The Cuban Five Victory: Reflections Ten Years Later

I can remember clearly the rush of joy I felt when I heard the almost unbelievable news that the last three members of the Cuban 5, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino, had landed in Havana on December 17th, 2014 after sixteen years of unjust incarceration in U.S. prisons. (The other two members of the Five, Fernando González, and René González, had been released previously at the end of their prison terms.) I had corresponded with Gerardo while he was in prison and seeing  the pictures of him embrace his wife, Adriana Pérez, who was about to give birth to their daughter Gema, made it all seem even more miraculous. Gema had been conceived through “diplomatic conception/ artificial insemination” which had been facilitated by Senator Patrick Leahy with the approval of the U.S. government.

Of course, it wasn’t a miracle but the culmination of years of continuous, intentional struggle on multiple levels in the face of daunting odds. I had been part of the campaign to win the freedom of the Five ever since Alicia Jrapko, (presente!), invited me to attend the Fifth International Colloquium to Free the Five held in Holguín, Cuba in 2009.  Before attending the Colloquium, I knew the general facts about their case. I understood that the Five had come to the U.S. to defend Cuba against terrorist attacks which had increased significantly during the 1990’s. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the economic crisis which ensued when Soviet support to Cuba drastically declined, U.S.-based Cuban extremist groups saw a new vulnerability and escalated their attack on the Cuban revolution through accelerated bombings and other subversive activities on the island. In particular, they were targeted the tourism industry which Cuba was trying to develop in an effort to rebuild the Cuban economy.

The mission of the Five was to infiltrate and gather intelligence about the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), Brothers to the Rescue, and Alpha 66  to stop the harm the terrorist attacks were causing in Cuba.  In June 1998, Cuba shared some of the information that had been gathered about these extremist groups with the FBI with the assurance that it would be used to prosecute these illegal activities. Instead, in September 1998 the U.S. government arrested the Five. The prosecution was based on the distorted narrative that the Five were part of a terrorist spy ring engaged in espionage against the U.S. In 2001, a few days after September 11th, the Five were convicted after a sham trial which ignored all of the evidence in their defense.

As the Five put it in a message to the Cuban people, “The U.S. legal system was openly utilized as a means of protecting the terrorists and, in an atmosphere of lynching, we were subjected to a rigged trial. Cruel conditions of confinement were utilized to break us and to prevent us from preparing an adequate defense. Lies took over the courtroom. Evidence was adulterated, damaged and suppressed.”  They were sent to five separate prisons across the United States without the possibility of communicating with one another. Visits from family members were largely prohibited. Gerardo Hernández received  two life sentences plus 15 years, the most severe punishment in the group.

I knew these facts about the Five but at the Colloquium in Holguín, I heard the searing, emotional testimony of visitors, family and community that had been directly impacted by the terrorist attacks. Giustino DiCelmo, the father of an Italian tourist who was killed in the 1997 bombing of the Copacabana Hotel in Havana, painfully expressed what it meant to lose a son in such a brutally random manner.  Odalys Pérez Rodriguez was the daughter of the pilot of Cubana flight 455 which exploded while flying from Barbados to Jamaica in 1976, killing all 73 people on board. She angrily denounced Luis Posada Carriles, the CANF leader who had boasted of his responsibility for the bombing. Carriles had been released from prison in the U.S. in 2007 and was living openly in Miami.

Mothers, wives, and children of the Five discussed the grief and hardship the imprisonment of their loved ones had caused. Olga Salanueva, René’s wife, and Adriana Pérez, Gerardo’s wife, described how the U.S. government had punitively denied their requests for visas on nine separate occasions, preventing them from visiting their husbands.  In response, the wives helped to establish an International Commission for the Right of Family Visits, with members in 27 countries, to expose the illegality of the U.S. policy and to build popular support for the inarguable right to family visits.

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, president of the Cuban National Assembly, highlighted the crucial importance of international solidarity in the battle to win freedom for the Five. Internationalism has always been at the core of Cuba’s revolutionary politics, most clearly exemplified in its support for the liberation struggles in South Africa which several members of the Five had participated in. The mutual character of that solidarity was demonstrated by the fact that fifty-four nations from all seven continents were represented at the Colloquium, a breadth of support that was expanded in the following years.

