The ‘Gabo’ connection
One of the fascinating sidebars to the story of the Cuban Five is the cameo role Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez played in the unfolding drama that led to the arrest of the Five in September 1998.
In this excerpt from the manuscript-in-progress, Fidel Castro asks his friend ‘Gabo’ to undertake an important secret mission on Cuba’s behalf.
Havana
Gabriel Garcia Marquez had to call Bill Richardson. Immediately. He needed to let the American Ambassador to the United Nations know that plans for his upcoming visit to Washington had taken a sudden, “unforeseen and significant turn.”
Fidel Castro with Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Marquez, the Nobel Prize-winning author, had stopped in Havana for a few days on his way to the United States, partly to clear up some literary loose ends for an article he was writing on Pope John Paul’s recent visit to Cuba and partly to spend some time with his old friend Fidel Castro. The two men had known each other for decades.
In January 19978, in fact, Marquez had been Castro’s front-row guest during the Pope’s historic speech to hundreds of thousands of Cubans—believers and non-believers alike—who had jammed into Revolution Square.
It had been a fascinating speech. The Pope had publicly called for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners while, at the same time, chastising the United States for its ongoing blockade of the communist island nation and attacking what he described as a “capitalist neo-liberalism [that] subdues human beings and nations’ development to the blind forces of the market…allowing for the exaggerated enrichment of a few at the expense of impoverishment of a growing minority, making the rich richer and the poor poorer.” Marquez was looking forward to writing more about the visit and its larger meaning.
Given their long history, it wasn’t all that surprising that Castro would take the occasion of Marquez’s visit to ask “Gabo” to carry a message form him to another of Marquez’s good friends, United States President Bill Clinton.[1]
What was surprising—shocking, even horrifying—was the content of the message Castro wanted Marquez to deliver to the president of the United States.
During the course of their discussions earlier today, Marquez had talked to Castro about his upcoming visit to Princeton University in New Jersey to conduct a literary workshop, and mentioned that he also hoped to make a side trip to Washington to meet privately with Clinton to discuss “the Colombia situation."
That’s when Castro had suggested his plan. Cuba had just discovered what he described as a “sinister terrorist plot” against Cuba, he told Marquez, and he wanted Bill Clinton himself to know about it so he could take the appropriate actions. But Castro didn’t want to put this information in an official letter in order “to avoid putting Clinton in the predicament of giving an [official] answer.” Instead, Castro would prepare a written summary of the plot and “other subjects of mutual interest,” which Marquez could then use as source material when he spoke with Clinton.
Castro had then personally drafted the note, entitled SUMMARY OF ISSUES THAT GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ MAY CONFIDENTIALLY TRANSMIT TO PRESIDENT CLINTON. It touched on seven different subjects, but it was “Point 1” that really mattered:
“An important issue. Plans for terrorist actions against Cuba continue to be hatched and paid by the Cuban American National Foundation using Central American mercenaries. Two new attempts at setting up bombs in tourist resorts have been undertaken before, and after, the Pope’s visit. In the first case, those responsible failed, they were able to escape and return to Central America by plane leaving behind the technical means and explosives, which were then seized. In the second case, three mercenaries were arrested with explosives and other means. They are Guatemalans. They would have received $1,500 USD for every bomb exploded.
“In both cases they were hired and supplied by agents of the ring organized by the Cuban American National Foundation. Now, they are plotting and taking steps to set up bombs in planes from Cuba or any other country airline carrying tourists to, or from, Cuba to Latin American countries. [Italics mine.] The method is similar: to hide a small device at a certain place inside the plane, a powerful explosive with a fuse controlled by a digital clock that can be programmed 99 hours in advance, then easily abandon the plane at foreseen destination; the explosion would take place either on the ground or while the plane is in flight to its next destination.
“Really devilish procedures: easy-to-handle mechanisms, components whose detection is practically impossible, a minimum training required for their use, almost absolute impunity.
“Extremely dangerous to airlines and to tourist facilities or of any other type. Tools suitable for a crime, very serious crimes. lf they were revealed and their possibilities exposed, they might become an epidemic as the hijacking of planes once became. Other Cuban extremist groups living in the United States are beginning to move in that direction.
