Day in the Five: Cuba protests illegal flights… again
On January 16, 1996, the Cuban government filed yet another official protest with the U.S. State Department urging American authorities to stop anti-Castro exiles from violating Cuban airspace… again.
José Basulto
Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based anti-Castro exile group, had been racheting up its provocative flights since July 13, 1995 when founder José Basulto first buzzed Havana in his Cessna 337 aircraft, dropping medallions and bumper stickers from the aircraft to encourage “civil disobedience” among the locals. To publicize his illegal actions, Basulto even brought along a Miami-based TV crew. He’d flown over Havana twice more, including just a few days earlier, on January 13.
Though the Cuban diplomatic note acknowledged Washington had been trying to stop the flights—the Federal Aviation Administration even launched an investigation into the Brothers group—Havana called on the American government to do more.
According to the Miami Herald, a State Department spokesman did acknowledge the over-flights were "definitely a violation of both international and Cuban domestic law" and insisted "we take this [violation] very seriously."
Despite American government pressure—and Havana’s public declaration that it had the right to “interrupt” future flights—Basulto remained not only unrepentant but also publicly announced plans for more such flights.
Cuba Florida map 270x300
On February 24, 1996, the Cuban government made good on its threat—shooting down two Brothers to the Rescue planes off the Cuban coast and killing all four aboard. (The International Civil Aviation Organization would later determine that, on this occasion, the planes were actually in international waters when they were shot down.)
The shooting down of the Brothers aircraft would later become a central issue in the trial of the Cuban Five. The prosecution claimed Gerardo Hernandez, the leader of the spy group, not only knew about the plan to shoot down the plane but was also involved in the decision to do so. Despite the fact that the prosecution offered no evidence to back up that claim, a Miami jury convicted him of conspiracy to commit murder as a result.
“The crazy idea the prosecution invented,” Hernandez would later tell American journalist Saul Landau, “is that not only did I know they [Cuba] were going to shoot the planes down—I did not know that—but I knew would do so over international waters; that Cuba was conspiring, not just to shoot down these planes invading Cuban air space, but over international waters. That’s the most absurd idea that anyone could ever invent. But the trial was held in Miami, and therefore I would be found guilty of any charge at all.”
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Interview on Posada trial with CBC Radio’s Dispatches
The interview is now available online.
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Shedding light, perhaps, on an assassination plot
Luis Posada Carriles
A legal argument Thursday over whether prosecutors should be permitted to tell the jury that Luis Posada allegedly talked with an FBI agent while in prison in Panama in 2000 may have inadvertently opened a new, if small window on what we know about a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Posada and three accomplices were charged in November 2000 in connection with a botched attack on the Cuban leader.
On November 22, 2000, while Posada was still in jail awaiting trial, he met with local FBI legal attaché Gil Torres.
During that conversation, Posada supposedly told Torres he had, in fact, “planned the attack” on Castro but “abandoned it when he realized there would be too much collateral damage.”
Posada has always—before and since—publicly denied any involvement in the plot, insisting he was in Panama at the time only to meet with a wannabe Cuban military defector.
Five years later, during his 2005 asylum hearing, a Homeland Security lawyer again asked Posada whether he’d told the FBI he had planned the attack.
Posada answered “I don’t recall.”
Because the 2000 Panama interview took place in prison and Posada didn’t have counsel present, Judge Kathleen Cardone had already ruled the transcript couldn’t be used as evidence during Posada’s current immigration fraud case.
But prosecutors argued Thursday that shouldn’t stop them from simply making reference to the fact of the 2000 interview based on what Posada had said—under oath and with his lawyer present—during his asylum hearing five years later. During the ensuing arguments between the lawyers, the snippet about the FBI interview came out.
In the end, Judge Cardone rejected the government request.
What that means is that the jury won’t get to hear anything about the 2000 interview in which Posada confessed to planning the assassination, while—as he so often does—contradicting other statements he’d already made.
But thanks to the lawyerly arguments, we now at least know what Posada supposedly told the FBI about his role.
Not that that necessarily gets us any closer to the truth…
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Does the U.S. government want to convict Posada?
