[antiwar-van] TODAY! Monthly Protest to Free the 5 Cuban Heroes!

[Tamara Hansen]

*La versión en Español sigue la versión en Inglés*


FREE THE 5 CUBAN HEROES NOW!

MARKING 7 YEARS OF MONTHLY PROTEST ACTIONS IN VANCOUVER!

PROTESTING THE 5th OF EACH MONTH FOR THE CUBAN 5!

JANUARY 5th, SIMULTANEOUS TWEETS FOR THE CUBAN 5

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Please join the Free the Cuban 5 Committee-Vancouver for our 86th
monthly picket action to demand:
>>>FREE THE 5 CUBAN HEROES NOW!
>>>RELEASE ANTONIO, FERNANDO, RAMON & GERARDO FROM U.S. PRISONS NOW!
>>>LET RENÉ GONZÁLEZ RETURN TO CUBA NOW!
>>>GRANT VISAS TO OLGA SALANUEVA & ADRIANA PEREZ, WIVES OF THE CUBAN 5, NOW!

SATURDAY
January 5, 2013
2pm
Vancouver Art Gallery (Downtown, Vancouver)
Robson St. @ Hornby St.

To see the poster for the protest action please visit:
http://www.freethe5vancouver.ca/posters/2013/130105-free-the-cuban-5-picket.pdf

To join the event on Facebook please visit:
http://www.facebook.com/events/180051818803449/

Follow us on Twitter: @Freethe5_Van

Since December, 2005, the Free the Cuban 5 Committee-Vancouver has
been organizing monthly and at times, more than monthly protest
actions demanding the freedom of the 5 Cuban Heroes from U.S. prisons.
Throughout these 7 years, thousands of people from diverse backgrounds
and all walks of life have gotten involved in the actions and many
more exposed to the case of the Cuban 5 from our consistent public
actions downtown in front of the U.S. Consulate and through dozens of
public forums, cultural nights, film showings, petition stops,
rallies, vigils and much more.

The Free the Cuban 5 Committee – Vancouver will also be participating
in the “Simultaneous Tweets for the Cuban 5” action called by the
International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban 5 for January
5th. Around the world people will be tweeting demanding the U.S.
government free the Cuban 5, and we encourage all of our supporters to
participate as well. For full information on this action, as well as a
letter to President Obama from Canadian journalist and author Stephen
Kimber, read the International Committee’s announcement below.

Support for the freedom of the Cuban 5 has grown in Vancouver, Canada
as it has around the world. A new year has begun. Let’s together make
2013 a year to re-double our efforts around the world demanding:

FREE THE CUBAN 5 NOW!

We invite you to join us to be part of this great struggle for human
rights of 5 Cuban Heroes.

Organized by:
Free the Cuban 5 Committee-Vancouver
604-719-6947 | freethe5vancouver at gmail.com
http://www.freethe5vancouver.ca/
Follow us on Twitter: @Freethe5_Van

For more information:

http://www.freethe5vancouver.ca/
http://www.antiterroristas.cu/
http://www.freethefive.org/
http://www.thecuban5.org/


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International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban 5
January 5th, Simultaneous Tweets for the Cuban 5,

Canadian Author and Journalist Stephen Kimber Sends a Letter to Obama
Let's start 2013 with simultaneous Tweets for the Cuban 5!

THIS SATURDAY JANUARY 5TH, SEND MESSAGES TO OBAMA VIA TWITTER: @BarackObama

Main labels:
#ObamaFreethe5Now!
#ObamaFreetheFiveNow!
#ObamaGivemeFive
#ObamaHumanitarianGestureforthe5

Follow us on twitter: @thecuban5; @Madresdelos5

Canadian Journalist and Author Stephen Kimber Sends a Letter to President Obama

This month Stephen Kimber joins the international campaign "The 5th of
each month for the Cuban 5" by sending a letter to President Obama
asking for their freedom.

Stephen Kimber is a journalist and Professor of Journalism at the
University of King's College in Halifax, Canada. He is the author of
one novel and seven nonfiction books. His latest book, What Lies
Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, will be published
in 2013.


Dear President Obama,

This is my first ever letter to an American president. That's not just
because I'm not an American citizen. I'm also a journalist, and
journalists are not in the habit of writing letters to heads of
governments.

But having spent the past three years researching the case of the
Cuban Five, I believe I have an obligation to write to you.

