Cuba Heroes' Message: Keep up the pressure
Morning Star | Tuesday, 12 July 2016 | Click here for original article
TWO of the Miami Five heroes who spent 16 years in US jails for infiltrating anti-Cuban terrorist groups told the Star yesterday to “keep up the pressure” on the US and British governments.
Rene Gonzales and Gerardo Hernandez paid a special visit to the Morning Star offices in east London, where they praised the newspaper for having supported the five political prisoners.
They urged everyone to keep fighting, as “pressure won the release of the five.”
Mr Hernandez said: “We have to spread the truth about Cuba. There’s a lot of distorted information about Cuba from the corporate press.”
Speaking of receiving copies of the Morning Star while in prison, Mr Hernandez remembers “reading them cover to cover” before passing them on to fellow inmates.
A couple of weeks later, “someone would come up to me and say: ‘Have you seen this? I think you’ll like it,’ before I had to tell them that I was the one who passed it on in the first place.
“We were reading stories about us [in the Morning Star] that we could not see anywhere else.”
The pair welcomed closer relations between Cuba and the US, with the US embassy reopening last year after 54 years.
But Mr Gonzales cautioned: “We have a lot of work to do in regards to our relationship with the US. There’s never been a normal relationship between Cuba and the US.”
He warned that the US was pursuing the same goals by different means.
Reflecting on their visit to the Durham Miners’ Gala at the weekend, Mr Gonzales said: “I was impressed by the joy from the community and how they don’t forget their history.
“They closed the mines, but they could not get rid of the miners.”
A video of the Morning Star interview with Rene and Gerardo is on YouTube here
