Cuban Prisoners and Imperialist Hypocrisy

The following article is reprinted from MR Zine. It
highlights the lies, slanders and sheer hypocrisys of the recent attacks on
socialist Cuba. The Cuban 5 are but a few of the many political prisoners that Imperialism holds in the USA, alongside other such notable personalities as Mumia Abu-Jamal, the MOVE 9, the Angola 3 and Leonard Peltier.

Cuban Prisoners, Here and There by Michael Parenti and Alicia Jrapko

For more than half a century Western political leaders and their corporate media have waged a disinformation war against socialist Cuba. Nor is there any sign that they are easing up. A recent example is the case of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, an inmate who died in a Cuban prison in February 2010 after an 82-day hunger strike.
Zapata's death sparked an outcry from Western capitalist media and official sources, including of course the United States. Almost without exception, in literally thousands of reports, the corporate media portrayed him as a "political prisoner" and a "political dissident" -- without offering any supporting specifics. In March 2010 the European Union voted to condemn Cuba for his demise.

Since 2004, Amnesty International has treated Zapata Tamayo as one of Cuba 's 75 "prisoners of conscience," without offering evidence to buttress this assertion. Like the Western media, Amnesty failed to specify what were the political activities that had led to Zapata's imprisonment.

An Amnesty International article (24 February 2010) stated that in May 2004 Zapata Tamayo was sentenced to three years in prison for "public disorder" and "resistance." According to some reports he launched his hunger strike not only to protest his conditions of detention but to demand a personal kitchen in his cell, a television set, and a cell phone, amenities that were not likely to materialize.
Zapata was subsequently tried several times on charges of assaulting guards and "disorder in a penal establishment." The offenses began to add up. At the time of his fast he was facing a total sentence of 36 years. Again Amnesty made no mention of any political activities.

Cuban doctors attempted to keep Zapata alive with intravenous feedings and other stratagems. One psychologist testified that she tried to convince him to cease the hunger strike and try to register his grievances by other means. Zapata's mother remarked that her son had the best Cuban doctors at his bedside and she thanked them for their assistance. Later she would change her story and claim that he was a "dissident" who had been mistreated.

According to the Cuban writer Enrique Ubieta Gomez, Zapata was a common criminal who was convicted of "unlawful break-in" (1993), "assault" (2000), "fraud" (2000), and "public disorder" (2002). One of his serious transgressions occurred in 2000 when he attacked someone named Leonardo Simón with a machete, fracturing his skull and inflicting other injuries.

Ubieta Gomez concluded that Zapata had been involved in a wide range of criminal doings, none of which were remotely political. He was in jail for breaching the peace, "public damage," resistance to authority, two charges of fraud, "public exhibitionism," repeated charges of felonious assault, and being illegally armed.

Despite this extensive rap sheet Zapata was paroled in March 2003, eleven days before the arrests of the 75 so-called "prisoners of conscience." Later that same month he was charged with another crime and imprisoned for parole violation.
To repeat: while his 2003 arrest happened to come within days of the imprisonment of the 75, Zapata was never part of that group. The Cuban government never accused him of conspiring with -- or accepting funds and materials from -- a foreign power, charges that were leveled against the 75.

Contrary to what was claimed by the Spanish news agency EFE, Zapata's name does not appear on the list of the 75 Cuban prisoners drawn up by the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 2003.

Since 2003, at least 20 of the 75 have been released due to health problems, shrinking the number still incarcerated to 55 -- a level of humanitarian leniency not likely to be emulated in the US criminal justice system. Apparently this news has yet to reach the US media. As of 17 March 2010 the New York Times still referred to the "imprisonment of 75 dissidents." Even more recently (5 April 2010) an NPR commentator referred to the "75 dissidents being held in Cuba 's prisons."

The Cuban government argues that to describe the 75 (or 55) as being "prisoners of conscience" or "political dissidents" is to misrepresent the issue. They were never tried for holding dissenting views but for unlawfully collaborating with a hostile foreign power, receiving funds and materials from the US interest section, with the intent to subvert the existing political system in Cuba.

Many countries have such laws, including the USA. As Arnold August points out, the US Penal Code, under Chapter 115 entitled "Treason, Sedition, and Subversive Activities," Section 2381 stipulates that any US citizen who "adheres to" or gives "aid and comfort . . . within the United States or elsewhere" to a country that US authorities consider to be an enemy "is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000." So too, Cuba has legislation directed at those who are funded by hostile foreign powers.