The fact is American journalism hasn't done a very good job of
explaining to the American public the case of the five Cuban
intelligence agents who have been incarcerated in the U.S. since 1998.
As a result, your administration has mostly managed to avoid dealing
with the issue at all or, when forced to comment, responding with the
tired, rote rhetoric of the Cold War era.

But the case of the Cuban Five has recently been brought back into the
public spotlight because of Alan Gross, the USAID subcontractor
currently serving a 15-year jail term in Cuba for bringing satellite
communication equipment into that country.

The media reporting of his case has been equally problematic, mostly
parroting your own State Department line that Gross is a
"humanitarian" who was arrested while trying to help Havana's tiny
Jewish community communicate with the outside world, and is now being
held "hostage" by Havana.

You know that's not true. So, of course, should the media. After all,
it was Desmond Butler, a foreign affairs reporter for the Associated
Press-a news agency subscribed to by most American media and unlikely
ever to be mistaken for a tool of the Cuban regime-who documented the
facts of the case.

Alan Gross was "paid a half-million dollars" by USAID, your
government's "democracy promoting" agency, to smuggle sophisticated
communications equipment into Cuba. That technology included Internet
satellite phones capable of avoiding detection and spy-quality SIM
cards "most frequently" used by the Defense Department and the CIA.

The goal of all of this was not to assist Cuba's Jewish community
communicate, as your government has insisted (the Jewish community
already had Internet connectivity) but to promote regime change-to
overthrow the government of Cuba.

Gross's own reports make clear he knew he was engaged in "very risky
business" and that discovery of what he was up to "will be
catastrophic."

That said, Alan Gross's family and friends, not surprisingly, want him freed.

Just as the Cubans want the Five-who are considered national heroes in
their homeland-freed.

Your government's unblinking response has been that there is simply
"no equivalence." The Cubans were trained intelligence agents
convicted of trying to steal military secrets and conspiracy to murder
four innocent civilians killed in the shootdown of two unarmed
Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in 1996. By contrast, the American
argument goes, Alan Gross was just a humanitarian do-gooder.

We now know Alan Gross was much more than that.

But it is equally true the Cuban Five are much less than the murderous
danger to American security the media and your government has
portrayed.

I have read the 20,000-plus pages of the transcript of their trial and
examined the thousands of additional pages of documents prosecutors
entered into evidence to try to convict them.

I won't try to whitewash the case against them. They were trained
intelligence agents, and some of them used false identities to enter
the United States. Part of the mission of some of them was to gather
military information.

Their primary military mission, however, was not to look for
information that could be used to attack the United States
(forgetting, for the moment, the ludicrousness of the idea of tiny
Cuba launching a military attack against the might U.S.).

The Cuban Five posed no military or security threat to the United
States. Don't believe me. Ask retired U.S. Lieutenant General James R.
Clapper, your own Director of National Intelligence. When you
appointed him in 2010, you said he possessed "a quality that I value
in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know
even if it's not what we want to hear."

You should hear then what General Clapper had to say about the Cuban
Five. In 2001, as Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence
Agency, Clapper testified at the trial of the Five. He was asked
specifically whether he would, "with your experience in intelligence
matters, describe Cuba as a military threat to the United States?" His
answer: "Absolutely not. Cuba does not represent a threat." He also
testified he found no evidence to suggest members of the Five were
"trying to obtain secret information."

The real military goal of the Five was to protect Cuba from possible
American attack. That such an attack was possible is beyond dispute.
Consider-as the Cubans undoubtedly did-Grenada (1983), Panama (1989)
and Haiti (1994).

Cuba's unarmed agents were essentially canaries in a foreign coal
mine, using their trained eyes and ears to detect signals of possible
imminent attack. When you think about it, that's exactly what your
American satellites, drones and, yes, human agents do in countries
where you perceive a threat to American security from hostile
governments-or terrorist elements.

That, in fact, was the real purpose behind Cuba sending its agents to
Florida-to infiltrate and report back on the activities of terrorist
anti-Castro exile groups who were actively plotting and often carrying
out deadly attacks against Cuba from the safe sanctuary of Florida.

I don't need to tell you that such attacks are illegal under the U.S.
Neutrality Act, but perhaps it is worth reminding you that American
authorities have rarely arrested anyone in connection with such plots
and that Florida juries have even more rarely convicted anyone accused
of any crime against Cuba.

