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<font size=3><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">July 10-12,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>President Obama,
It's Up to You to Rectify This Injustice <br><br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">The
Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By JOSÉ
PERTIERRA <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">T</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>he day the Court sentenced him to life
imprisonment plus 10 years, in maximum security, Tony explained to Judge
Lenard why Cuba sent him to the United States. <br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>“Allow me to explain my reasons, your Honor, in the clearest and most
concise way: Cuba, my little country, has been attacked, assaulted,
and slandered, decade after decade by a cruel ,inhuman and absurd
policy. A real terrorist war. . . . . Where
have such unceasing ruthless acts been hatched and financed? For
the most part, in the United States of America.”<br><br>
</dl>Tony Guerrero was part of a team of agents that Cuba sent to Miami,
tasked with infiltrating the Florida-based terrorist groups responsible
for the murder of over 3,400 Cubans over four decades. The team did
not seek to infiltrate U.S. government agencies, nor did it obtain any
classified documents. Their purpose was to gather evidence, so that the
FBI would arrest the terrorists.<br><br>
In June of 1998, the FBI secretly met with Cuban government officials in
La Habana. Without revealing how they had obtained the evidence,
Cuban law enforcement officials shared with the FBI 175 pages of
documents related to 31 terrorist attacks and plans that took place
between 1990 and 1998, as well as the money trail (through New Jersey and
Miami) that paid for those attacks. <br><br>
Cuba also turned over audiotapes of 14 comprising conversations involving
the mastermind of the campaign of terror, Luis Posada Carriles, as well
as 13 video and audiotapes of Posada´s accomplices, which provided the
details of their crimes. Thanks to Tony and his team in Miami, Cuba
was able to provide the FBI with the names, addresses, telephone numbers,
even the license plate numbers of the terrorists.<br><br>
The FBI thanked Cuba for the evidence and promised to investigate.
Investigate they did, but the result was unexpected. Rather
than arrest the terrorists, the FBI used the evidence that Cuba gave them
to arrest the Five. Why?<br><br>
The Miami terrorists were trained in the United States and were an
important part of the covert war on Cuba during the Cold War. For
fifty years, the United States government has coddled and protected,
rather than jailed and prosecuted, them. <br><br>
Miami is their city-of-choice: a hotbed of hostility against Cuba.
It’s no coincidence that terrorists gravitate to that city. Miami
is where they are protected and feted, as if they were patriots and
heroes. Only in Miami could the government win its case against the
Five.<br><br>
Gaining evidence to prosecute Posada Carriles and his terrorist network
was the raison d´etre</i> for the Cuba Five coming to the United
States. He is the mastermind of much of the terrorism. After
the fall of the socialist bloc, the Cuban economy went into a
tailspin. It turned to tourism for much-needed cash. In an
effort to scare tourists from going to Cuba, Miami Cubans unleashed a
campaign of terror against the island. They placed bombs in some of
La Habana´s most famous hotels and restaurants: the Hotel Nacional, la
Bodeguita del Medio, the Chateau Miramar, the Meliá Cohiba, the Tropicana
and others.<br><br>
On September 4, 1997, one of those bombs killed a young Italian by the
name of Fabio Di Celmo at the Hotel Copacabana in La Habana. A
piece of shrapnel from the glass ashtray next to the explosive device
severed his jugular. Blood gushed from the left side of his neck,
and he died within minutes.<br><br>
A year later, Luis Posada Carriles admitted to the New York Times</i>
that he was the mastermind behind the bombs that had been exploding in La
Habana. “That Italian was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but
I sleep like a baby,” he told New York Times </i>reporter Anne Louise
Bardach. <br><br>
When he killed Fabio in cold blood, Posada was already a fugitive from
justice with 73 counts of first-degree murder pending against him in
Venezuela for the 1976 downing of a passenger plane that killed all 73
people aboard, including virtually all the members of the Cuban fencing
team and a little nine-year-old Guyanese girl named Sabrina
Paul. Rather than extraditing him to Venezuela, the United
States continues to protect him and ignore Venezuela’s request. <br><br>
Fabiucho, as his family called him, was the youngest child of Giustino
and Ora. He was only 22 years old when he was brutally
murdered. He loved to read and to play soccer. He was madly
in love: with Cuba and her people. I spoke to his 90-year old father,
Giustino, two months ago in Cuba. Over drinks at a restaurant he
opened in his son´s honor in the Vedado neighborhood of La Habana,
Giustino recalled a letter he wrote to Tony six years ago: “Let the first
rays of sunshine fall on the darkness of the monstrous injustice of your
imprisonment.”<br><br>
Giustino, these drawings by Antonio Guerrero are little rays of sunshine
that fall on the darkness of this government’s indifference to the
suffering of the Five. It´s up to us to turn them into lightning
bolts of action. “Life is only life if there is courage”, said Tony
in one of his most beloved poems. Let us find the courage to take
up the mantle of the struggle to free the Five from the “monstrous
injustice” of their imprisonment.<br><br>
Let us remember here tonight and let us repeat it without rest that Tony
came to the United States to prevent crime, not to commit it. Let
us not forget that the U.S. government has turned justice
upside-down. And let us repeatedly remind the world that while the
government of this country puts the real heroes in jail, it protects the
criminals, allowing them to continue their reign of terror against
Cuba.<br><br>
On June 16, the Supreme Court turned down without comment a request to
hear the appeal of the convictions of the Five. The case is now
squarely in the hands of the President of the United States.
<br><br>
With one stroke of the pen, the President can reduce their sentences to
time served, so these brave men can go home to their families.
Article 2 of the Constitution of the United States affords the President
the power of Executive Clemency. That power is unfettered.<br><br>
No normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba is
possible as long as the Five remain unjustly incarcerated and the
terrorists live in freedom. Let this country come to its
senses: the terrorists belong in jail, and the counterterrorists
must be set free.<br><br>
From his prison cell in Colorado, Tony wrote that “tenderness runs pure
and clear like a mountain stream, particularly when life is most
painful. Suffering is a shared experience. We must know how
to give without expecting anything in return”. “Como el agua, pura
y clara, Corre en su arroyo serena, ha de correr la ternura, Cuando
aparece una Pena . . . No hay dolor que no sea tuyo. No hay sufrir
sin compartir. Se ha de tener un orgullo, Saber dar sin
recibir.”<br><br>
</i>President Obama, you were elected as a breath of fresh air, a
Promethean President who looks to the future. You say that you
don’t like to look to the past. But, Mr. President, you must
understand that Posada and the other Miami Cubans were Washington’s
instruments of terror against Cuba. That’s why the FBI didn’t
arrest them and instead arrested the Five.<br><br>
It is now your responsibility to right these terrible wrongs. A
blockade premised on starving Cubans into submission and a campaign of
terror to try and bring a proud people to their knees: that is the sordid
past you have inherited from your predecessors in the White
House.<br><br>
Mr. President, you must begin to heal these open wounds. This is the most
powerful nation in the history of civilization. Rather than the
most ruthless, Mr. President, ought not the United States be the most
generous, the most humane?<br><br>
President Obama, the Cold War is over. For the sake of the victims
of terrorism, for the sake of the suffering caused by almost fifty years
of an illegal and immoral blockade, for the sake of your country, for the
sake of the future, heal the wounds: end the blockade against Cuba,
extradite Posada, and free the Five. <br><br>
José Pertierra</b> is an attorney. He represents the government of
Venezuela in its request that the United States extradite Luis Posada
Carriles. His office is in Washington, DC. <br><br>
<br><br>
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