Films and Commentary from Saul Landau

Saul Landau: In the case of modern warfare, drones are targeted and they’re operated from Las Vegas, Nevada, so the people who are sending the drones in with the missiles on them don’t really know what the conditions are at the site of the targets that they’re supposed to strike. This is what war is. It’s random killing not only of soldiers but of civilians - and among these civilians are children.

. . . The obvious question one should ask is why don’t we go back to our policy and see if we can make a foreign policy that helps us avoid going into war rather than a foreign policy that seems to depend on going into war?

Landau: Well. This is a very frightened population, otherwise people would not have guns. I mean the legitimating reason that people give is that we need guns to protect our family and yet many of the people who are killed by guns are members of the family; a wife shoots a husband or a husband shoots a wife. These are often the victims of guns. 

Guns do not really protect anybody, guns are a fetish, guns are something that scared people have seem to have fallen in love with. 

. . . I think when you link up gun policy in this country, you have to look at the gun manufacturers and at the people who own major stocks in these companies. They do not want any gun-control; all they want is gun sales and ironically when you have massacres like the one that occurred in the Sandy Hook school in Connecticut, this increases gun sales rather than decreases them and I agree that it is not a law, a law is not going to work, that is going to control the violence.

The event was sponsored by the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five and endorsed by the D.C. Metro Coalition to Free the Five, Institute for Policy Studies, National Network on Cuba and the Takoma Park Free the Five Committee.

“This is the culture that kids grow up on,” Landau told Press TV’s U.S. Desk on Saturday when asked where the culture of violence in the United States comes from.

"What did Cuba do to us?," Landau asks. "Well, the answer, I think, is that they were disobedient, in our hemisphere. And they did not ask permission to take away property. They took it away. They nationalized property. And the United States ... has never forgiven them."

The writer Alice Walker, actor Danny Glover and filmmaker Saul Landau, among other U.S. personalities joined the Cuban intellectual Miguel Barnet and a group of scholars of his country, who traveled to San Francisco to participate in the 30th Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), in the claim for the return of The Five to their homeland.

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The filmmaker Landau defended the innocence of the Cuban Five and called for their release and to strengthen efforts to achieve their final return to Cuba.