As the U.S. ramps up its global efforts to protect genocidal racial capitalism, it is a crucial time for a new generation to study and learn from Cuba’s 60-year effort to build an alternative socio-economic system.
For a decade and a half, small, dedicated, disparate, sometimes competing groups of political activists in the United States and around the world demonstrated, lobbied, lettered, conferenced, tribunaled, cajoled and hectored in a seemingly quixotic quest to win the release of five imprisoned Cuban men.
In an editorial published in the print edition of the New York Times, Monday, Nov. 3, 2014, in English and Spanish (appearing online the evening of Sun. Nov. 2), the Editorial Board has called for a prisoner exchange of the three remaining members of the Cuban Five for Alan Gross, who is serving a 15-year sentence in Cuba.
Democracy Now! exclusive, the only freed member of the Cuban Five, René González, speaks out after a 13-year imprisonment in the United States. The five Cuban intelligence agents were arrested in the United States in 1998 and convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. They say they were not spying on the United States, but rather trying to monitor violent right-wing Cuban exile groups responsible for attacks inside Cuba. In Cuba, the five are seen as national heroes.
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