WASHINGTON POST

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/06/06/rapping-and-rallying-for-the-cuban-five/?wp_login_redirect=0

By David Montgomery June 6

Right on time — and by pure coincidence — in this week of fireworks over prisoner swaps, a couple hundred artists and activists from 31 countries are in town to push for the release of Cuban nationals convicted of spying in Miami in 2001.
They’re known as the Cuban Five, even though only three remain in prison, and winning their freedom is a national cause celebre for Cubans and an emotional crusade many progressives in this country. Actor Danny Glover had tears in his eyes as he addressed the audience at Calvary Baptist Church in Washington’s Chinatown, one of several locations where events are taking place through early next week.

“That becomes our mission as we leave here,” said Glover, wearing a ball cap that said “Cuba.” “We have to leave understanding that we have to do more, we have to talk more, we have to engage more.”

A five-day agenda packed with panels of lawyers and policy experts is leavened with politically-minded entertainment and Cuban culture. The unfinished final documentary by the late Washington filmmaker Saul Landau was to be screened at the church Friday afternoon. Titled “Cuba Sexual Revolution,” it was what Landau was working on last year as he battled cancer after a career exploring Cuba in films such as the intimate portrait, “Fidel” (1971) — which included the scene where Castro removes his olive green comandante shirt to play baseball in a muddy pueblo, and whiffs several times at the plate — and “Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?” (2010). For the new work, Landau interviewed Mariela Castro, a champion of LGBT rights in Cuba and director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education. She is the daughter of President Raúl Castro.

The activist rap duo Dead Prez was to perform Friday night with local political musicians at the Columbia Heights Education Campus. They’re announcing a new compilation album called “Battle Cry for Cuba and Zimbabwe.”
Might be an appropriate time for Dead Prez to reprise an old tune, “Globalization (Scene of the Crime)”:

A rally in front of the White House is set for Saturday afternoon, and Monday is lobby day on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, the gathered artists and activists are all trying to parse what the trade of captive soldier Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban prisoners might mean for the Cubans in prison. Could the remaining three be traded for Alan Gross, the U.S. contractor from Potomac who has has been jailed in Cuba since 2009? He was charged with “actions against the integrity of the state” for distributing communications equipment to the Jewish community in Cuba. Stephen Kimber, author of a recent book on the Cuban Five, as well as other commentators, said the Bergdahl trade showed that such deals are possible.

But then, does the ensuing backlash against the Bergdahl trade make such a swap less viable? At the State Department, a spokeswoman told reporters the administration’s position against a trade for the Cubans has not changed.

The Cuban Five were convicted in 2001 for passing non-classified material to the Cuban government. In addition, one of them, Gerardo Hernández, was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the 1996 Cuban shoot-down of unarmed civilian planes piloted by members of the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue. Hernández was sentenced to life. Antonio Guerrero and Ramón Labañino also remain in prison. Fernando González and René González have been released after serving most or all of their sentences.

At various times during the appeals process, at least one federal judge questioned whether the evidence against Hernández was compelling, and whether the five received a fair trial in Miami in the wake of the furor over Elián González, the refugee boy who was rescued from the sea and returned to his father in Cuba. The Cuban government said the agents were trying to uncover terrorist plots against Cuba.

José Ramón Cabañas, Chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, addresses artists and activists gathered in Washington this week to press for the release of the remaining three of the Cuban Five prisoners. (Bill Hackwell).

Martin Garbus, a lawyer for one of the Cubans, unveiled his latest argument in favor of setting aside the verdict. Ever since it was revealed several years ago that some reporters in Miami who wrote or broadcast about the case were also being paid by the U.S. government, Garbus said he has been collecting information on the extent of the government payments. Late last year, he filed papers in federal court in Florida alleging that the payments fostered coverage that biased the jury against rendering a fair verdict.

Don’t under-estimate how much the Cuban Five mean to Cubans, said José Ramón Cabañas, chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington.

“It’s not an elite subject, an official thing. It’s something that comes from the very bottom of our society,” Cabañas said in an interview. “Those are our heroes. We shared the information they gathered with your authorities. Why is there a reason to have them here in prison?”

HAVANA, Cuba, Jun 7 (acn) A group of 100 Venezuelan medical doctors will soon travel to Cuba to take different specialties as part of the efforts being made by the Venezuelan government to improve the country’s public health service, sources with the Venezuelan Health Ministry said in Caracas.

The doctors will take specialties, such as Intensive Medicine, Pediatrics, Pathologic Anatomy, Anesthesiology, Hematology, Oncology and others.

In a meeting with the doctors, the national coordinator of the community doctors program in Venezuela, Oscar Feo, stressed the recent setting up of the Medical University on the initiative of President Nicolas Maduro. The official said that the new school will articulate integral medicine as a regular course with other postgraduate courses.

The scholarships for the Venezuelan doctors are part of the Cuba-Venezuela Accord, signed in 2000 by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

HAVANA, Cuba, Jun 7 (acn) Students from 20 nations, who are taking difference courses in the Eastern Cuban province of Camaguey, held an evening sesión to express their support of the cause of the Cuban antiterrorist fighters held in US jails.

