On December 10, Power announced the launch of a U.S. State Department campaign called #FreeToBeHome, which she said would highlight the cases of “prisoners unjustly held around the world and the families they leave behind.” Without any sense of irony, or history, Powers added, “We call on all governments to release them. Political prisoners should be free to believe.”

Were Power to believe her own rhetoric, she would call on the U.S. government to release the political prisoners highlighted in Gonzalez’s campaign: Oscar López Rivera, Ana Belén Montes, Leonard Peltier, Julian Assange, Simón Trinidad, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, all deemed political prisoners in the U.S.

Telesur looks at some of the cases raised by Gonzalez and a few more.

A leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement, López Rivera is currently serving his 35th year in prison on charges related to his independence activities with the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FARN), which fought to turn Puerto Rico into an independent communist state. He is the longest-held political prisoner from Latin America in U.S. history.

Offered clemency by then-President Clinton in 1999, Lopez rejected the offer because it was not extended to other jailed FARN activists and because he refused to renounce his communist beliefs. As of 2010, Lopez is the sole remaining Puerto Rican revolutionary leader held by the U.S. In December, a group of Swedish politicians called on President Obama to pardon Lopez in his final days in office. “He was convicted and imprisoned because he struggled for his homeland Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination,” they wrote to Obama in an open letter.

Anticipating Powers’ campaign call that prisoners should “be free to be home,” the letter called on Obama to “allow Oscar López Rivera to live out the final part of his life in his homeland with his family.”

A U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican heritage, Belen Montes was charged with espionage on behalf of the Cuban government. At the time of her arrest, two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack in New York, she worked in the Defense Department as a Cuba specialist and was a key member of an intelligence report team which concluded that the small Caribbean island did not pose any danger to the U.S.

In pleading guilty to avoid the death penalty, Belen Montes told the court, “I engaged in the activity that brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law … I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”

An international campaign continues to call for her release on humanitarian grounds given that she is held in isolation and denied basic rights such as visitors, phone calls, and letters.

Despite her harsh conditions Belen Montes told interviewers in 2015 “If I repent, I deny myself … It’s not within the framework of my logic. I always knew the possible consequences of what I did.” She added, “What matters to me is that the Cuban Revolution exists … What’s necessary is that there always be a Cuban Revolution.”

Harvard-educated Simon Trinidad, also known as Ricardo Palmera, was the de facto foreign minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC. During a 2004 diplomatic trip to Ecuador to meet with U.N. representatives, he was arrested and deported to Colombia, where former President Alvaro Uribe declined to charge him with any crime, and instead conspired with U.S. officials to create a false pretext to deport him to the U.S.

After the U.S. was unable to convict him in his first trial on trumped-up kidnapping charges, a second jury found him guilty in 2008 and sentenced him to 60 years. Despite that conviction, U.S. officials then tried to convict Trinidad on drug charges. After two juries found him innocent of those charges, U.S. officials abandoned the attempted drug prosecution.

Since his 2005 deportation to the U.S., Trinidad has spent 11 years in complete isolation in a U.S. “supermax” prison, an explicit violation of the United Nations Convention against Torture.

In writing about his reasons for joining the revolutionary struggle, Trinidad wrote, “There’s our children, women, our families, our communities and normal life. If I don’t do this (join the struggle), what am I? A traitor. So I said no. That’s why I put up with pain and suffering to fight for what we lack. That’s why I took up the guerrilla struggle.”

Leonard Peltier was a leading figure in the American Indian Movement during the peak of its political activity in the 1970s. The movement, also known by its acronym AIM, was a militant group championing Native American autonomy and culture. In 1977, Peltier was convicted of the murder of two FBI agents in a trial Amnesty International has called unfair, given that there were no witnesses while key ballistics evidence used to tie Peltier to the murders was later revealed to be false.

The 40-year campaign for his release has been championed by the likes of Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Rigoberta Menchu, as well as the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and the European Parliament. Despite these efforts to secure his release, Peltier remains in jail as the longest-serving political prisoner in the U.S. At age 71 and suffering from diabetes and complications from a massive aneurysm, many fear that without a presidential pardon, he will die in jail.

In a May 2016 interview marking his 40-year imprisonment, Peltier spoke about his activism, saying, “That’s what we were always fighting to change — the idea that Indian lives weren’t worth anything. Indian culture has contributed great things to the world … we wanted to be recognized,” he said.

Journalist, acclaimed prison activist, and former Black Panther Party member Mumia Abu-Jamal is perhaps the most well-known political prisoner in the U.S.

Sentenced to death in 1982 for the alleged murder of a Philadelphia police officer in a trial called a “travesty of justice” by civil liberties advocates and human rights organizations such as the NAACP, ACLU, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Abu-Jamal spent almost 30 years on death row until 2011, when his sentence was commuted to life in prison after an appeal courts ruled that the original trial and sentence were tainted by racism.

Through his prison writings and popular radio broadcasts, Abu-Jamal has remained a key dissident voice in the U.S. reporting extensively on the prison-industrial complex and the institutionalization of white supremacy. In the past two years, the campaign for his release has gained added impetus given his deteriorating health. In September, a federal court ruled that prison officials had violated the U.S. constitutional guarantee against “cruel and unusual punishment” by denying Abu-Jamal treatment for Hepatitis C.

Abu-Jamal has said about his struggle for justice, “Do you see law and order? There is nothing but disorder, and instead of law there is the illusion of security. It is an illusion because it is built on a long history of injustices: racism, criminality, and the genocide of millions. Many people say it is insane to resist the system, but actually, it is insane not to.”

