“Shootdown” ebook now available
“Shootdown,” an excerpt from Stephen Kimber’s forthcoming book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five is now available as an ebook from Amazon. http://amzn.to/HWl12l
The excerpt unfolds the critically important episode of the shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft over the Straits of Florida in February 1996—from Brothers’ first illegal flyover of Havana in July 1995; through seven months of escalating diplomatic back and forth between Havana and Washington; equally escalating provocations by Brothers’ leader José Basulto; on to the February 24, 1996 mid-air confrontation and then the fallout—the unseemly quick passage of the draconian Helms-Burton law, which continues to hobble any serious attempt to improve relations between the United States and Cuba.
The excerpt also documents what members of the Cuban Five did and—more importantly—didn’t do in the lead-up to the Cuban government’s decision to bring down the two civilian aircraft, killing four people.
Seven months after the FBI arrested the Five in September 1998 for failing to register as foreign agents, using false documents and conspiracy to commit espionage—all serious but relatively minor charges—prosecutors tacked on an explosive addendum, charging Gerardo Hernandez with conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the shootdown.
That red-flag charge in Miami’s virulently anti-Castro exile community dramatically upped the stakes of the case, making it even more impossible for the Five to get a fair trial. The shootdown allegations permeated the trial and affected the sentencing, not only of Hernandez—who was handed a double-life sentence plus 15 years—but also of the other members of the Five, whose fates had all inextricably become linked to the shootdown.
As this excerpt clearly shows, there was not a shred of compelling evidence to indicate Hernandez even knew about, let alone had any role in the shootdown.
The full book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, will be published by Fernwood Publishing in the spring of 2013.
Copyright 2012 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Alan Gross, the Cuban Five and common sense
Alan Gross is not exactly the humanitarian do-gooder the U.S. government would have you believe. And the Cuban Five are not exactly spies and murderers. Is there a pattern here?
Alan Gross and wife Judy.
The campaign to free Alan Gross is ramping up. Gross is the American arrested in 2009 for smuggling telecommunications equipment into Cuba. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison for what the Cubans called “acts to undermine the integrity and independence” of their country.
The U.S. government insists Gross was a naive humanitarian caught trying to help Cuba’s small Jewish communities communicate with each other and the world. They have demanded his immediate release.
So has the American Jewish community. Members of Jewish and interfaith groups now stage weekly vigils outside the Cuban Interests Section in Washington— “We are not going to stop agitating, stop pushing for Alan’s release, until he is on the next plane out,” declares the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington—and recently launched a national online petition to urge Pope Benedict XVI to intercede on Gross’s behalf during his upcoming visit to Cuba.
The Cubans appear willing—but only in exchange for the release of the Cuban Five, a group of their intelligence agents sentenced in 2001 to even longer terms in American prisons.
The U.S. insists there’s no comparison between the two cases. Gross is an innocent; the Cubans were spies trying to steal U.S. military secrets, not to forget helping shoot down civilian aircraft, killing four people.
But Americans who truly want Alan Gross freed should carefully examine their government’s rhetoric—versus the reality—about both cases.
We already know—thanks to leaked Cuban court documents and an investigation by the Associated Press—that Gross was far from the innocent he has been portrayed.
Alan Gross was a subcontractor for the United States Agency for International Development, which promotes “regime change” in Cuba. He was working on a $500,000 contract to smuggle sophisticated telecommunications equipment—including “a specialized mobile phone chip that experts say is often used by the Pentagon and the CIA to make satellite signals virtually impossible to track”—into Cuba. The Cuban Jewish community didn’t ask for his help because they already had their own intranet and Internet access. And Gross himself knew what he was doing was illegal. “This is very risky business,” he wrote in one memo.
If the U.S. government has fudged the facts on Alan Gross, its credibility on the Cuban Five is non-existent.
Military secrets? While some of the Cuban agents indeed sought military information, they were primarily looking for canary-in-the-coal-mine signs the U.S. was planning to invade their country. Given the examples of Haiti, Panama, Grenada, who could blame them? Mostly, the agents counted planes on runways at Florida military bases—from public highways.
More to the point, their primary goal in Florida was to infiltrate and disrupt Miami anti-Castro groups who were hatching terrorist plots against Cuba in violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act.
Murder? The most serious allegation is that one of the Five helped engineer the shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft over the Straits of Florida in 1996 in which four pilots were killed. One can argue—I would—the Cubans were wrong to shoot down those planes, but there is not a shred of evidence in the 20,000-plus pages of trial transcript to indicate Cuba’s Florida agents had advance knowledge of the shootdown or any role in deciding to go ahead with the attack. I know—because I read the transcript as part of the research for a book I’m writing on the Five.