I'll come back to that.

Perhaps the most significant-and seemingly rational-rationale your
government has offered for refusing to consider a humanitarian swap of
the Five for Alan Gross is the reality that one of the Five was
convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the
shootdown of those Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996.

One can argue-I do-that the Cuban government should not have
authorized its jets to shoot down those aircraft. Despite the
Brothers' well documented ongoing provocations and illegal violations
of Cuban airspace-which, by the way, both the FAA and the Clinton
administration considered illegal and provocative, and attempted to
stop-I continue to believe there were other, better options for the
Cuban government than bringing down the planes.

But that is beside the point.

The only important issue here is whether any of those five agents had
any control over, or played any role in the decision to shoot the
planes down. Having read the trial transcript and examined the
evidence presented during their trial, my conclusion is not only that
there is no compelling link between any of the Five and the shootdown
but that, in fact, the evidence leads to the opposite conclusion.

Cuban State Security is incredibly compartmentalized and information
about such a significant attack would have only been communicated on a
need-to-know basis. There was no need for low-level Florida field
agents to know anything about what Havana's military was actually
planning, and there is no evidence they did.

But, you may counter, the Five were convicted by a Miami jury who
heard all the evidence.

Let's consider that.

I don't have to tell you about the pervasive power and influence in
Miami of right-wing Cuban exile groups. After two presidential
campaigns, you know that better than anyone.

But let's consider three other points when we imagine the chances that
a Miami jury could impartially judge the actions of acknowledged Cuban
agents.

In the lead-up to the trial of the Five-which took place in the
aftermath of the emotionally charged Elian González affair-Miami's
media was filled to bursting with even more-frenzied-than-usual
anti-Cuban rhetoric. We now know that at least some of that was
orchestrated by journalists who were also being secretly paid by the
U.S. Government's own Broadcasting Board of Governors. When those
clandestine payments were first revealed in 2006, the Miami Herald-to
its credit-fired its bought-and-paid-for journalists for their
egregious violations of journalistic ethics. But by then the damage
had been done.

Consider as well the double standard of justice that was common in
cases involving Cuba. There was another criminal case that took place
around the same time as the arrest of the Cuban Five. The FBI had
charged a group of anti-Castro Miami exiles, who had been arrested
aboard a vessel off Puerto Rico, with plotting to assassinate Fidel
Castro. Defense lawyers tried to get the trial moved to Miami. Federal
prosecutors objected on the grounds that their case against the men
would not get a fair hearing from a jury in Miami. Less than a year
later, however, federal prosecutors objected again when the Five's
defense lawyers applied to have the trial moved out of Miami. Did they
really believe Miami juries they'd claimed were too sympathetic to
anti-Cuban exiles would suddenly be able to fairly adjudicate a case
involving pro-Cuban agents?

Even more to the point, prosecutors in the Cuban Five case-just before
the jury was to begin its deliberations- asked an appeal court to
allow them to drop the charge of conspiracy to commit murder because
they didn't believe the evidence they'd presented could lead to a
conviction.

Although the appeal court rejected their plea, the prosecutors needn't
have worried. After a seven-month trial, the Miami jury took just a
few days to find the Five guilty on all counts, including conspiracy
to commit murder.

I'd simply ask you to instruct your own lawyers to review the trial
transcript and examine the evidence linking the Five to the
shootdown-and report back to you on what they find.

It may be sobering.

You already know that Amnesty International has raised "doubts about
the fairness and impartiality of the trial [of the Five]... the
strength of the evidence to support the conspiracy to murder
conviction... and whether the circumstances of the pre-trial detention
of the five men, in which they had limited access to their attorneys
and to documents, may have undermined their right to defense."

You will know as well that the United Nations' Human Rights
Commission's Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, after examining
the evidence, "requested the U.S. government to adopt the necessary
steps to remedy the situation."

You may point out-rightly-that the United Nations Working Group more
recently determined that Alan Gross's detention was also "arbitrary,"
that the Cuban court did not act in an "independent and impartial
manner" and called on Havana to "order [Gross's] immediate release."

Even if we accept the findings of the UN report, where does it leave
us? Can two wrongs make a right?

The reality is that neither Alan Gross nor the Cuban Five should be
languishing in prison. They are all, in the end, victims of the failed
50-plus-year history of American policy toward Cuba.

