René González, one
of the five men known as the Cuban Five, today will walk out of
Federal Prison in Marianna, Florida. He will walk out with his head
held high after more than 13 years in prison, having served his
utterly unjust sentence with complete dignity. He has been a model
prisoner, even while suffering the indignity of being inhumanely
deprived visits from his wife for more than 11 years.
Unable
to afford René even the small victory of his release, however, the
U.S. government insists on punishing him and his family even more by
requiring him to remain in Florida for the three years of his parole,
even though René has no family in Florida and his
life will be in danger from the very terrorist groups he helped to
infiltrate.
That danger cannot be underestimated. Florida
Congressperson Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was quoted in the Miami
Herald
on Monday calling René an “enemy of America” with
“American blood on his hands.” These utterly false charges
are a clear incitement to violence, and demonstrate all too clearly
the necessity of allowing René to return immediately to Cuba.
The very fact that a man who the government called a “spy”
and a “threat to national security” is required to remain
in the United States, rather than being immediately deported,
demonstrates quite clearly what the prosecution and persecution is
all about.
The
government never thought for one minute that René and his brothers
were “spies” or a “threat to national security”;
if they did, they would be putting René on the first plane back to
Cuba.
Instead, the punishment meted out to René and his brothers was all
about protecting the terrorists who serve the interests of the U.S.
government by trying to destabilize the Cuban government and overturn
the Cuban Revolution.
Cuba has suffered the scourge of
terrorism not just since Sept. 11, 2001, but for more than 50 years.
A scourge that over those years has killed at least 3,478 people,
most of them Cuban but also many others including 11 Guyanese and
five North Koreans killed in the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines
Flight 455 and an Italian (Fabio di Celmo) killed in a hotel bombing
in 1997. Thousands more have been seriously injured by the
terrorists.
René
and his brothers—Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González, Antonio
Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino—can be proud that they came to the
United States, unarmed and risking their lives, to fight that scourge
by infiltrating the right-wing terrorist groups based in Miami who
were responsible for that terrorism, and exposing their ongoing
plots.
The U.S. government helped organize, finance, and direct the actions
of those terrorist groups from the beginning, and protected them from
the consequences of their actions. It continued that collaboration
and protection by arresting René and the others, and continues that
protection with the unjust punishment of René and the other four.
That same government continues to this day to resist
Venezuela’s valid extradition request for the most notorious
terrorist of them all, Luis Posada Carriles, responsible not only the
1976 plane bombing which took the lives of 73 people, but also for
the torture of numerous Venezuelans when he was part of the secret
police in that country.
If
the U.S. government wants to continue to claim it is engaged in a
“war on terror,” it can help back up that claim with some
very simple actions. Allow René González to return to Cuba
immediately, free the remaining members of the Cuban Five and allow
them to return to Cuba as well, extradite Luis Posada Carriles to
Venezuela, and arrest the other known terrorists in Miami. Until
those acts have been performed, any claims by the U.S. government of
“fighting terrorism” will continue to ring hollow.
The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five has an online
petition to President Obama to allow René González to return to
Cuba, which has been signed by people across the United States and
from around the world. We urge all people of conscience the world
over to add their voices to this demand at:
http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-the-persecution-of-ren-gonzlez-let-him-return-to-cuba