In comparison to the media's tidal outcry on behalf of Cubans imprisoned in Cuba, consider the coverage accorded the five Cubans imprisoned in the United States. During almost 12 years of incarceration, the Cuban Five have been largely ignored by the corporate media and consequently remain mostly unknown to the US public.
The Five possessed no weapons and committed no act of terror, sabotage, or espionage. Gerardo Hernandez, Fernando Gonzalez, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, and Rene Gonzalez came to the United States during the 1990s to infiltrate and monitor the terrorist activities of private right-wing groups of Cuban exiles. The information they gathered in their undercover work was forwarded to the Cuban government which in turn passed much of it on to the US government with the understanding that the two nations were now supposedly cooperating in a war against terrorism.

In 1998 after receiving evidence of impending terrorist activities planned against Cuba, the FBI went into action. But instead of arresting the right-wing Cubans who were planning the attacks from US soil, the feds apprehended the five Cubans who were working at uncovering such plots.

The five were tried in a federal court in Miami, home to over half a million Cuban exiles. Miami is a community with a long history of hostility toward the Cuban government -- a record that a federal appellate court in the United States later described as a "perfect storm" of prejudice, designed to make a fair trial impossible.
The Cuban Five were kept in solitary confinement for 17 months, denied their right to bail and the right to a change of venue. After the longest trial in the history of the United States, they were sentenced by a jury in Miami to four life sentences plus 77 years collectively. The US public outside Miami heard next to nothing about this case -- in striking contrast to the lavish treatment later accorded to Zapata Tamayo.

Of those who have managed to hear about the Cuban Five through alternative channels, many have denounced the unfair and unwarranted convictions. On March 6, 2009 in an unprecedented show of support, twelve amicus briefs called upon the US Supreme Court to review the case. Numbering among the Cuban Five's supporters were ten Nobel Prize winners, the entire Mexican Senate, the National Assembly of Panama, members from every political group within the European Parliament, including three current vice-presidents and two former Presidents, and hundreds of lawmakers from Brazil, Belgium, Chile, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Scotland, and the United Kingdom.

In 2009 the US Supreme Court, giving no reason, refused to review the case, and the US corporate media continued to ignore it. Meanwhile the Cuban Five, hailed in Cuba as heroes defending their homeland against US-sponsored terrorism, continue to serve inflated sentences in US prisons on trumped-up charges.

If US rulers really are interested in fighting oppression and injustice, they might start closer to home. Thus far President Barrack Obama has shown no interest in the case. (Why does this not surprise us?) But other more genuine souls at home and abroad continue to press for justice.

Cuban Socialism - Resisting Imperialist Attacks Since 1959!

In lieu of the recent slurs and attacks on socialist Cuba by the bourgeois media, we are here reprinting a recent editorial from Granma International, the organ of the Cuban Communist Party, on their resistance to these vicious attacks.

We will defend the truth with our ethics and our principles

THE empire and its allies have launched a new crusade in an attempt to demonize Cuba. Its powerful political and media machinery has set in motion a colossal operation of deception with the object of discrediting the revolutionary process, destabilizing the country and provoking the conditions for the destruction of our social system.

In this heated campaign they are using their mercenaries at their whim. In order to obtain shameful political dividends they are tossing them to their deaths without the most minimal concern for those human beings; just as they have never cared about the death of more than 3,000 Cubans as a result of acts of terrorism organized and financed from the United States, or the fate of the 2,000-plus compatriots mutilated by those abominable acts, or citizens who have perished in the Strait of Florida having launched themselves on ill-fated adventures after the siren calls of the murderous Cuban Adjustment Act.

They are cynically invoking the human rights that they themselves have disregarded and are still disregarding with impunity today in diverse parts of the world. They are hypocritically accusing the Revolution of being responsible for the death of one person, a common prisoner who, thanks to the anti-Cuba campaigns and the abundant resources and means dedicated to that end, they have dressed up as a political prisoner, to be sacrificed to serving as the launch pad for the denigration of the nation that has made the greatest effort in the world to save lives, by sending tens of thousands of its selfless heath workers to cooperate in more than 100 countries. The Revolution that did not hesitate for one second to offer its doctors to come to the aid of U.S. citizens in New Orleans and other southern cities in the devastating wake of Hurricane Katrina; the Revolution that has given higher education to young people who were unable to graduate in their own nations, including a number from the United States; the Revolution that has placed at international disposition an innovative literacy method that has made it possible for millions of people in various countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Africa and Oceania to have access to the sacred human right of education and knowledge.

