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Vol. 80/No. 19 May 16, 2016
(In Review, special feature )
Book by Cuban 5 is powerful indictment of
capitalist ‘justice’
The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class:
“It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System. 135
pages. Pathfinder Press, 2016.
BY BETSEY STONE
OAKLAND, Calif. — “The book was awesome! Truly enlightening and
inspiring how the five Cubans were able to turn prison into a learning
experience and come out stronger!” Watani Stiner, a fighter for Black
rights who was framed up in the 1960s and recently released from San
Quentin, told me after reading The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives
Within the US Working Class.
The book, an interview by Socialist Workers Party leaders Mary-Alice
Waters and Róger Calero with five revolutionaries who spent 16 years in
prisons in the United States, is a powerful indictment of mass
incarceration in the U.S. As Stiner points out, it’s a book about
resistance, including the solidarity the Five extended to their fellow
prisoners and the support they received in return. And, above all, it
gives a picture of the values and human character that are the product
of the Cuban Revolution.
All of the Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio
Guerrero, Fernando González and René González — became revolutionaries
growing up in Cuba, where workers and peasants overthrew capitalist rule
in 1959 in a massive movement based on solidarity and internationalism.
They were framed up by the FBI in September 1998 for working to monitor
counterrevolutionary Cuban groups in Florida to prevent violent attacks
on Cuba. From that moment until December 2014, when the last three were
freed, the Five were subjected to many of the cruelties they describe in
the book.
A ‘microcosm’ of capitalist society
The U.S. prisons are a “microcosm” of the dog-eat-dog system of
capitalism, Hernández says in the interview. A place that fosters
violence, gangs and racism, where “the road to rehabilitation does not
exist.”
“The American system of justice” is “used by the US government to enable
a powerful minority to control a vast majority,” Labañino says. “A
person who is poor — Black, Latino, Native American, white — faces the
enormous savagery of what’s called American justice. It serves above all
to sustain a system that has no solution for the poor, present or future.”
The Five do not gloss over what Labañino calls the “brutal mentality” of
many of those they lived with, a product of the values that permeate
capitalist society as a whole. But the book is filled with examples of
acts of solidarity, help and respect the Five extended to their fellow
prisoners and the respect and support they received in return.
Hernández said when African-American prisoners learned about Cuba’s
support of liberation struggles in Africa, they would ask, “Were you
part of that?” When he told them he had fought in Angola against the
South African apartheid regime — as did Fernando González and René
González — they offered support.
Labañino says when he received the book Cuba and Angola, it caused a
sensation. Many prisoners “didn’t know Cuban volunteers had been in
Angola for sixteen years, defending its sovereignty against South
Africa. The system of disinformation in the United States erases
history,” he said. “Books by Malcolm X flew out of my hands.”
What’s possible with a revolution
In one chapter, the Five talk about Cubans they got to know in U.S.
jails, some who had also spent time behind bars in Cuba. There are less
material resources in Cuba, but prisoners there have access to
education, conjugal visits, passes to be with family, and women inmates
can stay with their newborn babies.
“I was inspired by what the Cuban Five say about incarceration in Cuba,”
Anita Wills told me. She is a fighter against police killings whose son
is in prison. “Prisons there are not about dehumanizing people. It shows
what’s possible with a revolution.”
“In Cuba a prisoner is another human being,” Labañino said. In the U.S.
prisoners are treated as the enemy, just as the cops see people as the
enemy. “If you don’t understand this,” he said, you won’t understand
“why the police act the way they did in Ferguson, Missouri, [in 2014].
Why there is no solution within that system.”
The book includes some 40 photos. It highlights facts showing the scope
of mass incarceration in the U.S., and explains why the Cuban government
opposes the death penalty, and why life sentences there are rare. The
Cuban Revolution has been “inspired always by a spirit of justice and
not vengeance,” says President Raúl Castro.
In the conduct of the Cuban Five, readers will find lessons of value for
any working-class fighter — examples of their courage, humor, dignity
and discipline, of how they held onto and shared their ideas while
respecting the views of those who disagreed.
Despite being separated for so many years in different prisons, each
acted in the same manner, leading a worldwide struggle to win their
freedom and emerging from prison stronger. How was this possible? It was
the Cuban Revolution itself, the political consciousness and values they
learned growing up.
“To spend seventeen months in the hole and sixteen years in prison and
create paintings that don’t contain a shred of hatred … that’s a product
of the way we were educated as revolutionaries,” Guerrero says in a talk
to students at the science and engineering university in Havana
reprinted in the book.
“Nothing that happened is about us as individuals,” he told the
students. “The standing we gained represents the resistance of our people.”
Their revolutionary convictions were strengthened by what they learned
from prisoners from El Salvador, Mexico and other countries about what
workers face today with the deepening capitalist economic crisis, a
crisis that has helped spawn a growth in the drug trade, violence and
repression.
“We came to know the problems of many places around the world,”
Hernández said. Thanks to “the empire’s publicity machine,” some people
think “capitalism is a house with two cars and a swimming pool. That
Haiti isn’t capitalism. Central America isn’t capitalism. The poor
neighborhoods of the United States aren’t capitalism. Capitalism is
whatever it suits them to show!”
The actions of these five representatives of the Cuban Revolution —
before, during and after their time within the U.S. working class —
offer proof that it’s possible to build a world where brutalities they
describe will not exist.
Related articles:
Millions rally in Cuba on May Day to defend revolution
DC event: Solidarity needed to lift US embargo of Cuba
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