Stop U.S. attacks on socialist Cuba

The struggle to free the Cuban Five from unjust U.S. imprisonment, now in its 14th year, is summarized in a Sept. 28 editorial in Granma International. (See “Justice for the Cuban Five once again denied” in this issue.) Attempts by the U.S. government to undo the gains won by Cuban workers through the 1959 socialist revolution — including its targeting of the Five Cuban heroes — have been increasingly exposed over these years.

A U.S.-sponsored, CIA-connected network based in Florida has killed more than 3,000 people in Cuba, including Italian tourist Fabio DiCelmo in a hotel bombing, a plane full of innocents on Cubana 455 and a worker at a popular Havana department store burned by CIA-planted incendiary devices concealed in dolls. In New York City, a Cuban diplomat was assassinated. Rockets were fired at the United Nations. In Washington, D.C., Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffat died in a car bombing. More terror activities aimed at socialist Cuba have occurred in Florida itself.

The corporate media hit a new low when the major reporters whipping up a frenzy about the Cuban Five during their trial were found to be on the U.S. government payroll at the same time. And now the prosecutor, Carolyn Heck-Miller, who insists that René González remain in Florida after his release from prison on Oct. 7, is intimately linked in a Granma article by Jean-Guy Allard to a longstanding anti-communist CIA operative — her deceased spouse. “Gene Miller … served as an Army counterintelligence officer during the Korean War, was recruited by the Miami Herald as an investigative reporter and gave name to the CIA Peter Pan Operation that dragged more than 14,000 Cuban children away from their home and their parents,” from 1960 to 1962. (Cuban News Agency, Oct. 2)

Heck-Miller refused to allow admitted plane and hotel bomber Luis Posada Carriles to be indicted for anything more than immigration violations, so he walks free in Miami — in violation of a longstanding extradition treaty with Venezuela and international law governing aircraft bombings. She was instrumental in blocking the trial change of venue to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which, although just 30 miles from Miami, has an atmosphere much less enflamed against the Five.

Although increasing numbers of U.S. residents are visiting Cuba in U.S. government-approved trips, the 50-year blockade to starve the Cuban people into submitting to their imperialist neighbor to the north, and the extralegal attacks and unjust incarceration of the Cuban Five are still the reality.

Cuban National Assembly of Peoples’ Power President Ricardo Alarcón wrote, “A normal relationship with the United States is unimaginable as long as any of the Five, even one, remains in prison and has not returned, free, to Cuba. Because their incarceration means, simply, that Washington continues supporting terrorism against Cuba and in that way any idea of improvement between the two nations is impossible.”