“The American investigation and intelligence agencies are in possession of enough reliable information on the main people responsible. lf they really want to, they have the possibility of preventing in time this new modality of terrorism. It will be impossible to stop it if the United States doesn't discharge its fundamental duty of fighting it. The responsibility to fight it can’t be left to Cuba alone since any other country of the world might also be a victim of such actions.”
He also didn’t make mention of the “two unwritten questions” Castro had suggested he could raise face-to-face with Clinton “if the circumstances were propitious.”
***
You can find out how the story unfolds and the unexpected, unintended consequences Marquez’s visit would have for the members of La Red Avispa, the Cuban intelligence agents now known as the Cuban Five.
[1] Marquez had carried messages between the two men in the past. In August 1994, in the midst of the crisis over the prospect that as many as 300,000 Cuban balseros, or boat people, might seek asylum in the U.S., Clinton and Castro used Marquez to open confidential talks on finding a solution to the exodus. During a dinner party on Martha’s Vineyard hosted by writer William Styron and his wife and attended by the vacationing Clintons, Marquez had steered Clinton aside to outline Castro’s proposals to settle the issue and to personally urge Clinton to “try and come to an understanding with Fidel, as he has a very good opinion of you.” Clinton, according to Styron’s wife, seemed amenable. It was the beginning of a brief interlude of fruitful discussions that ended abruptly in February 1996 when Cuban MiGs shot down two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in the Straits of Florida.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Erikson, the “absurdly unsuccessful” embargo, the Five and the future
Erikson
The author of the acclaimed book Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution is the new Senior Advisor in the U.S. State Department’s Western Hemisphere Affairs office.
What—if anything—does Daniel P. Erikson’s appointment last week mean for the future of U.S-Cuban relations—and the fate of the Cuban Five?
While the Miami Herald says Erikson’s duties are “still being defined,” the newspaper adds the former Senior Associate with the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington is “likely to play at least some role in carrying out the diplomatic side of the Obama administration's policies on Cuba.”
The Cuba Wars
Erikson’s Cuba Wars won Foreword Magazine’s 2008 Political Science Book of the Year award and praise from a diverse collection of American critics. The Nation called it “sharp and deeply reported.” Foreign Affairs described it as “an eloquent cry for more realistic, decent responses that help—rather than further punish—the long-suffering Cuban People.” And the Associated Press lauded it as “a complete, insightful and fair-minded look at American policies toward Cuba.”
The question is whether being fair-minded matters when it comes to Cuban-American relations.
The best clues to that question may be in Eriskon’s own writing.
Erikson rightly describes the 50-year U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, for example, as “absurdly unsuccessful,” and pointedly notes the hypocrisy that “tens of millions of [U.S.] dollars have been spent on Radio and TV Marti broadcasts intended to break through the Castro regime’s ‘information blockade,’ but the average American is banned from traveling to the island.”
He pins much of the blame for the logic-clanging dissonance in U.S. policy on the Cuban-American lobby, which—despite its 50-year track record of abysmal failure to topple Fidel Castro, or do much else other than get in the way—still exerts a bizarrely out-of-whack-with-global-reality influence over America’s Cuba policy.
Consider Erikson’s pre-new-job take on two specific cases:
- In his book, Erikson acknowledges that Cuba dispatched the Cuban Five to Florida “to keep an eye out for threats to the island that emanated from Cuban exiles.” While he is far from sympathetic to their current plight—he declares, without irony, that “they faced the full brunt of the American legal process, which found them guilty on all counts”—he acknowledges the real reason the Five seem “destined to remain behind bars” is the power of the Cuban-American lobby, “especially given the incendiary nature of the case in Miami.”
- His analysis of the case of Luis Posada Carriles is equally dark. Erikson points out that Posada’s 2005 return to the United States “created a fiasco for the Bush administration.” But he says it ultimately decided to treat the acknowledged terrorist with prosecutorial “kid gloves and face the charge of hypocrisy” rather than put him on trial “and risk embarrassing revelations and an explosion of outrage in Miami.”
Why all this concern with what a bunch of aging, obsessive exiles in Miami think?
