Humour from my Pen: The political cartoons of Gerardo Hernandez

Thursday, April 19, 2012 (All day) to Sunday, May 13, 2012 (All day)

April 19 to May 13, At the Vanishing Point, 565 King St, Newtown

Gallery hours: Thursday-Sunday 10.00am - 6.00pm

Join us for the opening – 6pm, Thursday April 19.

Free entry. All welcome.

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Humor from my Pen is an exhibition of satirical cartoons by Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, a political prisoner in the United States serving a double life sentence since 1998.

Hernández was born in Havana, Cuba on June 4, 1965, half a decade after working people took power from a U.S.-backed dictatorship in the 1959 Cuban Revolution. At school, he was already a cartoonist-humourist who participated in amateur festivals as part of a theatre group. He graduated in 1989 with a degree in International Political Relations.

In 1989-90, he volunteered as part of the Cuban forces in Angola that successfully repelled a second invasion of that country by the South African white racist regime.

Nelson Mandela told a huge welcoming rally in Cuba in 1991 that these Cuban fighters decisively defeated the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale. In doing so, he said, they helped secure Angolan sovereignty, win Namibian independence, and inspire the mass struggle inside South Africa itself to victory over apartheid.

Since 1982, Hernández has had his drawings published and exhibited. His book of caricatures, “You Can Achieve Everything With Love and Humor,” was published in 2002.

Hernández and Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González – known worldwide as the Cuban Five – have been imprisoned in the United States for over 13 years.

Before their arrests in 1998, these five Cuban revolutionaries had been gathering information for their government about the activities of counterrevolutionary Cuban-American organisations in south Florida.