Guantanamo Bay prisoners

For 14 years, the U.S. has operated this “island outside the law,” where 800 men have been illegally detained, tortured, and held without charge or trial in violation of both U.S. and international law. Despite President Obama’s promise to close the military prison, something the American Civil Liberties Union calls a “shameful episode in American history”, 49 prisoners remain jailed, despite facing no charges or having ever been convicted of a crime. The U.S. government itself has declared that 20 of these men – detained during the U.S.’s so-called ”War on Terror” – are entirely innocent of any crimes and pose no threat to the U.S. While every single national and international human rights group has called for President Obama to close the prison and release the prisoners before his term ends, the U.S. government is in the process of renovating the facility, increasing fears that it will continue to be a key part of the U.S. national security apparatus under President Trump.

(Granma)

Happy 53rd Anniversary of the Revolution, Brothers and Sisters! Every Year, Every Month…

…Every Day that we resist and continue to advance is a New Victory…

…in front of those who for more than a half century have tried to make us bend. Greetings!

Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo

Dear friends:

I wish to convey to all of you my most sincere appreciation for another year of company in solidarity with this struggle for truth and justice.

The year which will soon end is yet another year of significant efforts of all those, who in one way or another, contribute to the objective of making the freedom of the Cuban Five a reality.

We are aware of the activities and events that all of you organize everywhere in the world as part of the campaign for our freedom. To each one of you, in each place on the planet where you show the universal value of human solidarity, with the closing of the year 2011, receive my gratitude and my certainty that we will achieve victory.

May you have a happy and fruitful New Year, and that 2012 be another year of gains and victories for the causes that we defend.

Happy 2012!

¡Venceremos!

Fernando Gonzalez Llort

Dear sisters and brothers,

This year 2011 is reaching an end, and we want to take this special time to send you all our love, with warmness and the gratitude of the Five, for all that you give every day for the cause of Cuba; that is our cause.

You are our greatest virtue, our strength and the main reason we can maintain our optimism that someday the big miracle of our freedom will happen and we will all celebrate together in victory.

With those of you who have always been there along our side for these 13 years of unjust imprisonment, we are fulfilling the prophecy that all work of love overcomes the adversity and in the end that will prove to be the case.

We wish you happy holidays, a 2012 with peace, love, health and victories.

The love of the Five is with you every second of the year and of life!

On behalf of our five families, of the Cuban people, and from each one of us, we wish you

!!!!!!!HAPPY 2012!!!!!!!

Ramón Labañino

Dear friends,

The second half of December has started.  I decided to share with you this message that I have sent to many friends, answering their words of solidarity and encouragement.

Rene is free, but it is a freedom with many conditions; it is a freedom where he is in constant physical danger; it is a freedom without being able to have Olguita and his daughters next to him; it is a freedom without freedom.

Gerardo continues under the terrible conditions of a penitentiary, something I know very well. His strength remains high against the injustice of the double life sentence despite not being able to receive visits from Adriana.

Our Habeas Corpus process is reaching its end. Perhaps in the beginning of next year we will receive an answer. I am wondering what Judge Lenard’s response will be?.

It gives us great strength to hear about the participation of many friends from all over the world who attended the VII Colloquium for our freedom in Holguin. Once again the success of this yearly event shows that the struggle for our cause is growing.

These are some of the things that 2011 ends with, in the middle of a world that cannot take it anymore and is dying of pain. It is a world that is asking us to run to help it in order to save humanity from so much selfishness; a world that is taking us, as Fidel affirmed, “in a relentless pace, towards a definitive and total catastrophe”.

For me, the recent visit of my two sons has been the most wonderful thing that has happened to me in this 13 years of imprisonment.

With great thanks for your support, on behalf of the 5, I wish you a Happy New Year 2012!

Peace, health, happiness and success in your goals.

We are always optimistic, and reiterate: Venceremos!

Five embraces.

Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez

Dear friends:

As another end of the year approaches with all the festivities and the symbolism that for each of us, from its place on our diversity, hold these days, the family spirit is renovated and our best wishes point to the immediate future; projecting our aspirations, dreams, realities and affections.

For the five of us, separated from our families and from our people for more than 13 years, the recurrent wish of seeing at last this injustice repaired will be again our greatest hope. All of you, who have being with us throughout all these years on an endless struggle to accomplish something as simple as the application of the laws, have shown to be sensible enough so as to feel on your own flesh the laceration inflicted by the denial of such an elemental aspiration on both us and on our loved ones; by giving space on your hearts to this battle that for enduring would have already made many people give up. For that perseverance we thank you and reiterate to all of you the assurance of our eternal gratitude.

A very important year is coming. It is probably a decisive one, when the last legal skirmish of this long and tortuous process can be elucidated. Such as it has been admitted by the prosecutors themselves, the weight of the solidarity is of no small effect, and the knowledge that we still count on your efforts gives us encouragement and sustenance. We have no doubt that we all will continue together on this struggle until we can be victorious, and that it will be thanks to the actions of people like you that in the end the reunification of our families will be achieved.

It is because of that reciprocal link that the happiness of yours is also our happiness, that we share your projects, that we enjoy your successes and that together we all project the optimism and the perseverance that make us one. With that spirit of fraternity and shared feelings we wish you the best New Year and lots of success on every one of your aspirations, which are also ours.

Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2012.

With affection.

Rene Gonzalez Sehwerert