It is time to end the injustice-and, frankly, the stupidity-of a
policy that hasn't, and doesn't serve the interest of either country.
Or the world.

As you gear up for your inauguration and the unique opportunity a
second-term American president has to create an historic legacy, I
would urge you to reconsider the case of the Cuban Five.

You should use the occasion to grant executive clemency for the Five,
allowing them to return home to Cuba. The Cubans have already
indicated they would be prepared to reciprocate by freeing Alan Gross
to return to his family in the United States.

Such a swap would not only represent a significant and long overdue
humanitarian gesture by both governments but it would also signal an
opportunity to finally restart relations between the United States and
Havana on the basis of mutual respect and understanding.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Stephen Kimber


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¡LIBEREN A LOS CINCO HÉROES AHORA!

¡MARCANDO 7 AÑOS DE ACCIONES DE PROTESTA MENSUALES EN VANCOUVER!

¡PROTESTANDO EL DÍA 5 DE CADA MES POR LOS CINCO CUBANOS!

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Por favour, únanse al Comité de Vancouver por la Liberación de los
Cinco para la 86ta acción de nuestro piquet para exigir:

>>>¡LIBEREN A LOS CINCO HÉROES AHORA!
>>>¡LIBEREN A ANTONIO, FERNANDO, RAMON & GERARDO DE CÁRCELES NORTAMERICANAS!
>>>¡PERMITAN QUE RENÉ GONZÁLEZ REGRESE A CUBA AHORA!
>>>¡OTÓRGENLES LAS VISAS A OLGA SALANUEVA & ADRIANA PEREZ, ESPOSAS DE LOS CINCO, DE INMEDIATO!

SÁBADO
5 de enero de 2013
2pm
Galería de Arte de Vancouver (en el centro de Vancouver). Vancouver
Art Gallery (Downtown, Vancouver)
Robson St. @ Hornby St.

Para ver el poster de la acción de protesta, por favour visite:
http://www.freethe5vancouver.ca/posters/2013/130105-free-the-cuban-5-picket.pdf

Para unirse al evento en Facebook, por favour visite:
http://www.facebook.com/events/180051818803449/

Desde diciembre de 2005, el Comité de Vancouver por la Liberación de
los Cinco ha estado organizando acciones de protesta con carácter
mensual (a veces más de una vez al mes), exigiendo la liberación de
los Cinco Héroes Cubanos presos en cárceles norteamericanas. En estos
7 (siete) años, miles de personas de diversos orígenes se han
involucrado en las acciones y muchos más han expuesto el caso de los
Cinco a partir de nuestras consistentes acciones públicas en el
centro, frente al Consulado norteamericano y a través de docenas de
foros públicos, noches culturales, presentación de filmes, peticiones,
marchas, vigilias y muchas más.

El respaldo a la libertad de los Cinco Héroes ha crecido en Vancouver,
Canadá, como lo ha hecho en todo el mundo. Ha comenzado un Nuevo año.
Hagamos que este 2013 sea un año para redoblar nuestros esfuerzos
juntos por todo el mundo, exigiendo:
¡LIBERTAD PARA LOS CINCO YA!

Los invitamos a que se unan a nosotros en esta lucha por los derechos
humanos de Cinco Héroes Cubanos.

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¿QUIÉNES SON LOS CINCO HÉROES CUBANOS?

Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González
y René González, más conocidos como los Cinco, están en estos momentos
cumpliendo escandalosas sentencias incluyendo dos cadenzas perpetuas
más quince años. Fueron injustamente juzgados y condenados en la Corte
Federal de Estados Unidos por “conspiración para cometer espionaje” y
otras acusaciones fabricadas. Los Cinco eran realmente hombres
desarmados que se encontraban monitoreando las organizaciones
terroristas refugiadas en Miami, que desde 1959 han sido responsables
de la muerte de más de 3400 personas en Cuba, incluyendo un residente
de Canadá, Fabio di Celmo, en 1997. A través de su importante trabajo,
estos cinco hombres lograron impeder más muertes en Cuba.

Organizado por:
Free the Cuban 5 Committee-Vancouver (el Comité de Vancouver por la
Liberación de los Cinco)
604-719-6947 | freethe5vancouver at gmail.com
http://www.freethe5vancouver.ca/

Para más información:
http://www.freethe5vancouver.ca/
http://www.antiterroristas.cu/
http://www.freethefive.org/
http://www.thecuban5.org/