Erikson answered that question too. “It is far from clear that the strong Democratic majorities in the 111th Congress will herald much change on Cuba policy,” he concluded shortly after the 2008 elections, “especially since the Cuban-American lobbies that favor the embargo actively gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to both Republican and Democratic congressional candidates during the last election cycle. ”
Oh yes, that...
Or consider Barak Obama. During the last presidential campaign, Obama sent mixed signals. He expressed a willingness to begin “direct dialogue without pre-conditions” with the Cuban government and promised to support lifting restrictions on family members traveling or sending money to relatives in Cuba. But, in his major campaign speech on Latin American policy—to a well-connected, well-heeled Cuban American audience, it should be noted—he insisted he would maintain that same “absurdly unsuccessful” embargo.
Given that Obama became “the first presidential candidate to win [Florida] since the end of the Cold War while campaigning on a platform that moved, even gingerly, in the direction of greater engagement with Cuba,” and that his eventual Electoral College margin of victory was so significant he didn’t need Florida’s usually critical 27 electoral votes,” you might think Obama could finally change all that.
Erikson did. He argued in The Cuba Wars that Obama “had tremendous political scope of action to break through the “traditional animosity guiding U.S. relations with Cuba. The question,” he added sagely, "was whether he would choose to use it.”
So far, the verdict is decidedly mixed. Obama has eased some family travel restrictions and there are hopes people-to-people openings will continue to expand. But the administration has shown no signs—publicly at least—that it is ready top lift the useless trade embargo or negotiate a deal to free the Cuban Five.
Still, IPS, the Inter-Press Service, reported this week on rumours in Cuba that the Archbishop of Havana, Jaime Ortega, "may be mediating" negotiations to trade the Five for Alan Gross, the U.S. government contractor being held in Havana on allegations he entered the country illegally to distribute telecommunicatoons equipment to dissidents. That, coupled with Fidel Castro's recent public musings that the Five would be freed by the end of the year, has prompted renewed hope about the case.
But it is still faint. That’s because there is another presidential election looming, which will almost certainly be a closer contest than in 2008 , which means Florida’s anti-Castro warriors may matter more this time.
Which is why even the appointment of a moderate like Erikson seems unlikely to dramatically alter the stale state of Cuban-American relations.
That may not make foreign policy—or even common—sense but, as Daniel P. Erikson has demonstrated, when it comes to Cuba making sense doesn’t matter much at all.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
René and the Russian spies
René González Sehwerert told me he “wasn’t surprised at all” when the United States government reached a swift deal this summer to swap 10 freshly captured Russian spies for four Russians who’d been convicted of passing their country’s state secrets to the U.S.
Pass Go.
Get out of Jail Free.
Go home.
Sing patriotic songs with Vladimir Putin…
René González didn’t get to do any of those things.
René González
An American-born Cuban, González is currently in prison in Marianna, Florida, serving a 15-year sentence for what a Miami jury concluded amounted to the vague-notion crime of “general conspiracy” and conspiracy to act as a non-registered foreign agent – which, if you think about it, is pretty much what those now-free Russians were accused of doing.
González was part of a group of intelligence agents Havana dispatched to Florida in the 1990s to infiltrate wing-nut Miami-based exile groups that were bent on – and were, in fact – committing terrorist acts against their former homeland.
In Havana in June 1998, Cuban State Security turned over to a visiting delegation of FBI agents some of the fruits of the labours of González and his fellow agents.
What the Cubans revealed – through affidavits, confessions, wiretapped phone conversations, bomb-making equipment, bomb fragments, etc. – clearly connected the dots between a wave of hotel bombings in Havana in 1997, which killed Fabio Di Celmo, an Italian-Canadian businessman (read an excerpt and listen to Fabio's brother's memories of that day), and extremist anti-Castro exile groups in Miami(another excerpt).
The FBI thanked the Cubans and promised to investigate and respond. They didn’t. Instead, three months later, the FBI arrested not the terrorists who’d planned the bombings, but the Cuban agents who’d helped uncover their plots.
In Castro-phobic, up-is-down Miami, González and his four arrested compatriots – who’ve since become known globally as the Cuban Five and are considered heroes in their homeland – were tried, quickly convicted, and even more quickly sentenced to way-out-of-whack-with-the-known-facts prison terms.
