This is reflected in the Declaration of the recent 22nd Meeting of such a worthy organization as the Forum of São Paulo, celebrated in San Salvador at the end of June. A usual, they repeated that “we support the heroic struggle of the Puerto Rican people for its independence and the just claim of Argentina for their sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands”. In spite of the good faith of this phrase, its scantiness makes for deficiencies. The most simple is that between the immobility of the Malvinas and the present situation of Puerto Rico there is no similarity beyond the geographical accident that both are islands. If it is related to being colonial regimes, then Aruba, Martinique and other possessions in the Caribbean should have been included.

The second error is that in the case of the Malvinas there is a question of territorial integrity, but not of self-determination of peoples. Great Britain took this land from Argentina and replaced its small population with some colonists brought from England. If their descendants were to vote on sovereignty, their choice would be for London. Puerto Rico, on the contrary, is a historic nation, where some four million people defend their own culture, which is of a purely Hispanic-American and Caribbean strain. The question here is to recover the conditions necessary in order for this people to freely decide their own destiny. This is radically distinct from the case of the Malvinas. So to put them side-by-side –while omitting the other Antillean colonies – creates more confusion than solidarity.

But the main problem is elsewhere. It is the omission of that fact that ten years of recession and an unpayable debt has made Puerto Rico a headache for the US government as well. This has created a crisis within the colonial political system and its parties. In face of Puerto Rican non-conformity and complaints, and the pressure of Wall Street creditors, the US authorities arrived at two definitive decisions that have annulled the regime of the so-called Associated Free State (AFS).

The first is that the US Supreme Court decreed that the island has no sovereignty, and that this pertains exclusively to the Congress in Washington. The second is that the Congress then agreed to create a Fiscal Control Board whose members will be named by the White House, which will not only manage the fiscal affairs and budget of Puerto Rico, but will reorganize the administration of the country over and above the government elected by the Puerto Ricans, in order to ensure that the vultures of Wall Street collect the enormous debt, at the expense of the people who live on the island. This converts the governor of Puerto Rico into a simple ceremonial rag doll.

The two parties that defend the Colonial system — one annexationist and the other autonomist — whose inefficiency and corruption as governors of the country accumulated this debt, have lost their capacity to neutralize the population politically. In order to defend their worn-out privileges they direct their complaints and claims against the new Board, but the greater part of the population already sees clearly that the cause of their social and economic drama, their unemployment and poverty, and of the discredit of the political regime, is the colonial system. The same one that, faced with the deterioration of the panorama, calls for creating this new instrument of authoritarian domination.

This in turn has brought the pro-independence party and organizations not only to their moment of greatest political growth, but also to that of the greatest progress in the construction of their unity. This means that Latin American solidarity with the independence of Puerto Rico — and the support for its actors and struggles – needs to go beyond the usual phrases and calls for new analyses and initiatives in tune with the present demands and possibilities of the situation.

(by Nils Castro, Alainet)

René González, one of the five men known as the Cuban Five, today will walk out of Federal Prison in Marianna, Florida. He will walk out with his head held high after more than 13 years in prison, having served his utterly unjust sentence with complete dignity. He has been a model prisoner, even while suffering the indignity of being inhumanely deprived visits from his wife for more than 11 years.

Unable to afford René even the small victory of his release, however, the U.S. government insists on punishing him and his family even more by requiring him to remain in Florida for the three years of his parole, even though René has no family in Florida and his life will be in danger from the very terrorist groups he helped to infiltrate.

That danger cannot be underestimated. Florida Congressperson Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was quoted in the Miami Herald on Monday calling René an “enemy of America” with “American blood on his hands.” These utterly false charges are a clear incitement to violence, and demonstrate all too clearly the necessity of allowing René to return immediately to Cuba.

The very fact that a man who the government called a “spy” and a “threat to national security” is required to remain in the United States, rather than being immediately deported, demonstrates quite clearly what the prosecution and persecution is all about. The government never thought for one minute that René and his brothers were “spies” or a “threat to national security”; if they did, they would be putting René on the first plane back to Cuba. Instead, the punishment meted out to René and his brothers was all about protecting the terrorists who serve the interests of the U.S. government by trying to destabilize the Cuban government and overturn the Cuban Revolution.

Cuba has suffered the scourge of terrorism not just since Sept. 11, 2001, but for more than 50 years. A scourge that over those years has killed at least 3,478 people, most of them Cuban but also many others including 11 Guyanese and five North Koreans killed in the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 and an Italian (Fabio di Celmo) killed in a hotel bombing in 1997. Thousands more have been seriously injured by the terrorists.

René and his brothers – Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino – can be proud that they came to the United States, unarmed and risking their lives, to fight that scourge by infiltrating the right-wing terrorist groups based in Miami who were responsible for that terrorism, and exposing their ongoing plots. The U.S. government helped organize, finance, and direct the actions of those terrorist groups from the beginning, and protected them from the consequences of their actions. It continued that collaboration and protection by arresting René and the others, and continues that protection with the unjust punishment of René and the other four.

That same government continues to this day to resist Venezuela’s valid extradition request for the most notorious terrorist of them all, Luis Posada Carriles, responsible not only the 1976 plane bombing which took the lives of 73 people, but also for the torture of numerous Venezuelans when he was part of the secret police in that country.

If the U.S. government wants to continue to claim it is engaged in a “war on terror,” it can help back up that claim with some very simple actions. Allow René González to return to Cuba immediately, free the remaining members of the Cuban Five and allow them to return to Cuba as well, extradite Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela, and arrest the other known terrorists in Miami. Until those acts have been performed, any claims by the U.S. government of “fighting terrorism” will continue to ring hollow.

The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five has an online petition to President Obama to allow René González to return to Cuba, which has been signed by people across the United States and from around the world. We urge all people of conscience the world over to add their voices to this demand at: http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-the-persecution-of-ren-gonzlez-let-him-return-to-cuba