I left the Colloquium with a heightened understanding of  the responsibility that we in the U.S. had to build the campaign for the Five. For the next five years I worked in the International Committee to Free the Five, led in the U.S. by Alicia Jrapko and her compañero Bill Hackwell and co-chaired from Cuba by Graciela Ramírez Cruz. Alicia and Bill visited Gerardo in prison every few weeks from 2002 to 2014 and solidarity activists around the country visited other members of the Five consistently. These crucial visits supported the Five in prison and also provided political guidance for the U.S. campaign.

We organized events and demonstrations, lobbied Congress, developed media of all types, and gathered the support of scholars, actors, writers,and filmmakers. Renowned filmmaker Saul Landau directed a film about the Five, Will the Real Terrorists Please Stand Up. The film exposed the decades of assassinations and sabotage against Cuba that were first openly backed by Washington and then allowed to quietly flourish at the very same time as the U.S. was spearheading its “war against terrorism.”  Canadian journalist and professor Stephen Kimber published the book “What Lies Across the Water’”,a comprehensive account of the history behind the Cuban 5 case.  La Colmenita,Cuba’s National Children’s Theater group, toured the United States with a play they had written titled “Abracadabra,” about storybook characters who unite in an effort to win freedom for the Five.

The International Committee reached out as broadly as possible to unions, educators, faith-based organizations, and groups working for the freedom of other U.S.-held political prisoners.  We connected the campaign for the Five to the victories that had been won to free other political prisoners in the United States such as the eleven Puerto Rican independentistas who had received clemency from President Clinton in 1999.  Fernando spent four years in the same cell as Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera at Terre Haute prison in Indiana while Gerardo spent several years with Black liberation freedom fighter Mutulu Shakur in Victorville prison, California.

From inside prison, the Five tried to break through the blockade of silence imposed by the U.S. media to tell the world who they really were. Antonio Guerrero learned to paint from other artists in prison, guided by José Marti’s precept, “Truth needs art.”  His exhibit called Desde Mi Altura/ From My Altitude, held at the SPARC community art gallery in Los Angeles in 2010, exemplified the power of this saying.  In his artist statement, Antonio  explained,  “Each work expresses not only my human essence but that of the Five, united as we are by unbreakable principles.”

Gerardo created satiric cartoons and logos. On one of her visits, he told Alicia Jrapko a story about his experience caring for a bird inside the prison.  Afterwards, she wrote the story down from memory and began to circulate it online.The bird and the prisoner, expressed Gerardo’s deep care in the face of the prison’s restrictive, inhuman conditions. Alice Walker and Cuban poet Nancy Morejon edited a book, Letters of Love and Hope, which featured excerpts from the prison diaries of the Five and excerpts from their letters to their families. One of the letters, written by Ramón Labañino for his daughters, stated in part “Now you can understand why daddy couldn’t be with you longer, or share all the happy times with you like other fathers do with their children.  For that, I’m very sorry. . . But I want you to know that I had to leave because of my love for you and everyone.”

These were the type of building blocks, amplified across the world, that contributed to the victory that the Five won in 2014. Fundamental to the entire effort was the bedrock commitment of the Five themselves to the Cuban people and their belief that Cuba had the right to defend itself against terrorist attacks.

In a message to the Cuban people written in 2013, the Five explained their steadfastness. “We did not surrender, because by implicating Cuba, the nation we were protecting, in false accusations in order to swell a U.S. government file against the island would have been an unpardonable act of betrayal of the people we love. We did not surrender, because human values are still, for us, something precious on which the transformation of human beings into better people rests. We did not surrender because that implied renouncing our dignity, a source of self-esteem and love of self for any human being.”

