Thursday, APRIL 26
1:40 pm ≈ 2:40 pm
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
• CUNY
524 West 59 Street, Room L2.84
Between 10th & 11th Avenue, New York, NY
In Florida in 1998, five Cuban men were arrested and eventually tried on
trumped-up charges of conspiracy to commit espionage, and given sentences
ranging from 15 years to 2 live terms plus 15 years.
Millions of supporters, including the National Lawyers Guild, Amnesty
International, many nobel laureates, Danny Glover, Alice Walker, and others,
have called for their freedom. Still, the U.S. courts repeatedly ignores U.S.
and international laws, keeps them imprisoned, and the State Dept. repeatedly
denies family members the right to visit them, yet another human rights
violation. What have these men done to earn this
wrath?
Right-wing Cuban exile organizations have for decades carried out numerous
terrorist actions that have claimed 3,500 Cuban lives. They could operate with
impunity from U.S. soil because their goal, the overthrow of the Cuban
Revolution, coincides with U.S. foreign policy. Dating back to the failed 1961
Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA and other U.S. agencies have had a long history
of cooperating to meet this common goal.
During the 1990s, a common strategy was to carry out bombings of the Cuban
tourist industry, endangering both Cubans and foreign visitors. The Five
monitored these exile groups and reported back to Cuban authorities. Cuba
presented their collected evidence to the U.S. government, including the FBI,
insisting they must enforce their own laws and stop these terrorist
organizations.
- Why then did the FBI arrest, not the terrorists, but those who
monitored them?
- How could they be charged and tried for conspiracy to commit
espionage
if they were not infiltrating government agencies?
- How could they possibly have had a fair trial in Miami-a city so
dominated by forces hostile to the Cuban government that it would not even host
the Latin Grammys if it included Cuban artists?
- Did the journalists in the local media accept payments from
government sources while covering the story?
- Why do the mainstream media elsewhere in the country
consistently choose to ignore the story?
- Why has the government repeatedly denied visas to wives and family
members to visit them in prison, as allowed even by U.S. prison rules?
- What does their case reveal about the U.S.'s treatment
of other political prisoners?
Discuss these and other issues with Ramsey Clark, former
U.S. Attorney General from 1967 to 1969 under President Johnson. Since leaving
public office Clark has led many human rights campaigns, including opposition
to the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya and the War on Terror. He is an international law attorney, human rights
advocate and founder of the International Action Center, an activist
organization committed to building broad-based grassroots coalitions to oppose
U.S. wars abroad while fighting against racism and economic exploitation of
workers here at home. He has dared to legally represent the most difficult
cases, including death penalty cases in Texas, Native American political
prisoner Leonard Peltier, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
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For more info: lbarrios@jjay.cuny.edu
Organized by: Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies-
John Jay College of Criminal Justice; International Action Center;
The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization - IFCO.
Support the 5 Days for the Cuban 5 in Washington, DC, April
17-21.
See www.theCuban5.org for details.
$5 R/T bus tickets available for NY area residents to attend protest at White
House on April 21.
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