November 12, 2001
FAIRFAX, California — A public forum in defense of five Cubans recently convicted in Miami on frame-up charges of conspiracy to commit espionage for the government of Cuba was held here Oct. 20. Nearly 100 people attended the speakout, held during a weekend meeting of the National Network on Cuba. The five Cubans have been in jail over a year, mostly in solitary confinement.
On June 8, a federal court in Miami convicted Cuban citizens Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González. As a statement by the Cuban government pointed out, the five were in Miami to “discover and report on terrorist plans hatched against our people” by counterrevolutionary opponents of the Cuban Revolution.
In addition to targeting revolutionary Cuba, the U.S. government’s frame-up violated crucial constitutional rights needed by workers in the U.S.
November 12, 1976
Peter Camejo, Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, visited Andres Figueroa Cordero — one of the five imprisoned Puerto Rican nationalists Oct. 28. Camejo is the first candidate for public office ever to visit Figueroa Cordero in prison.
Figueroa Cordero and four other members of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico — Rafael Cancel Miranda, Lolita Lebron, Oscar Collazo, and Irving Flores — were imprisoned in the early 1950s for armed actions in support of Puerto Rican independence. They are the longest-held political prisoners in the Western Hemisphere.
Camejo said he visited Figueroa Cordero “to show my solidarity with him and to be better able to explain the issues in this case during the closing days of the campaign. The five remain in prison today because they have not wavered in their support to Puerto Rican independence.”
November 12, 1951
One Negro youth is dead and another near death after being shot by a Florida sheriff who was transporting them to the site of a retrial ordered by the Supreme Court.
This latest outrage came as the climax to a frame-up attempt that has become known as the “Little Scottsboro case.” On July 16, 1949, a 17-year-old farm wife in Groveland, Fla., claimed that she had been raped by four Negroes. The rape charge became the excuse for a bloody anti-Negro terror, with mobs burning houses, and shootings and beatings in the Jim Crow sections of the town.
In the course of this terror, one Negro youth was shot to death, and three others were arrested, charged with the “rape.” One was sentenced to life imprisonment, and two to death, after a mockery of a trial. The Supreme Court declared this travesty a mistrial. NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White has demanded a federal investigation.