Day in The Five: Heroes of the Republic
On December 29, 2001, the Cuban Parliament unanimously voted to declare five Cuban intelligence agents—who had been sentenced in Miami earlier that month to prison terms ranging from 10 years to life—“Heroes of the Republic of Cuba.”
It is Cuba’s highest honour.
The five—Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labanino, Rene Gonzalez, Fernando Gonzalez and Antonio Guerrero—were part of La Red Avispa, a spy network the Cuban government dispatched to Florida in the 1990s to infiltrate and disrupt terrorist attacks directed at their homeland.
They were arrested in Miami in September 1998 and convicted of espionage and even conspiracy to commit murder after a controversial six-month trial.
The Cuban government argued the men were only doing what the U.S. government claimed, in the wake of 9/11, as its own sacred mission—fighting terrorism—and that they’d been forced to do what they did because the American government had refused to do anything to prevent Florida-based exile groups from launching terrorist attacks against Cuba.
At a special session of the National Assembly, Cuban President Fidel Castro called the sentences “rude, infamous.” He praised the Five as “extraordinary men [on] an extraordinary and human mission,” and thanked them “for completing with exemplary dedication, dignity and steadfastness the sacred mission of defending the nation and protecting it from terrorism.”
Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon read a New Year's letter the Five had sent to Castro in which they quoted a famous Cuban independence leader, General Calixto Garcia: “I am, before everything, Cuban. And for nothing, and for no one, will I sacrifice my ideals.”
Castro later told the assembly that, as a result of the importance of the men and their mission, 2002 would be officially known in Cuba as the “Year of the Heroic Prisoners of the Empire.”
Despite that—not to mention years of legal appeals, international reports criticizing the trial and sentencing, and an international campaign to “Free the Five” that included calls from more than a dozen Nobel laureates for their freedom—all five men remain in custody in U.S. prisons today.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Day in the Five…Whose fair trial?
On December 8, 1998, after a 14-day trial, jurors in Puerto Rico acquitted five anti-Castro exile militants of plotting to kill Fidel Castro.
Afterwards, two of the jurors told reporters the verdict was intended to send a “message to the Cuban people that we’re with you.” The jurors then left the courthouse, singing the Cuban national anthem in the company of the no-longer-accused. That night, they all celebrated together at a popular local Cuban restaurant.
“Prosecutors had hoped that holding the trial in Puerto Rico would give them a better shot at convictions than in Miami,” the Miami Herald explained after the verdict. In Miami, the newspaper noted, "juries regularly acquit anti-Castro plotters.”
The prosecutors may have been wrong about Puerto Rican juries.
But they definitely knew their Floroda juries.
That's why, even as prosecutors in Puerto Rico had opposed defence motions to move the assassination plot trial to Miami, prosecutors in Miami were fighting even harder to oppose defence motions for a change of venue in the case of the Cuban Five.
The Five were arrested in September 1998, just three months before the verdict in the Puerto Rico case.
For more details on the case against the Puerto Rican plotters—the one on which they were acquitted—check out this excerpt from Sting in the Wasp’s in-progress narrative.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Day in the Five… The trial begins
Ten years ago today—on December 6, 2000—five Cuban men finally went on trial in a small chamber on the seventh floor of the Miami court building. They were charged with everything from the relatively minor offence of failing to register as foreign agents all the way to conspiracy to commit murder.
In his opening statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Buckner claimed the evidence would “paint a portrait of a sophisticated and highly motivated espionage cell operating in the midst of our community” The spies, he claimed, had gone so far as to help “bring about the murders” of four exile fliers who’d been shot down while flying near Cuba in 1996.
The Cubans acknowledged the Five were intelligence agents but claimed their mission was not to spy on the United States government but to infiltrate militant, Florida-based anti-Cuban exile groups. Their goal: to prevent terrorist attacks on their own country. They denied any responsibility for the downing of the aircraft, which the Cuban government claimed had repeatedly violated Cuban airspace and refused to desist despite many warnings.
The trial, which would last six months and generate more than 3,000 pages of evidence and 20,000 pages of testimony, took place in a highly charged atmosphere. The trial began in the immediate aftermath of the infamous Elián González affair and against the backdrop of a Miami so hostile to Cuba and its leader Fidel Castro that several defence lawyers felt compelled to begin their opening statements “by disavowing any sympathies for Castro or communism,” the Miami Herald reported.
It was not a good start. And it would only get worse.
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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