[Ppnews] Honor and Injustice: The Case of the Cuban Five
Political Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Thu Apr 27 12:18:18 EDT 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/
April 27, 2006
The Case of the Cuban Five
Honor and Injustice
By JOSÉ PERTIERRA
Last Valentines Day, the Federal Court of
Appeals heard oral arguments concerning one of
the greatest injustices in the history of U.S.
jurisprudence. The lives of five innocent men
hang in the balance, awaiting the decision of the
11th Circuit. Although the United Nations Working
Group on Arbitrary Detentions already declared
their trial in Miami unfair and in violation of
international law, most Americans are not
familiar with the story of the Cuban Five.
They are five men of peace who came to this
country from Cuba to combat violence and terror.
The men were wrongfully arrested eight years ago,
tried and eventually convicted in Miami for
conspiracy to commit espionage and murder. A
Miami Court meted out the maximum prison terms
that the law allows: 1. Gerardo Hernandez
received a double life sentence, 2. Antonio
Guerrero was given a single life sentence, 3.
Ramon Labañino a life sentence, 4. Fernando
Gonzalez a 19 year sentence, and 5. René Gonzalez 15 years.
To understand their story and their trial, we
must reflect on the last forty-seven years of
terrorism that have been launched against the
people of Cuba from the shores of South Florida
with the knowledge and consent of the United States government.
The extremists in Miami have fought a dirty war
against Cuba for over almost fifty years. With
the aid and comfort of the United States,
Cuban-immigrant terrorists specifically target
innocent men, women and children of Cuba in a
type of Miami-Jihad against Cuban Communism. They
target Cuban airliners, ships, restaurants,
hotels, places of businessall in an effort to
take over the island and shape it in their own bloody image.
Cuba puts the number of its victims of terrorism
at 3,478 killed and 2,099 wounded. The terrorists
also caused significant property damage which,
when added to the damage done to the Cuban
economy by the United States blockade against the
island, amount to losses in excess of $67 billion.
In the early 1990s Cuba was struggling to
jump-start an ailing economy, after the dramatic
disappearance of its principal trading partners:
the Soviet Union and its allies. Desperate for
dollars, Cuba broadened its tourist industry.
Looking to cause a chilling effect on the
bourgeoning tourist trade in Cuba, the
Miami-based terrorists targeted Havanas finest
hotels and restaurants. An internationally known
Cuban-émigré terrorist named Luis Posada Carriles
used tens of thousands of dollars obtained from
Cuban extremist groups in Miami to hire Central
Americans to take and set bombs in Cuba. The
bombs killed an Italian tourist, Fabio di Celmo, and wounded several others.
Frustrated with the FBI´s apparent unwillingness
to stop this campaign of terror, Cuba asked the
Five to penetrate the Miami based extremist
organizations and gather information about
upcoming terrorist acts in order to try and
derail them before the terrorists could carry
them out. They were able to establish clear,
convincing and unequivocal evidence that
implicated leading organizations and individuals
living in Miami as being behind the campaign of terror.
President Fidel Castro decided to send a personal
emissary to Washington to deliver a hand-written
note to President Bill Clinton, asking that the
United States indict and prosecute the
terrorists. Castros letter to Clinton said in
part, if you really want to do so, you can put a
stop to this new form of terrorism. It is
impossible to stop this terrorism without United
States involvement. . . . Unless it is stopped
now, in the future any country could be victimized by this new terrorism.
President Castros personal emissary was none
other than Nobel Prize for Literature Gabriel
García Márquez who arrived in Washington, D.C. on
May 1, 1998. President Clinton was out of town
for several days in California, and after waiting
him out at the Hotel Washington for several days,
García Márquez finally met with White House Chief
of Staff Mac McLarty on May 6, 1998 and gave him
the letter. García Márquez recalls McLarty´s
reaction to the letter: The terrrorist plot the
letter outlined elicited from McLarty a grunt,
from which he uttered ´this is terrible´. García
Márquez tells that McLarty then repressed a
mischievous smile and exclaimed without
interrupting his reading of the letter, ´we have a common enemy´.
After McLarty finished reading, García Márquez
asked the question he had been saving since
arriving in Washington, would it be possible for
the FBI to establish contact with its Cuban
counterparts and begin a war in common against
terrorism? The meeting in the White House, says
García Márquez, lasted fifty minutes and ended
with McLarty looking into his eyes saying Your
mission was of the highest importance, and you
have done your job very well. García Márquez
committed the phrase to paper in a letter to
Fidel Castro and said: neither the personal
decency that I possess abundantly, nor the
modesty that I lack permits me to abandon this
phrase to the ephemeral glory of the microphones hidden in the flowerpots.