In the context of an ongoing international campaign and the 3rd Five for the Five action in Washington D.C. claiming the freedom of Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernandez and Ramon Labanino, the boarding students in Cuba also demanded Washington to put down its hostile policy against the island.

Haitian Luis Vidal called peace-loving people around the world to urge Washington to lift the over-50-year economic blockade of Cuba and to free the three anti-terrorists who were imprisoned in 1998 after they, along Rene Gonzalez and Fernando Gonzalez, monitored violent organizations that planned terrorist actions against the people of Cuba.

The president of the Youth Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five in the eastern province, Jorge Belisario, said that the return to Cuba of the three men can only be achieved with the solidarity of the people of the world and particularly with the support of the US people.

During the evening session, the students stressed the example given by the mothers and relatives of the five antiterrorist fighters, who have suffered the absence of their beloved ones but have always expressed their optimism and spirit of struggle.

Friday, June 20, 2014 – 5 PM
Lake Shore Hotel, 5:00 PM
4900 S. Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60615

Race to Revolution
The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow
by Gerald Horne
“Path-breaking … Their story is our story, and thanks to Horne, we can now study its flow in a single, and profound, narrative.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
429 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-58367-445-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-58367-446-8
June 2014
http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb4451/

The histories of Cuba and the United States are tightly intertwined and have been for at least two centuries. In Race to Revolution, historian Gerald Horne examines a critical relationship between the two countries by tracing out the typically overlooked interconnections among slavery, Jim Crow, and revolution. Slavery was central to the economic and political trajectories of Cuba and the United States, both in terms of each nation’s internal political and economic development and in the interactions between the small Caribbean island and the Colossus of the North.

Horne draws a direct link between the black experiences in two very different countries and follows that connection through changing periods of resistance and revolutionary upheaval. Black Cubans were crucial to Cuba’s initial independence, and the relative freedom they achieved helped bring down Jim Crow in the United States, reinforcing radical politics within the black communities of both nations. This in turn helped to create the conditions that gave rise to the Cuban Revolution which, on New Years’ Day in 1959, shook the United States to its core.

Based on extensive research in Havana, Madrid, London, and throughout the U.S., Race to Revolution delves deep into the historical record, bringing to life the experiences of slaves and slave traders, abolitionists and sailors, politicians and poor farmers. It illuminates the complex web of interaction and influence that shaped the lives of many generations as they struggled over questions of race, property, and political power in both Cuba and the United States.

In his path-breaking book, Gerald Horne reveals how the histories of Cuba and the United States, from the slave trade to Jim Crow and the Cold War, have always been closer and more turbulent than the ninety miles separating them across the Straits of Florida. Indeed, one cannot possibly understand the journey from bondage to freedom in America without wrestling with its consequences for the people of African descent in Cuba. Their story is our story, and thanks to Horne, we can now study its flow in a single, and profound, narrative.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

Gerald Horne is one of our most original historians.
—Ishmael Reed, John D. MacArthur Fellow

Gerald Horne’s epic history will help many readers understand the special relationship between slavery, African Americans, and Cuba over the centuries. Horne continues in the deep tradition of Frederick Douglass, who described Cuba as ‘the great western slave mart of the world.’ Horne is in the forefront of historians laboring to revise the entire story of the Americas until the broken pieces are mended.
—Tom Hayden, author, Inspiring Participatory Democracy

Horne offers new insights and thoughtful analysis of the comparative and at time complementary circumstances of slavery and racial animus in Cuba and the United States, and in the process reveals a new dimension to the complexities of the Cuba-U.S. problematic. Race to Revolution is a very much welcome and important contribution to the scholarship on the workings of trans-national systems.
—Louis A. Pérez, Jr., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Gerald Horne is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of African-American History at the University of Houston. He is the author of more than two dozen books, including The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Negro Comrades of the Crown, Mau Mau in Harlem?, From the Barrel of a Gun, and Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950.

Monthly Review Foundation, 146 W. 29th Street, Suite 6W, New York, NY 10001
Tel: (212) 691-2555; Outside of NY: (1-800) 670-9499; Fax: (212) 727-3676

All Material copyright © 2014 Monthly Review Press. [login]

http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb4451/
Date: Jun 8, 2014 10:35 AM
The Counter-Revolution of 1776:
Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
(Hardcover)
By Gerald Horne
$48.75
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

Description
________________________________________
The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then residing in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with London.

In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne complements his earlier celebrated Negro Comrades of the Crown, by showing that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt.

In the prelude to 1776, more and more Africans were joining the British military, and anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain. And in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were chasing Europeans to the mainland. Unlike their counterparts in London, the European colonists overwhelmingly associated enslaved Africans with subversion and hostility to the status quo.

For European colonists, the major threat to security in North America was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. And as 1776 approached, London-imposed abolition throughout the colonies was a very real and threatening possibility–a possibility the founding fathers feared could bring the slave rebellions of Jamaica and Antigua to the thirteen colonies. To forestall it, they went to war.

The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in large part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their liberty to enslave others–and which today takes the form of a racialized conservatism and a persistent racism targeting the descendants of the enslaved. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 drives us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.