So why were they convicted? They weren’t actually charged with spying or murder, but with “conspiracy to,” a convenient, low-burden-of-proof catch-all.
And the trial itself took place in Miami, the most virulently anti-Cuban city in America, where anti-Castro terrorists are rarely charged and almost never convicted. Miami juries are notorious. In 1999, for example—soon after the Cuban Five were arrested—U.S. prosecutors successfully fought attempts to have another trial of a group of Cuban-Americans charged with plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro moved to Miami because they recognized “the Cuban population is large and they will have a harder time getting a conviction” in Miami.
Americans who want Alan Gross freed have so far shied away from linking his case to that of the Cuban Five—perhaps because they swallowed the administration Kool Aid on the case. They shouldn’t.
None of this is to suggest there aren’t humanitarian grounds for Gross’s release. There are. The 62-year-old—whose mother and daughter are suffering from cancer—is said to be in poor health and has lost more than 100 pounds during his captivity. But the Cubans have equally compelling humanitarian—and even more compelling natural justice—arguments for their release too.
It’s time to make a deal.
***
Also published in the Huffington Post
Copyright 2012 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Field Notes 4: Truth, lies and the Cuban American National Foundation
My goal in writing “Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection” is to stick to the facts, reconstructing key events of the case in order to produce an in-the-moment narrative that will help readers understand the true story of what really happened even as it entertains them.
But whose facts? Whose truth? Those are especially tricky questions in a story such as the Cuban Five, which is fraught with emotion, ideology and vested interests.
Everyone is selling their own version of the facts, and everyone insists theirs is the only true one.
Let’s look at just one example.
Jorge Mas Canosa
On September 10, 1997, when Cuban State Security announced the arrest of Salvadoran mercenary Raúl Cruz León for planting a bomb in the Copacabana Hotel that killed an Italian tourist, it added a stunning accusation: “The investigation revealed, without any doubt, that the operations were carefully planned and executed from Miami by a subversive organization controlled by the Cuban American National Foundation headed by counterrevolutionary leader Jorge Mas Canosa.”
The Cuban American National Foundation is the richest and most influential Cuban exile organization in the United States. Both its critics and its supporters would agree CANF played a central role in determining—and maintaining—America’s hard-line policies toward Cuba. Mas Canosa himself was one of Miami’s most respected businessmen, a confidant of American presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton.
Canosa with Bill Clinton
CANF, not surprisingly, denied Havana’s allegations; such charges, it said, were so ludicrous as to be “not worthy of a serious response.”
But, a year-and-a-half later, at Cruz León’s trial, the Cubans upped the ante. One of the trial’s key witnesses was a State Security agent named Percy Alvarado Godoy who claimed to have infiltrated CANF in the early nineties.
According to his testimony, senior CANF officials had set up a secret paramilitary wing of the organization at a meeting in Naples, Florida, in 1992 specifically to carry out violent attacks against Cuba.
Percy Alvarado Godoy
Alvarado named names; he claimed he’d been recruited to act as an agent by Luis Zuñiga, a member of CANF’s executive board. He said that the organization’s president, Pepe Hernandez, had been his handler for a mission to plant a bomb inside Havana’s popular Tropicana Cabaret. Alvarado said the man who trained him to assemble the bombs and gave him the device to take to Cuba was none other than Luis Posada Carriles, the CIA-trained exile militant alleged to have been one of the masterminds of the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 that killed 73 people.
Again, the Cuban American National Foundation dismissed the allegations out of hand. As for Percy Alvarado? “If he had infiltrated [the Foundation],” spokesperson Ninoska Perez sniffed rhetorically, “you think he would go unnoticed? No one’s heard of him.”
And that’s the he-said-yes/he-said-no way the story played out for seven years.
But then, in June 2006, there was stunning confirmation of the Cuban version of events.
It came from the most unlikely source and for the least ideological of reasons.
Antonio “Toñin” Llama was not only a member of CANF’s board and inner circle but he was also a bona fide anti-Castro militant—with criminal charges to prove it. In 1998, he had been charged—and acquitted—in connection with a plot to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro.
That case, ironically, sowed the seeds for Llama’s discontent and his eventual decision to go public with what he knew about CANF’s secret paramilitary wing. Llama believed that CANF had reneged on a promise to cover his and his co-conspirators’ legal expenses. Worse, while he was on trial, some CANF members sold off $1.4 million worth of equipment he had personally financed on its behalf in preparation for the assault on Cuba.