The Cuban Revolution has consistently acted on the basis of ethical, political and moral principles, following the teachings of Fidel. Respect for human beings is the essence of our system and has been one of the keys of popular support for the process since the heroic days of the Sierra Maestra, when the lives of enemy prisoners were always respected.

Despite the empire’s unvarying policy of hostility and constant aggression, ranging from armed invasion, terrorist acts of sabotage and attempts on the lives of Fidel and our leaders, to the promotion of subversion and a genocidal economic, commercial and financial blockade that has been in place for 50 years, the Revolution has never murdered, tortured or disappeared even one of its enemies.

Can the governments of the United States and the European countries that are shouting their heads off criticizing Cuba and condemning it as if they were vestal virgins, say the same thing? What can they say about the million dead in Iraq and the tens of thousands of victims in Afghanistan as a consequence of the illegal wars executed there? How can they explain the secret prisons and the torture of alleged terrorists? What is the legal basis for the selective assassinations that the United States has perpetrated against its enemies in various parts of the world with a special force headed during this period by the very same general who is now commanding the troops in Afghanistan? How can they justify the death in the last five years of more than 100 immigrants who were in the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement?

What human right sustains the brutal blows dealt to representatives of social movements protesting during the Climate Summit in Copenhagen or Californian students demanding a larger budget for and less money taken out of education? Who is supervising the humiliating treatment meted out to immigrants in hundreds of detention centers scattered throughout Europe? Have the U.S. Congress or the European Parliament and the right-wing parties of Europe, currently so concerned about Cuba, responded with alarm to, denounced or condemned these scandalous violations of human rights?

What is really making them concerned is the moral fortitude of the Revolution, its fidelity to principles, its growing prestige in our region, where it has become an important actor in promoting the integration process; its intelligent and serene response to confronting the harsh consequences of the international economic crisis and the blockade; and its clarity in terms of having to change what has to be changed in pursuit of attaining full justice for our people, as we have been asked by Fidel and Raúl.

It is for that reason that the empire and its European allies are drawing up plans, coordinating the work of their special services, sending their diplomats onto the streets to monitor the work of their paid agents on the island, and increasing funds for subversion in Cuba. The USAID alone has a budget of $20 million this year to supply counterrevolutionary group and finance the media attack on Cuba.

They are currently focusing their cynical campaign on another hunger striker – whose common crimes and counterrevolutionary acts were exposed in Granma last March 8 – and who is being offered all the qualified medical treatment he requires.

They are internationalizing his show while maintaining a cynical silence concerning his cruelty and criminal record, his aggression and death threats to a doctor, the director of the hospital where he worked, and his attack on a defenseless elderly man who had to undergo emergency surgery as a result of the injuries he received.

They are likewise kicking up a fuss around the self-denominated Damas de Blanco (Women in White), who are lending themselves to the enemy’s game while supporting themselves with dollars stained with Cuban blood, supplied among others by the terrorist Santiago Alvarez Fernández Magriá, who attempted to blow up the Tropicana Cabaret and is the Miami benefactor of Luis Posada Carriles. Thus it is not surprising that the mastermind behind the sabotage of a Cubana de Aviación passenger plane and other execrable acts should have come out a few days ago in Miami to show his support for these "damas," whose only sanction to date has been the overwhelming and energetic repudiation of our people in the streets.

Receiving money from a terrorist organization is a felony that is severely punishable in the United States. So is acting in the service of a foreign power. The crimes of the so-called "dissidents" have nothing to do with freedom of expression, but are related to paid collaboration with the enemy superpower in its conspiracies against our nation. It is proven that all of them were in direct or indirect receipt of funds from the U.S. government and more than a few European foundations collaborating with the policy of war on Cuba.

What would happen to these "dissidents" if they acted in the country of their master in the same way they are in Cuba? The U.S. Penal Code sets out a sentence of 20 years for those who advocate the defeat of the government or the established order; 10 years for persons who make false statements with the aim of threatening national interests in relation to another nation, and three years for those who maintain "correspondence or relations with a foreign government" with the intention of influencing its conduct in relation to a conflict or controversy with the United States."