Their inner determination was fueled by the resolute commitment of the Cuban people to win their return. In a speech at a rally in June 2001, Fidel had insisted “Volverán! They will return!” and the entire country was mobilized to ensure that prediction would come true. Constant news, billboards, events, and annual international Colloquiums were just some of the methods used to keep the Five in the hearts and minds of the Cuban people. At the same time, their family members were tireless in their efforts to expose the injustices of their imprisonment and build support for the Five, traveling around the world to insist that the Five must be free.

Ricardo Alarcón, President of the Cuban National Assembly, wrote a series of sixteen articles articles published first in Counterpunch and compiled later as a book titled “Forbidden Heroes – the Untold Story of the Cuban Five.”.The articles focused on “the twisted judicial process”  of the case over the years. In 2005, Alarcon summed up his frustration with the U.S. court system as  an avenue for justice. “Now they are five kidnap victims of an administration that rides roughshod over the law everywhere. Not just in Abu Grahib and Guantánamo. Within US territory as well.  What is to be done? The time has come to shout it from the rooftops. To go on demanding their immediate release until it happens, unconditionally. Freedom now for the Cuban Five. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

Behind the scenes,throughout their imprisonment, the Cuban government was engaged in a persistent effort to win their release through diplomatic means. The specific mechanism that brought about the freedom of Gerardo, Antonio and Ramon in 2014 was a prisoner exchange. Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor employed by USAID who had been convicted of conducting covert operations in Cuba, was released in exchange for the freedom of the Five. Shortly after their release, President Obama and Raul Castro, announced plans to restore diplomatic ties and a few months later, the U.S. reopened their embassy in Havana.

After Obama left office, these tentative measures to shift U.S. policies towards Cuba were quickly overturned by Trump who removed American diplomats from the embassy in Havana, added hundreds of coercive measures against Cuba and in the last days before he left office put Cuba on the infamous State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list. The SSOT designation seriously increased the punitive restrictions on Cuban trade and finance resulting in dire shortages of food, medicine, spare parts, fuel and all necessities. Despite campaign promises to reverse Trump’s punitive Cuba policy, Biden has continued it unabated.  As Cuban President Diaz-Canel put it recently “Biden in a disciplined and cruel manner complied with the policy that Trump approved during his mandate.”  In response, the global solidarity movement has escalated its campaign to take Cuba off the SSOT list.

On December 17, 2024 a major event was held in Havana to mark the tenth anniversary of the return of the Five.  Gerardo, who is now national coordinator of the Committee’s in Defense of the Revolution (CDR) spoke on behalf of the Five who were all present with their families at the event. He expressed special thanks for the unconditional support that the Five received from their families and the Cuban people, with appreciation for every letter they sent into prison and every march they participated in.

Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla emphasized the role of the Cuban people and the critical importance of international solidarity in the ongoing struggle. “Our people took on the campaign for the freedom of the Five in an extraordinary way.  It became a true campaign of the peoples…International solidarity will have to continue confronting and denouncing until one day the arbitrary and unjustified designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism is eliminated and the inhumane and illegal blockade against our country is lifted for the definitive triumph of justice over abuse and oppression.”

Graciela Ramirez Cruz called out the hypocrisy of the SSOT designation. “It violates the conscience of the men and women of the world that the US, the main violator of Human Rights, the one that continues to murder with its weapons the children and women of Gaza together with its Zionist partner Israel, the one that is behind every coup d’état in the region and the world, the one that imposes on Cuba the genocidal blockade for more than 60 years, the one that issued more than 900 sanctions against Venezuela. It is outrageous that the U.S., the country that promotes terrorism, accuses the victim, includes and ratifies Cuba in an illegal and perverse list where it should never have been.”

Three days after the celebration, on December 20th, tens of thousands of Cubans, led by Raul Castro and President Diaz-Canel, marched to the U.S. embassy in Havana to demand the removal of Cuba from the SSOT list and an end to the blockade. The protest made it clear that the indomitable spirit and determination that guided the Cuban Five’s victory will continue in the face of whatever destructive plans the Trump administration has in store for Cuba.  In the U.S., it will be critical to intensify and expand all of our solidarity work in the next period. We can find strength for the future in recognizing the significant role we were able to play in winning the freedom of the Cuban 5.

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