They’re all still in prison. Two, including González, have been denied a single face-to-face visit with their wives for the last 12 years. One – convicted on the flimsiest of jury-baiting evidence of conspiracy to commit murder – is currently in the process of losing his last faint-hope appeal, thus facing an until-death-do-us-part future of two consecutive life terms plus 15 years.
Unless, of course, the United States government decides to cut the kind of deal with Cuba that it willingly did with the Russians.
The U.S. could easily swap the Five for whatever remains of Cuba’s “political prisoners.” Raúl Castro, in fact, offered to do just that at the time of Obama’s election. The Cubans would also probably happily toss into that bargain American contractor Allan Gross, who is currently in jail in Cuba after entering the country illegally in order to distribute satellite communications devices.
The reality is that the Cubans – like the patriotic song-singing Russians – didn’t steal (or even try to steal) a single American state secret.
Forget the conspiracy-to-murder charge, which wouldn’t stand up in any courtroom outside America. According to a 2005 report by the United Nations Human Rights Commission’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, in fact, their 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.”
For the most part, the Five were engaged in the kind of anti-terrorist work that, in post 9-11 America, would have earned them patriotic medals and the thanks of a grateful nation – if, that is, they had been American agents trying to keep Al Qaeda from attacking their homeland.
If, more importantly, they weren’t Cubans.
So why won’t the United States cut a deal with Cuba like it did with Russia?
“The policies of the U.S. government against Cuba are from another galaxy,” González responds when I ask him that question in an email, adding that those other-worldly policies are “fed by a rabid, irrational mentality that is almost impossible to fathom.”
As part of my research for a book on the Cuban Five, I’ve been corresponding with several of the Five, including González.
For a man who has spent the past 12 years in jail – some of that time in “the hole” – for a crime he still believes was not a crime and who has not been allowed a single visit with his wife in all that time, González remains remarkably positive and upbeat.
“I've tried to make the best of it, with some success, I suppose,” he tells me of his jail-induced health and physical fitness regimes. “To tell you the truth I feel great at my 54 years. Some good has to come out of this.”
One thing that hasn’t changed as a result of his incarceration, however, is González’s belief in the legitimacy of what he did. Neither has his hard-won understanding of what drives Cuban-American relations, even in the age of Obama.
“It is far more complicated than the common explanation about the ‘too powerful Miami Cubans,’” he tells me. “The Miami Cubans are still the puppets, although from time to time they try to pull at the strings, like on the Elian [González] affair.”
The deeper explanation, he believes, has to do with America’s historic understanding of the Cuban revolution. “By their logic we are a property that they ‘lost,’ and it carries a heavy price for the ‘lost’ property to assert its own independence.”
René González is still paying that price, while the Russian spies are back home, singing patriotic songs.
This commentary also appears in
The Mark: The People and Ideas Behind the Headlines.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
More details emerge of Hernandez’s time in the ‘hole’
Gerardo31
"[Gerardo] Hernández’s sister Isabel first learned that he had been put in the 'hole' ... when she went for a visit at the U.S. maximum security prison in Victorville, California, July 24. She was only allowed to talk to him by phone, separated by a thick glass partition, while he was kept handcuffed...
"Hernández had been asking to see a doctor since April. He was not given an appointment until July 20, when doctors ordered blood tests to see if he had been infected by a bacteria that has sickened many prisoners. Instead of facilitating the tests, prison authorities put Hernández in the hole the next day..."
More from The Militant, August 16, 2010.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Conversation about Sting of the Wasp
Stephen Kimber talks about the story behind the story of his new book Sting of the Wasp in this interview on CKDU-FM's Book Club with journalist Stephen Patrick Clare.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
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About
This is the site for Sting of the Wasp, collected research and other materials for an in-progress narrative nonfiction book about the Cuban Five by Stephen Kimber.
The Cuban Five were members of "La Red Avispa"—the Wasp Network—spies Havana dispatched to Florida in the early 1990s to infiltrate militant anti-Castro exile groups that Cuba believed were plotting terrorist attacks on its soil. The Cuban Five were arrested, tried, convicted and are all now serving long prison terms in the United States.
In the United States, they are virtually unknown. In Cuba, they are heroes.
That’s the short version of the story. The long version is… well, more complicated... Stay tuned.
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