Cuban Five

The Cuban Five (Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González) are five Cuban nationals convicted of espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, and other illegal activities in the United States. They are currently serving prison terms in the United States, but are appealing their convictions; the fairness of their trial has received widespread international criticism. In Cuba, the Five are seen as "heroes" for having sacrificed their liberty in the defence of their country.

Activities

The "Cuban Five" were Cuban intelligence officers who worked for Cuban State Security as part of "La Red Avispa", or Wasp Network, which the FBI dismantled with 10 arrests in 1998. The network observed and infiltrated a number of Cuban-American groups which the Cuban government considered terrorist: Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue. It also attempted to infiltrate the United States Southern Command headquarters in West Miami-Dade. The US government also accused the remaining four of lying about their identities and sending 2,000 pages of unclassified information obtained from US military bases to Cuba. The network received clandestine communications from Cuba via the Atención numbers station.

US organizations including the FBI had been monitoring Cuban spy activities for over 30 years, but made only occasional arrests. The Cuban government had long sought to undermine the counter-revolutionary activities of anti-Castro exile Cuban-Americans, since the 1962 Bay of Pigs Invasion onwards (United States and state terrorism#Cuba (1956-present)).

After two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were shot down by Cuban MiGs in February 1996 and four American citizens were murdered, on the basis of information sent to Cuba by an infiltrator of the group, the Clinton administration launched a crackdown.

Arrests, convictions and sentences

All five were arrested in Miami, Florida, on September 12, 1998 and were indicted by the US government on 26 different counts, including charges of false identification, espionage and (for Hernández) conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the shoot-down of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.

From the day of their arrests, the so-called "Five" spent 17 months in solitary confinement,. Evidence, which the President of the Cuban National Assembly Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada maintains "belonged to the defendants themselves and included family photographs, personal correspondence and recipes" - was classified as "secret", preventing the defendants and their attorneys from seeing it.

The trial, beginning in November 2000, went on for seven months and jury deliberations lasted a few hours. In June of 2001, the group was convicted of all 26 counts in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami, including the charge of first-degree murder against Gerardo Hernandez which the prosecution had applied to withdraw. In December of 2001, the members of the group were sentenced to varying prison terms: two life terms for Hernández, to be served consecutively; life for Guerrero and Labañino; 19 years for Fernando Gonzáles; and 15 years for René Gonzáles. In addition, the prosecution sought a novel post-release sentence of "incapacitation", imposing specific restrictions on them after their release, which would be enforced by the FBI.

After the arrests, motions by the defense for a change of venue, on the basis that Miami was a venue too associated with exile Cubans, were refused. The jury did not include any Cuban-Americans but 16 of the 160 members of the jury pool "knew the victims of the shootdown or knew trial witnesses who had flown with them." A year later, an application to change venue for the same reason was granted by the same court in an employment case with a Cuban connection. As a result the Five applied for annulment of the trial and a change of venue for a retrial; the motion was denied. The Five's appeal to a higher court was inhibited by further month's solitary confinement in early 2003, and by denial of access to their attorneys; the appeal court effectively acknowledged these human rights infringements by granting more time for the appeal at the request of the attorneys. On August 9, 2005, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta unanimously overturned the convictions and sentences of the Cuban Five and ordered a new trial outside of Miami, saying that the Cuban exile community and the trial publicity made the trial unfavorable and prejudicial to the defendants. This was the first time a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a trial court's finding with respect to venue. However, on October 31, 2005 the Atlanta court agreed to a US government request to review the decision, and in August 2006 the ruling for a new trial was reversed by a 10-2 vote of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeal sitting en banc. Charles R. Wilson wrote the opinion of the majority.

On June 4, 2008, a 3-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of the "Five" but vacated and remanded for resentencing in district court the sentences of Guerrero, Labañino, and Fernando González. The court affirmed the sentences of Gerardo Hernandez and Rene Gonzalez. The court found that there was no espionage and that no top secret information was obtained or transmitted, and that the sentencing judge had made six serious errors, but nonetheless remanded the case back to the same court. The decision was drawn up by William Pryor. In January 2009, the Five appealed to the US Supreme Court. 12 amicus curiae briefs have been filed.

