Free the Miami 5

A contingent of 15 éirígí activists were among those who gathered at the US embassy in Dublin on Monday [October 12] to call for the release of the Miami 5.

The five Cuban patriots have been unjustly imprisoned in the USA since 2001 as a result of their activities in disrupting right-wing terrorist plots against Cuba.

Speaking at the demonstration, éirígí spokesperson Daithí Mac an Mháistír extended solidarity greetings from the party to Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González, who are doing four life sentences and 75 years collectively.

Daithí said: “The Miami 5 are guilty of no crime, other than that of protecting their country from a terrorist attack, they should be released immediately and be allowed to return to Cuba.

“We are all aware of the hypocrisy and lies surrounding the charges they were convicted of 11 years ago. What we need to keep in mind is the real reason why the US administration has persecuted them as it has. It is the very same reason that the US has persecuted their homeland for the last 50 years.

“Cubans themselves are their own most eloquent and passionate defenders. The words of Frank Josué Solar Cabrales epitomises the magnitude of what the Miami 5 were intent on defending when they embarked upon their mission. He wrote of how: ‘the spirit of a whole epoch palpitates in the Cuban Revolution. Much of the destiny of humanity will depend in forthcoming years on the outcome of the Cuban Revolution. Today, capitalist prehistory not only signifies backwardness, servitude, and abysmal inequalities. Its levels of consumption, wastefulness, of irrational exploitation of natural resources, of aggression against the environment, have brought us all to a point which has put the very survival of the human species in danger’.

“What is at stake with the advance or backward movement of this revolutionary process is something as serious as our very own existence.”

Daithí continued: “The very permanence of the Cuban Revolution signifies an enormous impulse to those who rebel, to those who confront domination, to revolutionary struggles across the globe, to the dream of making this world of ours better.

“The dream of making this world of ours better, and of defending that idea from those who would want to bomb it out of existence, is the real reason why the Miami 5 continue to languish in US prisons. In this context, their incarceration must be understood as a crime of epic proportions against the very notion of justice.

“The ethics and morality at the very heart of the Cuban revolution have already absolved the Miami 5. Let us hope it is not too long before the land of supposed liberty and justice finds it within itself to do likewise.”