The enemy is using all its weapons of pressure. It is using political coercion and ordering the media annihilation of those wishing to show their solidarity with Cuba. It is attempting to silence any voice that is in discrepancy with its dictate. It has even forgotten the much-trumpeted "freedom of expression" by obliging Google to close the digital blog of a Cuban intellectual who has exposed with irrefutable arguments the real political propositions of the campaign against our homeland.

Nothing surprises us. They are the same perverse methods as those put into practice 50 years ago when President Eisenhower passed the Covert Action Plan against Cuba.

As compañero Raúl stated in the closing session of the 9th UJC Congress:

"More than half a century of permanent combat has taught our people that vacillation is synonymous with defeat."

"We will never yield to coercion from any country or group of nations, no matter how powerful they might be, and regardless of the consequences. We have the right to defend ourselves. Let them know that if they try to corner us, we will take cover, first and foremost with truth and principles. Once again we will be firm, calm, and patient. Our history is rich with such examples!"

We will make battle with our ideas, in our streets and in all international scenarios.

This May Day will receive an overwhelming and unequivocal response of support for the Revolution from our nation and its workers!

We will defend the truth with our ethics and our principles!

Translated by Granma International

Ukrainian government and people recognize Cuban treatment of the children of Chernobyl

This is reproduced from Granma International, the organ of the Cuban Communist Party. I am posting it as an example of the fantastic acts of solidarity that the Cuban socialist revolution has achieved, something we need to uphold in the current climate of imperialist attacks on socialist Cuba.

A distinction for Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, chief inspiration of the humane project constituted by the treatment program in Cuba for Ukrainian children and their families affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, was presented during a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the first patients’ arrival.

José Ramón Machado Ventura, first vice president of the councils of State and Ministers, received the distinction from Dr. Julio Medina, director of the program in the city of Tarará.

During the ceremony, former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma announced the conferral on Fidel of the Order of Merit, First Class, and on President Raúl Castro, the Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, First Class.

Kuchma also presented distinctions to Minister of Public Health José Ramón Balaguer and other doctors, diplomats and collaborators who have contributed to the program’s success.

In closing remarks, Balaguer said that the treatment program for these children was an example of what a people without great material resources can do when it has the great spiritual wealth of having been educated in solidarity, unconditional dedication, and love for other peoples.

The minister noted that the years of the special period, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the intensification of the blockade could not put a dent in the Cuban people’s spirit of solidarity and humanity, and that Cuba continues to carry out the program according to the existing possibilities.

It was during those difficult years of the 1990s that more children benefited from the program, he said. Treatment was provided to more than 300 children with hematological illnesses, chiefly leukemia, and 136 with different types of tumors. Fourteen complicated heart operations were performed, as well as two kidney transplants, six bone marrow transplants, and others.

Balaguer affirmed that the victims of that catastrophe who have been treated in Cuba have also found consolation and love, and he praised the efforts of those who have worked over the last 20 years to provide excellent services – workers in healthcare, science, services, gastronomy, and culture, all to benefit these 25,457 people, 21,378 of them children, who will always carry in their hearts the indelible mark of friendship between the Ukrainian and Cuban peoples.

Declaration of the Ukrainian mothers

We, the mothers of the children affected by the Chernobyl disaster, and the International Chernobyl Fund, would like to address all people of goodwill in this world: be receptive to our words, because they come from deep within our hearts as mothers.

For a mother, the worst misfortune that can happen in life is the illness of her child. When in 1990, Cuba and the Comandante Fidel reached out to help the sick Ukrainian children, we could not but appreciate this great deed of the Cuban people, and we want to declare to the entire world that there is no action more humane with respect to sick children than the Ukrainian-Cuban program, Children of Chernobyl.

With all our hearts, we thank the immense Cuban people, their wise leaders Fidel Castro, who made this program a reality, and Raúl Castro, who has now taken over its leadership, for everything they have been able to do for the Ukrainian children affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe.

There are things in life that are not bought or sold with money: friendship, and mutual aid and support in difficult times, and this is what now firmly unites the Cuban and Ukrainian people.

We trust that the sincere and just voices of the Ukrainian mothers will be heard by the peoples of the world.

And we would like to state that there is no country freer than Cuba, that it is known throughout the world as the island of freedom, where never, under any circumstance, have human rights been violated.

We the Ukrainian mothers thank the people and the government of the Republic of Cuba with all our hearts for treating our children, and we hope that the black wings of Chernobyl disappear forever, and that the friendship between two great peoples lasts forever.

Viva Cuba! Viva Ukraine!

Translated by Granma International