3/2/09
Peter Coyote, American actor and author, is writing a series of articles for San Francisco Chronicle, regarding his days in Havana invited by the Eleventh Habano Festival. In two of those articles he mentioned the case of the Cuban Five, once in relation with his friend, political prisoner Leonard Peltier and in another one, regarding a conversation with well-known Cuban intellectuals, Nancy Morejón and Rigoberto López.
In the great philosophical political debate between "liberty" and "equality" the Cubans have come down firmly on the side of "equality" (unless one is judged an enemy of the regime). For someone like myself, however, whose friend, Sioux leader Leonard Peltier, has been imprisoned for 28 years by a trial which would have shamed the Russian system, and who is aware of the Cuban Five, (virtually unknown to Americans but currently serving egregious sentences in the United States for spying on right-wing Miami Cubans who had been blowing up Cuban airplanes, bombing and strafing their home-land) not to mention Gitmo, we have little standing to criticize Fidel's political prisoners until we have released all of our own. We can candidly admit that Cuba is a police-state when we candidly admit that demonstrators in the United States were beaten, arrested, and hauled off in handcuffs outside the Republican Convention simply for exercising their Constitutional rights. Every system has its shadow sides and we should excuse or apologize for none. Our standing to criticize would be much more well-grounded if we began with our own.
Reconstruction under way in Cuba, Peter Coyote, Saturday, February 28, 2009
Nancy Morejón is one of the most famous poets in Cuba and after speaking for awhile, runs home and returns with a copy of her book, ³The Sweet Abyss,² with a foreword by our own renowned writer, Alice Walker. Rigoberto Lopez is a film director who has done several political documentaries with Danny Glover and has met Sean Penn here on one of his several visits. Having these friends in common is an ice-breaker and soon we are discussing the case of The Cuban Five and the possibility of my narrating a documentary to introduce Americans to their imprisonment.
Visiting the cigar factory, Peter Coyote, Sunday, March 1, 2009
