By Arthur Shaw
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa criticized the unjust imprisonment of the Cuban Five, jailed for preventing terrorist attacks on Cuba from Miami, Florida.
Pres. Correa condemns the political imprisonment of the Cuban Five as an USA attack on human rights.
In his regular Saturday nationwide broadcast to the Ecuadorian people – this time from Pedro Maldonado in Pichincha province – Pres. Correa expressed his hope that this vile injustice in the USA against the Five will be reversed and the five anti-terrorist fighters and patriots returned their home in Cuba.
The Cuban Five are Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González. They were arrested September 12, 1998 and railroaded in rigged trial in an rabid anti-Cuban Miami court in 2000. In May 2009, the GOP-infested US Supreme Court refused to overturn the Kangaroo convictions of the Cuban Five, upon the urging of the Barack Obama regime.
“During the changing of the presidential guard ceremony, we were accompanied by a special guest, Irma Schewerert, a Cuban woman and mother of one of the Cuban heroes, who have been imprisoned in the United States for more than 11 years now,” Ecuadorian Pres. Rafael Correa said. “In real terms, this is an attack on human rights and hopefully this situation will soon be reversed. These Cubans are political prisoners. Political, yes! These ones really are political prisoners.”
“The Five were accused of espionage when what they were doing was preventing acts of sabotage mounted by a particular section of the ultra-right Cuban community in Miami. And instead of being congratulated for it, they were subjected to a questionable trial,” Correa noted.
Correa studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a Master of Science in Economics in May 1999, and later a PhD in Economics in October 2001.
Throwing the heroic Cuban Five into the US gulag is consistent with hypocritical protection and immunity that the bourgeois regime in the USA conferred on Luiz Posada and Orlando Bosch, two terrorists fiends who blew up Cuban-owned commercial airliner in mid-air in 1976, slaughtering all 73 people on board. The bourgeois regime in the USA shamelessly pardoned Orlando Bosch after the 1976 massacre and declined to extradite Luis Posada to Venezuela, the country where two pro-US imperialist psychopaths masterminded the plot to destroy the airliner and slaughter its passengers and crew.
In July 12, 1998 published interview with NY Times reporter Ann Louise Bardach, headlined A Bombers Tale, Posada boasted openly about some of the people he murdered and other acts of terrorism committed AFTER the 1976 attack on the Cuban airliner.
Still, the bourgeois regime and most of the bourgeois media in the USA say the Cuban Five should stay in US prisons because the US is anti-terrorist.
The Cuban Five worked to prevent a repetition of the 1973 bombing of the Cuban airliner that slaughtered so many innocent people.
How is preventing another massacre an act of terrorism on the part of the Cuban Five?
Again, how is protecting terrorists who now reside comfortably in Miami anti-terrorist on the part of the US regime?
