acts of solidarity, help and respect the Five extended to their fellow prisoners and the respect and support they received in return.
Hernández said when African-American prisoners learned about Cuba’s support of liberation struggles in Africa, they would ask, “Were you part of that?” When he told them he had fought in Angola against the South African apartheid regime — as did Fernando González and René González — they offered support.
Labañino says when he received the book Cuba and Angola, it caused a sensation. Many prisoners “didn’t know Cuban volunteers had been in Angola for sixteen years, defending its sovereignty against South Africa. The system of disinformation in the United States erases history,” he said. “Books by Malcolm X flew out of my hands.”
What’s possible with a revolution
In one chapter, the Five talk about Cubans they got to know in U.S. jails, some who had also spent time behind bars in Cuba. There are less material resources in Cuba, but prisoners there have access to education, conjugal visits, passes to be with family, and women inmates can stay with their newborn babies.“I was inspired by what the Cuban Five say about incarceration in Cuba,” Anita Wills told me. She is a fighter against police killings whose son is in prison. “Prisons there are not about dehumanizing people. It shows what’s possible with a revolution.”
“In Cuba a prisoner is another human being,” Labañino said. In the U.S. prisoners are treated as the enemy, just as the cops see people as the enemy. “If you don’t understand this,” he said, you won’t understand “why the police act the way they did in Ferguson, Missouri, [in 2014]. Why there is no solution within that system.”
The book includes some 40 photos. It highlights facts showing the scope of mass incarceration in the U.S., and explains why the Cuban government opposes the death penalty, and why life sentences there are rare. The Cuban Revolution has been “inspired always by a spirit of justice and not vengeance,” says President Raúl Castro.
In the conduct of the Cuban Five, readers will find lessons of value for any working-class fighter — examples of their courage, humor, dignity and discipline, of how they held onto and shared their ideas while respecting the views of those who disagreed.
Despite being separated for so many years in different prisons, each acted in the same manner, leading a worldwide struggle to win their freedom and emerging from prison stronger. How was this possible? It was the Cuban Revolution itself, the political consciousness and values they learned growing up.
“To spend seventeen months in the hole and sixteen years in prison and create paintings that don’t contain a shred of hatred … that’s a product of the way we were educated as revolutionaries,” Guerrero says in a talk to students at the science and engineering university in Havana reprinted in the book.
“Nothing that happened is about us as individuals,” he told the students. “The standing we gained represents the resistance of our people.”
Their revolutionary convictions were strengthened by what they learned from prisoners from El Salvador, Mexico and other countries about what workers face today with the deepening capitalist economic crisis, a crisis that has helped spawn a growth in the drug trade, violence and repression.
“We came to know the problems of many places around the world,” Hernández said. Thanks to “the empire’s publicity machine,” some people think “capitalism is a house with two cars and a swimming pool. That Haiti isn’t capitalism. Central America isn’t capitalism. The poor neighborhoods of the United States aren’t capitalism. Capitalism is whatever it suits them to show!”
The actions of these five representatives of the Cuban Revolution — before, during and after their time within the U.S. working class — offer proof that it’s possible to build a world where brutalities they describe will not exist.
Related articles:
Millions rally in Cuba on May Day to defend revolution
DC event: Solidarity needed to lift US embargo of Cuba
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