On Sunday August 8, renowned actor Danny Glover visited Gerardo Hernandez at USP Victorville, California. The meeting caused a big stir in the prison that just a few days before had held Gerardo in "the hole" under inhumane conditions. 
 
The plans for this meeting took several months in the making and could not have come at a more opportune moment to symbolize the tremendous support for Gerardo after what he had just been forced to endure.

Dear Sisters and Brothers:

 

I am dictating these words via telephone, which is why I must be brief and I will not be able to say everything I would have liked. Yesterday afternoon I was removed from "the hole" with the same speed in which I was thrown in. I had been taken there supposedly because I was under investigation. These investigations can take up to three months, sometimes more, but I was there 13 days. As a known Cuban journalist would say; you can draw your own conclusions...

On Saturday June 26, with great enthusiasm, the Second United States Social Forum (USSF) ended in Detroit. For 5 consecutive days, more than 15,000 people from cities and towns across the US and around the world had converged on this economically hard hit city to share common problems and to plan strategies to help alleviate the grave problems facing humanity from the unequal distribution of the world's wealth and resources. Notable participation came from such countries as Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, South Africa, Palestine, Honduras and Nepal. The format of the USSF encompassed as many as 1000 workshops and 50 People's Movement Assemblies. Also at the forum there were cultural expressions, art galleries, children's Art Village and Youth Space, and a massive people's media center.

Jean-Guy Allard

BY nominating Mark Feierstein as assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), U.S. President Barack Obama, who wanted to improve the image of this discredited organization, has shot himself in the foot. The former federal employee is a specialist in disinformation with the sulfuric smell of imperial intelligence.

It was announced yesterday that a habeas corpus petition was filed on behalf of Gerardo Hernández. What is a habeas corpus petition and why it is also referred to as collateral?
Following his conviction Gerardo had a right to appeal it to the circuit court of appeals in Atlanta, which he did and then seek a review in the U.S. Supreme Court, which he also did. That process is the direct appeal. When that process is completed, which it is in Gerardo's case, then one has the right to launch a collateral appeal or a collateral attack on the conviction, which is a very limited form of appeal (only constitutional issues not previously litigated, plus a claim of actual innocence), in what was previously known as "federal habeas corpus.” Now it is called a "Section 2255,” motion. And that is where we are now.
We filed the section 2255 motion on June 14, with our brief to follow within 30 days, indicating those constitutional violations which had not been part of the previous appeal, and a claim of actual innocence.

From June 22 to 26, under the slogan Another World is Possible, Another US is Necessary, the United States Social Forum (USSF) will take place in the city of Detroit Michigan. Thousands of participants from all over the world will converge with the great majority being from the U.S. The USSF will provide a space to build relationships, learn from each other's experiences, and share analysis of the struggles that working and poor communities face. The USSF will offer the opportunity to develope leadership, vision, and strategy needed to realize a more just world.

By Teresita Jorge (AIN)

 
Ramon LabaЯino will celebrate his 47th birthday on June 9th in a US prison for having 
infiltrated extreme right wing Cuban American organizations based in southern Florida to stop 
them from carrying out terrorist activities against the Cuban people.
 
This fighter in favor of freedom and justice was detained in 1998 and submitted to a biased trial in Miami in 2001, where his other four brothers, Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero, Rene Gonzalez and Fernando Gonzalez were also sentenced to long unjust prison terms. 

Another birthday will be celebrated far from his daughters and wife Elizabeth Palmeiro, whom he has been married to for 20 years. Although his conditions in prison are harsh, Ramon maintains his strong revolutionary convictions.

They condemned him to the exile of silence, to the punishment of the most sordid solitude; two life sentences they hanged like a piece of iron from his neck, and cast him into the void of a cell, into the empire of evil in a prison. However, and despite everything, he laughed. 
  
They, who tried him and convicted him, did not suspect that he would manage to erect, behind bars, that country in which a man and a woman would never be at risk of wearing out, not even from so many kisses.