El Paso Federal Court House
If you are inclined to conspiracy theories, you might conclude—based on the evidence of the first few days of testimony in the immigration fraud trial of alleged terrorist Luis Posada Carriles—that the U.S. government is doing its damnedest to lose the case.
While the notion that prosecutors don’t want to win is almost certainly unfair, the reality is that prosecutor Jerome J. Teresinski’s performance with his first witness this week was—to be charitable—stunningly inept.
And his first witness, Gina Garrett-Jackson—the Miami-based Homeland Security lawyer who handled Posada’s 2005 asylum application—didn’t help the cause.
Teresinski, who one reporter described as looking like a young Robert Duvall, began by introducing one version of Posada’s asylum application without explaining there were, in fact, two identical but different-dated applications.
Which gave the defence a chance to muddify the legal waters almost before the first question had been asked.
Once that was cleared up and the exhibit properly introduced, Teresinski asked Garrett-Jackson a series of open-ended questions that allowed her, perhaps encouraged her, to ramble and answer questions he hadn’t asked. Justice Kathleen Cardone admonished both the lawyer and the witness to stick to the standard legal process of specific question-answer, question-answer.
That ate up his first afternoon. Thursday morning he tried another tack, asking Garrett-Jackson to read sections of the transcripts of Posada’s various hearings to herself—while the jury stared at the ceiling—and then proceeded to ask her confirmatory questions about what she’d just read.
After the defence objected, he switched course and asked the witness to read chunks of the transcript directly into the record. But he went back to the beginning and asked her about all the same passages he’d quizzed her on earlier.
When the defence objected again—this time to the witness’s intonations when she read—Teresinski switched gears one final time and played audio-taped excerpts—of the same material the jury had already heard twice in other forms—for the jury members who followed along on headphones.
By the time Teresinski finally managed to finish his direct examination of the witness—a witness whose job was simply to set the stage for the battle to come—there was less than an hour left in the day for the defence to begin its cross-examination.
Since the court won’t be sitting Friday and Monday is the Martin Luther King holiday in the U.S., the trial won’t resume until Tuesday. At this pace, joked judge Kathleen Cardone at one point, proceedings could drag on for two years. While that’s unlikely, the predictions of a four-to-six week trial are beginning to seem optimistic.
Court observers seemed perplexed by the government’s stumbling start.
The reality is that the three front-and-centre lawyers on the government side—Teresinski, lead prosecutor Timothy J. Reardon III and Bridget Behling—are all ostensibly high-powered trial attorneys with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Counterterrorism Section, National Security Division, in Washington, and were parachuted into El Paso specifically to handle this case.
None of which is to suggest the war is lost. Trials have their own ebb and flow, and the government can certainly recover its momentum and equilibrium. But the reality is that they are not off to an auspicious start.
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
My story on the Posada trial at cbc.ca
COMMENTARY
Luis Posada, terrorist or patriot?
Castro's nemesis, a former CIA operative, goes on trial in Texas
By Stephen Kimber, special to CBC News
To the Cuban government, Luis Posada Carriles is the Osama bin Laden of Latin America, a coldly calculating, unapologetic Cold Warrior who is responsible for the murder of at least 74 innocents.
To many in Florida's Cuban exile community, however, Posada remains — in the defiant words of one of the banners his supporters carried this week outside a Texas courtroom — "a soldier, a patriot, a fighter for liberty and democracy."
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2011/01/13/f-luis-posada-cia-trial.html#ixzz1AwrXNpXq
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
CBC Dispatches looks at the Posada trial
CBC Radio's award-winning international news program Dispatches today will feature an interview with me about the opening of the Luis Posada immigration fraud trial in El Paso, Texas.
You can hear the program on CBC.ca at 1 pm (1:30 pm in Newfoundland)
across the CBC Radio 1 network, and again on Sundays at 7 pm ET, 8 pm AT and 8:30 pm NT.
It is also broadcast on Sirius 137 Fridays at midnight and 9 am, and on Sunday at 10 pm. If you miss it, it will be available via podcast.
Copyright 2011 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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