In the wake of the Garcia Marquez visit, the U.S.
sent an FBI team to Cuba a month later to discuss
collaboration with Cuba on a War On Terror.
Cuba handed over 64 files containing the results
of its investigation into 31 different
terrorists acts and plans against the island in
the decade of the 90s. Cuba enclosed details of
the terrorist operations, including photographs
of the explosives used. Having learned the lesson
taught Woodward and Bernstein by their famous
source Deep Throat, Cuba advised the FBI to
follow the money if it was to discover the
organizations in Miami who were behind the
campaign of terror, and Cuba handed the FBI 51
files with information relating to the money trail.
The mastermind behind the terror campaign of the
90s was Luis Posada Carriles, who was then living
in hiding in Central America and receiving money
from Miami extremist groups. Posada Carriles was
wanted in Venezuela for the cold blooded murder
of 73 innocent passengers aboard a Cuban civilian
airliner he downed in 1976 using C-4 explosives.
With the help of influential friends in Miami and
Washington, he escaped from jail in Venezuela while awaiting trial.
The money trail led directly to the lap of Posada
Carriles and passed through the offices of the
terrorist organizations in Miami that financed
him. In 1998, Posada Carriles admitted to the New
York Times of being the mastermind behind the
bombing campaign in Cuba and that the money used
to carry out the campaign of terror came from
well known Cuban-immigrant organizations in Miami.
Cuba handed over to the FBI tapes of 14 telephone
conversations of Luis Posada Carriles with
details on the series of bombs that had exploded
in Cuba in the 90s. Cuba also gave the FBI Luis
Posada Carriles´ addresses in El Salvador,
Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Panamá. Also
tapes of conversations with Central American
detainees in Cuba who admitted Posada Carriles is
their boss and had sent them to Cuba to place
explosives in the hotels and restaurants.
Finally, Cuba turned over 60 sets of documents
with information about 40 terrorists based in
Miami, including their addresses, and evidence of their ties to terror.
Cuba then waited . . . and waited . . . and
waited. Cuba waited for the FBI to start
arresting terrorists. But instead the FBI
arrested on September 12, 1998, the men now known
as the Cuban Five: the men who had come to Miami
to penetrate the Miami exile terrorist organizations.
According to El Nuevo Herald, the first persons
that were notified of the arrests of the Cuban
Five were Cong. Lincoln Diaz Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami.
The Five were charged with 26 counts of violating
federal laws. They were placed in solitary
confinement (in a place called the hole) for
the next 17 months, until the start of their trial.
The Elian González case had stirred up anti-Cuba
passions in Miami during the first several months
of the year 2000, and a defense team concerned
about prejudices in the city against their
clients made motions to have the venue changed
from Miami-Dade which the defense called a basic
nucleus of anti-Castro Cuban exiles where the
conditions for a fair trial do not exist. The
motions to change venue were denied, and the
trial took place in Miami in the fall of 2000. It lasted seven months.
The Five were not tried for espionage, but for
conspiracy to commit espionage. It is not
disputed that the Five didnt have, didnt take
and didnt see a single page of classified
government information. The first thing the
prosecutor said to the jury at the beginning of
trial was: We arrested these five men and
confiscated 20,000 documents from their
computers, but ladies and gentleman of the jury
none of these 20,000 documents contain a single
page of classified information. The lynchpin of
the governments case on conspiracy to commit
espionage was that Antonio Guerrero worked in a
metal shop in the Boca Chica Navy Training Base,
a base that was completely open to the public and
that even had a visitors viewing area to allow
folks to photograph planes on the runway. No one
even alleged that Antonio Guerrero or any of the
Five had access to any classified information
from the base or from anywhere else.
The government argued that the Five had agreed to
have Tony Guerrero work in the navy base and that
the alleged agreement constituted a conspiracy to commit espionage.
The second conspiracy charge was as ridiculous as
the first: conspiracy to commit homicide. The
Government alleged that Gerardo Hernández
conspired with Cuban officials to shoot down two
aircraft from a Miami organization called
Hermanos al Rescate as they entered Cuban
airspace. The two aircraft had been intercepted
by the Cuban Air Force and all four aboard were
killed. No evidence of any agreement between
Gerardo and anyone else regarding the shoot-down
was ever presented. Only a jury in Miami could
ever find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt
regarding a conspiracy about which not a single
piece of evidence was presented. The absence of
evidence on this charge was so glaring that the
Prosecutor tried to modify the charge but the
Court of Appeals refused to allow it.
The jury, whose foreman openly admitted during
voir dire his dislike of Fidel Castro, returned
guilty verdicts on all 26 counts of a seven month
trial against five defendants in a single day.
