RALLY TO FREE “ALL” THE CUBAN FIVE NOW! Saturday, June 1 1:00 PM 360 University Ave. Toronto

PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release: Monday, May 27th, 2013

The Cuban Five were in the United States to expose U.S.-sponsored terrorism against Cuba and other nations, carried out by ultra-right groups based in Florida, which has caused the death of 3478 people and permanently maimed thousands more.

The blowing up of a Cuban airliner in 1976, whereby 73 people were killed, as well as the murder of Fabio Di Celmo in 1997, a permanent resident of Montreal who was killed in a series of bombings in Havana Hotels, are examples of such U.S.-sponsored terrorism considering the masterminds of these attacks are walking free in Miami.

That’s why, in support of the “Five Days for the Cuban Five” action in Washington D.C., rallies will take place around the world on Saturday June 1st in front of U.S. Embassies and Consulates.

Friends in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and other cities will join in these actions. Please, participate in the Toronto rally and be a voice for justice and freedom for all the Cuban Five.

RALLY TO FREE “ALL” THE CUBAN FIVE NOW!

Saturday, June 1

1:00 PM

360 University Ave.

(across from the U.S. Consulate)

Toronto

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/284590075010736/

Sponsored by: Toronto Forum on Cuba and 

Asociación de Cubanos"Juan Gualberto Gómez".

Endorsed by: The Friends of the Cuban Five Committee; the Worker to Worker, Canada- Cuba Labour Solidarity Network; International Festival of Poetry of Resistance - IFPOR; Canadian-Cuban Friendship Association Toronto; Canadian Network on Cuba; Latin American and Caribbean Solidarity Network;

If your organization, would like to be added to the list of endorsers, please send an email to torontoforumoncuba@rogers.com

For more information check:

www.thecuban5.org 

www.torontoforumoncuba.com 

www.freethefive.org

Click here for details on the second

"5 DAYS FOR THE CUBAN 5″ in Washington, D.C.

The Canadian Network On Cuba sends greetings to the Five Days for the Five, Washington, DC, May 30-June 5, 2013

Greetings to the Five Days for the Five, Washington, DC, May 30-June 5, 2013

Dear sisters and brothers,

The Canadian Network on Cuba, on behalf of the Canada-Cuba solidarity and friendship movement, warmly greet all those gathered in Washington over these five days in the fight to break the wall of silence and disinformation that surrounds the just cause of the Five Cuban Heroes. As exemplars of Cuba, they represent the best of the struggle for self-determination, independence and human dignity. Their ongoing victimization by the U.S. government for defending their homeland from terrorism is an affront to the peoples of the world.

Our recently concluded 6th Convention reaffirmed our resolute commitment to continue mobilizing to demand that the U.S. government immediately and unconditionally free all of the Five Heroes. As long any of the Five Heroes remain in prison, we will not pause in our struggle for their freedom! Together with your efforts, and all those across the world, justice will prevail!

Free All the Five Cuban Heroes Now!

In solidarity,

On behalf of the Canadian Network On Cuba

Isaac Saney

Co-Chair & National Spokesperson

VI CNC Convention held in Toronto

VI Biennial CNC Convention

The VI Biennial CNC Convention took place at Toronto's City Hall from May 17 to 20. The Canadian Network On Cuba (CNC) is an umbrella organization integrated by different associations, unions and groups of solidarity with Cuba from all over Canada.

Kenia Serrano, President of the Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), Sandra Ramírez of the Canada Desk of that organization, and the Cuban Ambassador to Canada Julio Garmendía were guests in the event.

The Convention offered a space for friends of Cuba to debate and explore new strategies in favor of the Caribbean island besieged by the hostility and aggression of the United States of America .

Here's a greeting sent to CNC by the  Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization-IFCO 

Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization-IFCO

418 W 145 Street, New York, NY 10031Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO)
418 W 145th Street, New York, NY 10031

Tel.: 212.926.5757 end_of_the_skype_highlighting - Fax: 212.926.5842 - Email: ifco@igc.org(212) 926-5757; Email: ifco@igc.com

Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO)
418 W 145th Street, New York, NY 10031

                                                                                                                        

May 21, 2013

VIA Email:

Elizabeth Hill <elizzhill@hotmail.com>

Isaac Saney <isaney@hotmail.com>

Canadian Network on Cuba-CNC

Toronto, Canada

Greetings from the United States;

Congratulations in your 6th Biennial Convention that exchange with love and respect ideas on activities in solidarity with Cuba.

As a grassroots interfaith organization that believes in peace with justice, we want to express our unconditional solidarity love to the Cuban Revolution. Because we believe that another world, much better, is necessary and because we believe that Cuba since the revolution came to power started building this new world we want to say Presente with our solidarity.

We recognize that the imperialist are always looking for an opportunity to isolate the Cuban’s experience and for this reason, we give thanks to liberating spaces like this Conference because is another way to break this blockage. There is no doubt. No other commercial, financial, political, cultural, and spiritual blockade in history has lasted longer than the one imposed by the US government on Cuba since the early 1960s. It's immoral and illegal and in our understanding a modality of political and economic terrorism. We have a clear understanding that the purpose of the blockage is to inflict violence, fear, and intimidation in the Cuban people. We wonder; why this blockage is not in the F.B.I. most wanted list?

