Gerardo Hernadez’s Cartoon Illustrates French Textbook

The cartoon will illustrate a chapter of a Spanish book for pre-university education.

A cartoon drawn by Gerardo Hernandez, one of the five Cuban antiterrorist fighters unjustly held in the United States, was chosen to illustrate a chapter of a Spanish book for pre-university education in France, official sources said today.

The International Committee for the Release of the Cuban Five, as Hernandez, Ramon Labañino, Fernando Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero and Rene Gonzalez are known, said in a statement that the text will be used starting this month in many French schools, with 10,000 copies to be printed.

The cartoon is accompanied by the phrase “Ni muy-muy, ni tan-tan” (Neither one extreme or the other) and was drawn in 2011 to be presented to the 8th Congress of the Association of Cuban Journalists.

Hernandez drew the cartoon from his cell in the maximum security wing of the federal prison in Victorville, California where he remains imprisoned.

According to Hernandez, the drawing is a comment on the way international media treat the Caribbean country.

The editor of the textbook, Noe Perez, found the cartoon on the Internet and chose it because he believes it well describes the relationship between information, power, and problems such as bias in the reporting of news events.

The Cuban anti terrorist fighter and his four other compatriots were condemned to harsh sentences in 2001, after monitoring Miami-based violent groups that planned actions like those which have left over 3,400 victims in Cuba in the past 53 years.

Rene Gonzalez was released from prison on October 7, 2011 after serving a 13-year sentence, but now is being forced to complete an additional punishment sentence of three years under supervised release in southern Florida.

The Five were tried in Miami amid a hostile media atmosphere, aimed at manipulating public opinion and persuading the jury to convict them.