Over the years, the government and people of Cuba have assisted thousands of Barbadians through the Operation Milagro eye care programme and the granting of scholarships to Barbadian students and the provision of Cuban coaches in a wide variety of sporting disciplines.
Now, the people of Cuba need our solidarity and support in the tragic case of the Cuban Five – fighters against terrorism who have been unjustly imprisoned in the United States for the past 14 years.
It was on September 12, 1998 that a team of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officers swooped down on five Cuban men who were resident in the city of Miami, arrested and charged them with “espionage” and other related criminal charges.
The men were in Miami for the sole purpose of investigating the several anti-Cuba terrorist organizations based in that city, and forestalling any future terrorist attacks on their nearby Cuban homeland.
And what was so ironic about the actions of the FBI is that, just a few months earlier, Cuba’s Ministry of Home Affairs had provided the FBI with dossiers of information collected by the Cuban Five on acts of violence that were being planned in Miami by such Cuban-American terrorist organizations as Alpha 66 and the Cuban Freedom Council.
Ironically, it was this honest and constructive overture that the American authorities pounced upon and used as a springboard to launch arrests – not against the Miami-based terrorism – but against the five Cuban patriots who had helped to ferret out the information.
And so, the Cuban Five put on trial in Miami were subjected to a biased and deeply flawed political trial, and were unjustly convicted and sentenced to ridiculously long sentences ranging from fifteen years to life in prison.
But who exactly are these five heroes? Well, their names are Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo, Ramon Labanino Salazar, Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, Fernando Gonzalez Llort and Rene Gonzalez Sherweret. And although we refer to them as the Cuban Five, two of them are actually United States citizens – born in the United States to Cuban parents.
Needless-to-say, the presence and activities of the Cuban Five posed absolutely no threat to the government and peoples of the United States. Their sole purpose was to discover and foil the type of terrorist attacks that had been inflicted on Cuba over the years, such as the 1976 blowing up of a Cubana airline over Barbados, the many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the 1997 bombings of six major hotels in Cuba.
The People’s Empowerment Party is urging all Barbadians and other Caribbean people to join in the international campaign to free the Cuban Five. We Barbadians witnessed the horrors of terrorism first hand back in 1976, and we therefore know what the heroic Cuban Five were fighting so desperately hard to prevent.
To date, such Barbadian organizations as the Clement Payne Movement and the Barbados-Cuba Friendship Society have made major efforts to help the cause, and our leading artiste Anthony Gabby Carter has contributed a stirring musical anthem entitled Free Them.
• The PEP column represents the views of the People’s Empowerment Party.