The perceived importance of Cuba to the security of the mainland did not arise initially in 1959 and thereafter. Before 1776 Spanish Cuba was the launching pad for repeated attacks on Georgia and the Carolinas, frequently with African troops at the tip of the spear, which terrified settlers. This led directly to the so-called Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which–inter alia–was designed to eradicate this threat by ousting the Spanish from Florida and Cuba.

By 1762, this goal had been attained though through negotiations Madrid was able to retain Cuba (while Britain occupied Florida). With the threat from Cuba dissipated, the mainland settlers then focused intently on ousting London–a goal that accelerated in importance when in 1772 the British Empire seemed to be moving toward abolition of slavery, which would have jeopardized the fortunes of leading settlers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and attorneys for slaveholders, e.g. John Adams.

The successful revolt against British rule leading to the formation of the USA–a process aided immeasurably by Madrid–then led to the new republic ousting Britain from leadership of the African Slave Trade: thus, as early as the 1790s and continuing until 1865, U.S. nationals were in the leadership of bringing enslaved Africans to Cuba–a period when the slave population of the island increased exponentially.

Unfortunately, many among the U.S. left still cling to the fairy tale that the formation of the U.S., which led to the first apartheid state was a great leap forward for humanity–though demonstrably this was hardly the case for those who happened to be of African descent (which may shed light on why this left’s record in recruiting of the most stalwart progressive force in the U.S., i.e. African-Americans, has been far below par).

Product DetailsISBN-10: 1479893404
ISBN-13: 9781479893409
Published: New York University Press
Pages: 363
Language: English

Usually Ships in 1-5 days

• Hardcover (3/2014): $48.75

http://www.esowonbookstore.com/book/9781479893409

STATEMENT OF THE CC CPRF

STAND-STILL OF RUSSIA IS DEADLY DANGEROUS!

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation expresses its deep indignation at the events in Ukraine. Bandera-fascist junta which seized the power in Kiev goes on with its bloody punitive action against civilians. Security agencies under Kiev’s control subject residential areas, hospitals, schools and kindergartens to artillery attacks and aviation raids in defiance of mass victims among civil population. These actions have all the indications of open terror and ethnic cleansing.

CC CPRF believes that the so-called election of Mr. Pororshenko as the president doesn’t have anything to do with the idea of “free and fair elections”. Moreover, as the developments persuade us, his coming to power resulted in enlarging the punitive operation and its turning into a real slaughter. The footage of the bloody air raid in the centre of Lugansk, filmed by the eye-witnesses is really shocking. This act of terror equals to barbarous bombardments of Spanish Guernica, British Coventry and Soviet Stalingrad. This is the true face of fascism.

The war crimes that are being committed have no time limitation for prosecution. They must become the subject for consideration by a special tribunal. Punishment is inevitable for those who gave the criminal orders: Turchinov, Yatsenjuk, Avakov, Poroshenko. Those who fulfill their orders will not avoid punishment as well.

CC CPRF attracts attention to the fact that the most atrocious accidents coincide in time with the visits to Ukraine of major US politicians. In our opinion this is yet another evidence that this military reckless scheme of the Kiev junta was conceived by the Washington administration and is being managed by it. These steps by the American politicians must be severely condemned at the international level.

The possibility that this conflict will spread not only into the neighboring regions of Ukraine, but also into the bordering areas of Russia is quite real. It is our country that this war is aimed at. This war is fratricidal and destructive for the foundations of Russian statehood. The situation requires immediate reaction on the part of the president and the government of Russia.

CC CPRF stands for an immediate session of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. A number of measures must be elaborated without delay on how to stop conflict spreading and bring the situation in Ukraine to normal. Under present circumstances the CC CPRF considers it to be necessary:

– to recognize officially the Donetsk and the Lugansk People’s Republics
– to secure a non-flying zone over the territory of these republics aiming at putting an end to death and destruction
– to arrange a humanitarian corridor for supplying people of the Donetsk and the Lugansk People’s Republics with living essentials and for evacuating the victims
– to take measures to help refugees from Ukraine
– to support volunteers who would like to help the people of Ukraine in the struggle against bandera-fascist junta
– in case of further enlargement of the punitive operation against the citizens of the Donetsk and the Lugansk People’s Republics to demand that the president of the Russian Federation should exercise the right given to him by the Federation Council to use armed forces for the protection of the life and freedom of the civilians.

Stand-still is becoming deadly dangerous!

Gennady Zyuganov
Chairman of the CC CPRF

René González, uno de los Cinco luchadores antiterroristas cubanos presos injustamente en cárceles norteamericanas y que hoy se encuentra en libertad, manda un mensaje de agradecimiento a todas aquellas personas que apoyan su causa y que continúan pidiendo que se liberen a sus tres compañeros, aún encarcelados.

Published on Jun 6, 2014

Fernando González, uno de los Cinco luchadores antiterroristas cubanos presos injustamente en cárceles norteamericanas y que hoy se encuentra en libertad, manda un mensaje de agradecimiento a todas aquellas personas que apoyan su causa y que continúan pidiendo que se liberen a sus tres compañeros, aún encarcelados.