After listening to more than 70 witnesses over
the course of the trial, reviewing 119 volumes of
transcript plus 15 volumes of pre-trial testimony
and more than 800 exhibits some as long as 40
pages, the jury took all of one day of deliberation to convict.
After their convictions, the Five were sent to
maximum security prisons across this country, and
two of them have been denied visits from their
wives for the past seven years in violation of U.S. and international law.
On August 9, 2005, a Three-Judge Panel of the
very conservative Court of Appeals for the 11th
Circuit in Atlanta published a 93 page decision
that reversed the convictions and sentences,
ruling that the Five did not receive a fair trial
in Miami and acknowledging evidence produced by
the defense at trial that revealed terrorist
actions by Miami exile groups against Cuba. The
three judges even cited in a footnote the role of
Luis Posada Carriles and correctly referred to
him as a terrorist. They found that a perfect
storm of prejudice prevented the Cuban Five from having a fair trial in Miami.
The Bush Administration, however, didnt give up.
Through its Solicitor General, the government
made a formal appeal to all 12 judges of the
Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta, and out of apparent
deference to the unusual request from the
Department of Justice the Court of Appeals
nullified the three-judge panel decision and
agreed to hear the case en banc. Oral Agreements
were heard on February 14, 2006. and we continue
to await a verdict from the Court of Appeals, as
the Five continue to languish in prisons
throughout the country far away from their loved
ones. They will have spent eight years in prison
unjustly this coming September 12.
Attorney Leonard Weinglass who represents Antonio
Guerrero said recently: The Five were not
prosecuted because they violated American law,
but because their work exposed those who were. By
infiltrating the terror network that is allowed
to exist in Florida they demonstrated the
hypocrisy of America's claimed opposition to terrorism.
As the Five were being prosecuted in Miami, the
campaign of terror against Cuba continued. In
November 2000, Posada Carriles was arrested in
Panama along with three accomplices before they
could carry out the plan to blow up an auditorium
filled with students at the University of Panamá
where Cuban President Fidel Castro was to speak.
The four were convicted by a Panamanian Court,
but on August 26, 2004, in one of her last acts
as President, Mireya Moscoso pardoned them in
violation of Panamanian law. The three
accomplices, all Cuban-Americans, immediately
went to Miami to be given a heroes welcome.
Unable to immediately join them in Miami, because
he is neither a US citizen nor a legal resident,
Posada Carriles went to Honduras to scheme for a
way to go where many terrorists love to live: Miami.
In March 2005 he finally got his wish. His
Cuban-immigrant friends smuggled him into Miami
from the Yucatán peninsula aboard a yacht called
the Santrina in March of last year.
Venezuela immediately presented a request for his
extradition for 73 counts of first degree murder
in relation to the downing of the civilian
aircraft in 1976. Rather than acting on the
extradition request, the United States government
is now sheltering him in El Paso, Texas in
violation of important international treaties and
conventions, including one that protects us from
terrorism aboard civil aviation and another one
that prosecutes terrorists who use explosives in commission of their crimes.
The United States Government is conducting a
schizophrenic war on terror, as it prosecutes
those who combat terrorism and save lives, while
it shelters those who commit terrorism and
murder, such as Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch
and so many other terrorists who currently reside in Miami.
Washingtons schizophrenia on terror is
undetected by the majority of the American
people, because the mainstream media in this
country does not care enough to tell the story.
Should the American people learn the truth about
the Cuban Five, they will hold the United States
government accountable for its responsibility
concerning forty-seven years of terrorism against
Cuba, including the unjust prosecution of the
Cuban Five and the equally unjust sheltering of
international terrorists such as Luis Posada Carriles.
Some in Miami think Cuban immigrant terrorists
are patriots. They ignore that civilized people
must abide by rules, even in politics and war. To
target innocent civilians because some would
disagree with their countrys policies is not
patriotism. It is murder. There is no honor in murder.
There is no honor in prosecuting those who
peacefully combat terrorism, and there is no
honor in sheltering terrorists. As long as the
Cuban Five remain behind bars and impunity reigns
in Miami, President Bushs War on Terror will lack credibility.
There is no honor in silence. Journalists have a
duty to tell the American people the truth: about
the absence of weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, about the torture of prisoners in
Guantanámo and Abu Ghraib, about the existence of
CIA controlled clandestine prisons, about the
governments illegal domestic surveillance
program, about the bloody history of Miamis
terrorists, and about the true story of the Cuban
Five. It takes a while, but eventually the truth comes out.
History will honor the Cuban Five, and justice will soon set them free.
José Pertierra is an attorney in Washington, D.C.
He represents the government of Venezuela in the
extradition case of Luis Posada Carriles.
The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/ppnews_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20060427/baf1b7d4/attachment.htm>
More information about the PPnews
mailing list