• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 10 / 30 / 2010

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BY LEA SHERMAN. BERKELEY, California"More than 60 people attended the Bay Area premier of The Day Diplomacy Died, a documentary by Bernie Dwyer and Roberto Ruiz Rebo. It was held at La Peña Cultural Center here October 7.

The event was an evening in solidarity with Cuba and the Cuban Five and marked the 43rd anniversary of Che Guevara’s murder in Bolivia.

“This meeting is part of the international campaign for actions in solidarity with the Cuban Five on the 12th anniversary of their unjust imprisonment,”explained Alicia Jrapko, national coordinator of the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban 5, which organized the event.

Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González were arrested in 1998 while monitoring the activities of counterrevolutionary groups in South Florida that had carried out violent attacks on Cuba, including the bombing of hotels. Now known internationally as the Cuban Five, they were framed up on false charges and have spent 12 years in U.S. prisons.

Jrapko noted that the campaign to free the five focuses on “reaching out to those who don’t know about the case.” She pointed to art exhibits, concerts and a mountain-climbing action to publicize the case and the support of actors, artists, and union figures, including Ed Asner, Danny Glover, and Dolores Huerta.

The Day Diplomacy Died refutes Washington’s slander that the Cuban government repressed freedom of speech and expression when it arrested 75 so-called dissidents in 2003.

The film builds on interviews with four Cuban revolutionaries who had infiltrated the opposition groups that were operating under the tutelage of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana; former U.S. diplomats in Cuba; Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban National Assembly; and José Pertierra, a Cuban American attorney currently representing the government of Venezuela in its effort to extradite Luis Posada Carriles. Posada Carriles was convicted by a Venezuelan court in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner over Barbados that killed all 73 people aboard.

The documentary explains the role of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana in financing the “dissidents” and offering them other incentives to recruit others and organize acts of provocation and sabotage. One of the Cuban undercover agents exposes the plans of a “dissident” who was plotting the placement of bombs in manholes beneath the main streets of Havana.

The film documents the context in which the 2003 arrests took place as Cuba faced a wave of armed hijackings and other acts of violence as the U.S. invasion of Iraq began.

Filmmaker Bernie Dwyer had been scheduled to be part of the premier to speak about the documentary, but she was unable to attend.

Saul Landau, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., who is making a documentary on the case of the Cuban Five, took her place. A sharp debate ensued between members of the audience and Landau, who stated that he wouldn’t have made the documentary because even though the “dissidents” were guilty, they were “jerks” who should not have been arrested.

In response, several speakers pointed to the long history of U.S. organized attacks on revolutionary Cuba over the last 50 years, including the frame-up and imprisonment of the Cuban Five.

The program also included poet Nina Serrano, who read a poem she wrote to honor Che Guevara.

THE MILITANT, Vol. 74/No. 41 November 1, 2010

Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/118690