For us supporting the Cuban Revolution is to reaffirm the beautiful things that they are doing for humanity. In Cuba, security is viewed not only as that of the nation per se, but at the same time as access to medical services and education, both as human rights and not as privileges. Here in the United States we have the largest prison population in the world. Look at it this way, the United States has less than 5% of the world's population, but one quarter of the prison population of the world. In contrast, there are in the United States more than 50 million people without health insurance: they don't have the right to get sick. If we add to this that we have about 11 million undocumented people that have no right to get sick because someone could declare them illegal, then this issue is very critical because it does not create security. Perhaps this explains why infant mortality in Cuba is much lower - with 4.83 deaths per 1,000 live births - than in the United States - 5.98 deaths per 1,000 live births. Worth noting also is that infant mortality for Black women in the United States is 2.4 times higher than for White women. To this we can add that more than 14% of the adult population of the United States cannot read because they are illiterate. Interestingly, the webpage CIA-Facts tells us that the U.S. spends 5.5% of the GDP on education while Cuba spends 13.6%. It's worth remembering: Cuba sends doctors and teachers to all parts of the world while the United States sends the military. I imagine that you already know what each one of these goes there to do.

This people’s revolution every day makes real what the Bible (Matthew 25:31-46) is telling us: For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me… The Cuban revolution with their solidarity is also rewriting the new Bible.

God bless the Cuban Revolution, God bless the Cuban people, God bless Comandante Fidel Castro, God bless President Raul Castro, and God bless the Cuban Socialist project.

Venceremos!

In solidarity love, the most important sacrament,

Gail Walker & Fr. Luis Barrios

Co-Executive Directors

On the question of Guantanamo, Jonathan M. Hansen

By JONATHAN M. HANSEN

IN the 10 years since the Guantánamo detention camp opened, the anguished debate over whether to shutter the facility — or make it permanent — has obscured a deeper failure that dates back more than a century and implicates all Americans: namely, our continued occupation of Guantánamo itself. It is past time to return this imperialist enclave to Cuba.

From the moment the United States government forced Cuba to lease the Guantánamo Bay naval base to us, in June 1901, the American presence there has been more than a thorn in Cuba’s side. It has served to remind the world of America’s long history of interventionist militarism. Few gestures would have as salutary an effect on the stultifying impasse in American-Cuban relations as handing over this coveted piece of land.

The circumstances by which the United States came to occupy Guantánamo are as troubling as its past decade of activity there. In April 1898, American forces intervened in Cuba’s three-year-old struggle for independence when it was all but won, thus transforming the Cuban War of Independence into what Americans are still wont to call the Spanish-American War. American officials then excluded the Cuban Army from the armistice and denied Cuba a seat at the Paris peace conference. “There is so much natural anger and grief throughout the island,” the Cuban general Máximo Gómez remarked in January 1899, after the peace treaty was signed, “that the people haven’t really been able to celebrate the triumph of the end of their former rulers’ power.”

Curiously, the United States’ declaration of war on Spain included the assurance that America did not seek “sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control” over Cuba and intended “to leave the government and control of the island to its people.”

But after the war, strategic imperatives took precedence over Cuban independence. The United States wanted dominion over Cuba, along with naval bases from which to exercise it.

Enter Gen. Leonard Wood, whom President William McKinley had named military governor of Cuba, bearing provisions that became known as the Platt Amendment. Two were particularly odious: one guaranteed the United States the right to intervene at will in Cuban affairs; the other provided for the sale or lease of naval stations. Juan Gualberto Gómez, a leading delegate to the Cuban Constitutional Convention, said the amendment would render Cubans “a vassal people.” Foreshadowing the Cuban Missile Crisis, he presciently warned that foreign bases on Cuban soil would only draw Cuba “into conflict not of our own making and in which we have no stake.”

But it was an offer Cuba could not refuse, as Wood informed the delegates. The alternative to the amendment was continued occupation. The Cubans got the message. “There is, of course, little or no real independence left to Cuba under the Platt Amendment,” Wood remarked to McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, in October 1901, soon after the Platt Amendment was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution. “The more sensible Cubans realize this and feel that the only consistent thing now is to seek annexation.”

But with Platt in place, who needed annexation? Over the next two decades, the United States repeatedly dispatched Marines based at Guantánamo to protect its interests in Cuba and block land redistribution. Between 1900 and 1920, some 44,000 Americans flocked to Cuba, boosting capital investment on the island to just over $1 billion from roughly $80 million and prompting one journalist to remark that “little by little, the whole island is passing into the hands of American citizens.”

How did this look from Cuba’s perspective? Well, imagine that at the end of the American Revolution the French had decided to remain here. Imagine that the French had refused to allow Washington and his army to attend the armistice at Yorktown. Imagine that they had denied the Continental Congress a seat at the Treaty of Paris, prohibited expropriation of Tory property, occupied New York Harbor, dispatched troops to quash Shays’ and other rebellions and then immigrated to the colonies in droves, snatching up the most valuable land.

Such is the context in which the United States came to occupy Guantánamo. It is a history excluded from American textbooks and neglected in the debates over terrorism, international law and the reach of executive power. But it is a history known in Cuba (where it motivated the 1959 revolution) and throughout Latin America. It explains why Guantánamo remains a glaring symbol of hypocrisy around the world. We need not even speak of the last decade.

If President Obama were to acknowledge this history and initiate the process of returning Guantánamo to Cuba, he could begin to put the mistakes of the last 10 years behind us, not to mention fulfill a campaign pledge. (Given Congressional intransigence, there might be no better way to close the detention camp than to turn over the rest of the naval base along with it.) It would rectify an age-old grievance and lay the groundwork for new relations with Cuba and other countries in the Western Hemisphere and around the globe. Finally, it would send an unmistakable message that integrity, self-scrutiny and candor are not evidence of weakness, but indispensable attributes of leadership in an ever changing world. Surely there would be no fitter way to observe today’s grim anniversary than to stand up for the principles Guantánamo has undermined for over a century.

Source: ajiacomix