In June 2006, Llama issued a public statement claiming he had been forced to file for bankruptcy because the bank, “which lent me part of the money to buy 10 airplanes, 8 ships and armaments” wanted its funds back. Llama called on CANF to “deliver the titles and assets that I bought and paid for the campaign that we carried out when I was a director, with the purpose of destabilizing Castro’s communist government.”
In a subsequent interview with El Nuevo Herald, Llama reported that the secret paramilitary project “started to take shape during CANF’s annual meeting in Naples in June 1992… About 20 of the foundation’s most trusted leaders agreed, and designated Jose ‘Pepe’ Hernandez, the current CANF president, and Mas Canosa to choose the armed group.”
In other words, Llama confirmed virtually everything Percy Alvarado and the Cubans had claimed seven years earlier.
By now CANF was—ever so slightly—more circumspect with its denials. Instead of denying the substance of what Llama had said, its spokesperson simply argued: “we consider that it is extremely irresponsible for a press organization to echo what clearly represents an extortion and defamation attempt.”
Whose facts?
Whose truth?
As the American writer Lillian Hellman once put it: “What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable.”
Lies, however, are easier to spot.
***
If you'd like to see how this episode is portrayed in the book, you might be interested in reading this draft excerpt. The story will also be expanded in another section focusing on Percy Alvarado's testimony during Cruz León's trial.
Read more Field Notes.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Field Notes 3: Meet Andrés Gómez, Miami progressive
Andrés Gómez—a shambling, friendly, 63-year-old bear of a man—is the director of Areito Digital, an online magazine of “progressive Cuban immigrants,” the leader of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, a Miami-based pro-Cuba activist organization, and one of the best known moderate voices in Miami’s el exilio.
I met with him while I was in Miami recently trying to understand why lawyers for the Cuban Five had argued at trial and later, in appeals, that it was impossible for their clients to get a fair trial in Miami.
Gómez has traveled a long journey from his beginnings not only as the refugee child of anti-Castro exiles but also as the nephew of a leader of one of the most notorious anti-Castro terrorist groups of the 1960s.
Like much in Miami, his story begins in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution when his upper middle class parents joined the flood of anti-Castro refugees escaping to Miami in 1960. He was 13 at the time.
Most of his family, Gómez says, were—and are—militantly anti-Castro. “Progressives?” He thinks for a minute, laughs. “There’s me and another first cousin. We’re a pretty lopsided right-wing family.”
His own favourite uncle growing up was Miguel San Pedro, a key member of the Movimiento Nacional Cuba, an anti-Castro terrorist group that claimed responsibility for—among other incidents—a failed bazooka attack on the United Nations during Che Guevera’s speech in 1964 and a bomb blast at the Cuban exhibit during the Expo 67 world’s fair in Montreal.
“I loved him dearly,” Gómez says today. Despite their differences, his uncle not only taught him much about Cuban history and politics, he says, but also happily and “constructively” argued with his young nephew, helping hone his developing views on Cuba.
His uncle, Gómez says now, was actually a Cuban nationalist who not only opposed Castro but also American interference in his country. That eventually brought him into conflict with an increasingly powerful cabal of Miami exile militants—including Luis Posada, Oscar Bosch and others—whose actions would become more and more intertwined with those of the CIA.
San Pedro, Gómez remembers, was “incensed” when anti-Castro exiles bombed a Cubana Airlines plane in 1976, killing 73 people. “His own brand of terrorism involved not harming innocents,” Gómez inists. “It was OK to kill officials to make a point. But never innocents. He saw the [airplane] bombers as decadent Mafia types."
By the time San Pedro died in 1981, Gómez believes his uncle had distanced himself from his terrorist past. “He would have been my age when he died,” Gómez says today, “and I think that, if he’d been raised in different circumstances, a different time, he would have turned out like me.”
Gómez’s own political evolution was gradual. At the University of Miami in the sixties, he was one of the founders of the Federation of Cuban Students, a group that fought to preserve the privilege of a separate loan program for Cuban students (one of the perks available to the children of “good” anti-communist Cuban exiles but not to other immigrant groups). And one of his contemporary right-wing critics says he saw Gómez at an anti-Castro rally in support of jailed exile terrorist Felipe Rivero as late as 1967.
Gómez says his radicalization began with the standard trigger issues for young people in the sixties in America—Vietnam, civil rights—but quickly spread to encompass Latin American revolutionary movements and, particularly, the Cuban experience.