Cuban government's criticism of the convictions

Sign on a street in Varadero.

The arrest and conviction incited an uproar from the Cuban government and sympathetic groups. The five convicted men claim that they were in Miami to monitor anti-Castro Cuban exile groups operating out of that city, which they claim were engaging in terrorist activities against Cuba, although anti-Castro supporters claim there has been no proof and/or conviction supporting the argument that those under surveillance by the spy network (ie. Brothers to the Rescue pilots; the Elian Gonzalez family, and other civic Cuban exile groups) have committed or have been involved in terrorist plots or acts .

Defenders of the Cuban Five claim that their actions are justified on the grounds that acts of terrorism against Cuba were carried out by exile groups such as CORU, Alpha 66, and Omega 7 during the 1960s and 1970s with impunity.

In a 2001 report by Cuba's Permanent Mission to the United Nations, the Cuban government cataloged 3,478 deaths as a result of "terrorism", "aggression", "acts of piracy and other actions". The events cited span the course of four decades and pertain to attacks such as the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 by men trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as the CIA-supported Bay of Pigs invasion and the War Against the Bandits between the government and anti-communist rebels in the Escambray Mountains (see also Operation Mongoose). The frequency of these attacks has decreased in recent decades to almost non-existent.

In 1999 and 2000, in a propagandistic act with no relevancy in the real world, the Cuban government sued the Government of the United States in Cuba's civil courts for damage caused by terrorist acts, with the courts awarding damages of $180bn and $120bn respectively.

International criticism of the convictions

Since their conviction, there has been an international campaign for the case to be appealed. In the United States, the campaign is most conspicuously represented by the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five , which is represented in twenty US cities and over thirty countries. Other US groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party have been known to campaign for the release of the Cuban Five.

On 27 May 2005, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted a report by its Working Group on Arbitrary Detention stating its opinions on the facts and circumstances of the case and calling upon the US government to remedy the situation. Among the report's criticisms of the trial and sentences, section 29 states:

29. The Working Group notes that it arises from the facts and circumstances in which the trial took place and from the nature of the charges and the harsh sentences handed down to the accused that the trial did not take place in the climate of objectivity and impartiality that is required in order to conform to the standards of a fair trial as defined in article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States of America is a party.

Amnesty International has criticized the US treatment of the Cuban Five as human rights violations, as the wives of René Gonzáles and Gerardo Hernández have not been allowed visas to visit their imprisoned husbands. Furthermore, Amnesty International has declared, in a 2006 open letter to the US State Department, that they are following closely the status of the ongoing appeals of the five men of numerous issues challenging the fairness of the trial which have not yet been addressed by the appeal courts.

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs has criticised the unwillingness of the United States government to extradite Luis Posada Carriles, convicted of the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455.

Eight international Nobel Prize winners have written and sent a document to the US Attorney General calling for freedom for the Cuban Five, signed by Zhores Alferov (Nobel Prize for Physics, 2000), Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize, 1984), Nadine Gordimer (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1991), Rigoberta Menchú (Nobel Peace Prize, 1992), Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (Nobel Peace Prize, 1980), Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1986), José Saramago (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1996), Günter Grass (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1999).

In the United Kingdom, among other actions, 110 Members of Parliament wrote an open letter to the US Attorney General in support of the Five. Six other wrote to Tony Blair calling on the British government to apply pressure on the US to act against terrorists in Florida and to release the Five immediately. Blair declined to do so.

In April 2009 a Brazilian human rights group, Torture Never Again, awarded the Five its Chico Mendes Medal, because their rights had been violated.

External links

• National Committee to Free the Cuban Five
• Miami 5 — site run by the Cuban newspaper Granma
• antiterroristas.cu — on terrorism against Cuba, and on the Cuban Five