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
Looking for loopholes in El Paso
Cuba's Granma newspaper says Luis Posada Carriles' lawyers are trying to use a legal loophole to prevent the court from hearing key evidence in his case.
Posada, the alleged mastermind of both the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 and also the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign, is scheduled to go on trial at the Federal Court in El Paso, Texas, in January 2011 on immigration-related charges.
Bombed Aché disco in Havana.
He's accused of lying in his 2005 application for asylum in the U.S. when he claimed he wasn't involved in the hotel bombing campaign. Those attacks resulted in the death of an Italian-Canadian businessman and injuries to dozens of others.
Prosecutors had intended to use evidence originally gathered in Cuba in connection with the attacks as part of its case but the defence is now arguing that material should be excluded because an earlier court order required such evidence be turned over to the court before December 1, 2009.
The defence claims it won't have time to consider that evidence before the January trial.
Ironically, Posada is not charged with organizing the bombing campaign—a terrorist act—but merely of lying about his involvement—a lesser charge.
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
Another of Five moved to medium security
Ramón Labañino, one of three members of the Cuban Five whose prison sentences were reduced last fall, has been moved from a maximum security prison in Kentucky to a medium security institution in Jesup, Georgia.
Ramón Labañino
Labañino, 46, had been serving a sentence of "life plus 18 years" following his 2001 conviction for espionage conspiracy. But last year the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the sentences for Labañino, Fernando Gonzales and Antonio Guerrero, ruling that their original punishments were too harsh.
Labañino's sentence was reduced to 30 years. That, coupled with his "exemplary" conduct during his 12 years in prison, apparently won him his transfer.
Guerrero, whose original sentence of life plus 10 year was dropped to 21 years and 10 months, was transferred to a medium security prison in Florence, CO, earlier this spring.
There is no word yet on whether Fernando Gonzalez, whose 19-year sentence was reduced by a year, will also be transferred.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Hernandez’s lawyers file habeas corpus petition
Gerardo Hernandez
In a last-ditch, no-more-cards-to-play legal effort, lawyers for convicted Cuban Five spy Gerardo Hernandez this week (June 14, 2010) filed what is called a collateral appeal—or writ of habeus corpus—in Miami Federal Court claiming it has new evidence the court should have aware of before letting a jury decide the fate of the Five.
The evidence, uncovered by the National Committee to Free The Five through freedom of information requests, shows that a number of Hispanic journalists who wrote inflammatory stories about the Five were actually in the pay of the U.S. government at the time.
That's not the only grounds Hernandez's lawyers cite—in their documents, they also argue that the government concealed important evidence and they question the adequacy of the Five's defence team—but the new evidence is the key to any faint hope the defence has that it will prevail.
Meanwhile Hernandez continues to be held in a US prison in California where he had not been allowed a visit from his wife for 12 years.
You can read the full text of an interview with Leonard Weinglass, the lawyer for Hernandez, here.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
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About
This is the site for What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, 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 sentenced to 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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