The turning point came in 1977. Thanks to a brief rapprochement between the United States and Cuba during the Jimmy Carter presidency, Cuba invited 55 young Cuban exile professionals and intellectuals—including Gómez—to visit the homeland that had been off limits to them for all of the 18 years since the Cuban revolution. The 55 became founding members of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, named after a 19th century black Cuban military general “known for his fierce fighting against Spain in defense of his homeland.”
That first visit to Cuba, Gómez would write 30 years later, “left an everlasting mark on all of us… We were young, but we were aware of the implications of our resolution… we were the ones who destroyed the monolithic image of the then-Cuban counter-revolutionary exile.”
The “counter-revolutionary exile” monolith in Miami did not take the challenge lightly. Over the years, there were attempts on the lives of Gómez and others.
“Bombs,” Gómez says simply, “a Molotov cocktail thrown against a house.”
One of the members of the original brigade—Carlos Muñiz Varela—was murdered in April of 1979 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “That was 31 years ago,” Gómez says, “and no one has ever been brought to justice. Even though we know who did it, and we know that they [the FBI and Puerto Rican police authorities] know who did it.”
That isn’t unusual. American law enforcement has, at the least, benignly tolerated exile violence, whether against Cuba itself or against moderates in the Cuban American community. Prosecutions are rare, convictions even rarer.
Gómez tells the story of one 1994 incident to make his point. Members of Miami’s Alianza de Trabajadores de la Comunidad Cubana, a group collecting medical equipment and supplies to donate to Cuba, discovered a plot to burn down a warehouse they were using to store 20 tons of supplies in preparation for shipping it to Cuba.
“We let the FBI know what we knew,” Gómez says.
On the night of November 2, 1994—two months after Max Lesnik’s Replica offices had been attacked with two Molotov cocktails—police arrested three Cuban-American men just after they’d smashed out a window and were climbing into the warehouse. They were armed with 10 gallons of gas, fuses and a fully loaded semi-automatic handgun.
Despite the reality that they’d been caught red-handed, Gómez says, the FBI didn’t want to pursue the case. “’Let’s not go to a trial,’ they said to us. ‘The jury will find them innocent anyway. If we don’t take it to trial, we can reach an understanding with them, we’ll be able to control them better…” Gómez shrugs. “We wanted to go to trial.”
The case didn’t go to trial.
“That’s the way it’s been in Miami,” he says simply.
****
In an unprecedented 1992 report, Americas Watch, a human rights group, published a scathing assessment of the state of free speech in Miami, concluding that exile groups, including the Cuban American National Foundation, the Miami City Commission and local Spanish-language radio stations were so determined to enforce their anti-Castro political views among Miami's exile community that "moderation can be a dangerous position."
The 30-page document catalogued a long list bombings, vandalism, beatings, death threats, violence and harassment aimed at moderate exiles from the 1970s to the nineties.
Intriguingly, the group decided to look into the free-speech climate in Miami—the first time it had ever investigated an American city—while investigating human rights violations in Cuba.
"Ironically," the Americas Watch report concluded, "in their attitude toward dissenting viewpoints, many anti-Castro Miami Cubans have a good deal in common with the regime they loathe."
For more, you can check out this Field Note on Max Lesnik, another of Miami's progressive Miami Cubans.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Field Notes 2: Miami
We are sitting in the cramped, cluttered offices of Radio Miami, which look more like a 1960s commune than a modern radio station. Radio Miami—“radio para la difusión de ideas”—is located in a nondescript strip mall well beyond the stifling political and cultural confines of Little Havana.
That, I have been told, is more a safety precaution than an accident.
Lesson #1.
I have come here on this June day to try to learn what it is like to be a progressive Cuban-American in militantly right-wing, pro-blockade, Castro-must-die, our-terrorists-are-freedom-fighters Miami.
My guides to this strange netherworld are two of the key figures in Miami’s besieged and beleaguered Cuban-American left, Max Lesnik and Andrés Gómez.
Max Lesnik
Lesnik, now 77 and a regular commentator on Radio Miami, was a close friend and ally of Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution but the two men had a falling out soon after over Castro’s decision to embrace communism.
In 1961, Lesnik joined the exodus of Cubans fleeing to Miami, but he never became—or attempted to become—part of Miami’s virulently anti-Castro el exilio community.
Instead Lesnik, who published a magazine called Replica, made it a point to include all shades of exile opinion in its pages. But the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane that resulted in the deaths of 73 people—the first ever act of airplane terrorism—became his personal “point of no return," he tells me. "Replica was openly democratic, publishing all points of view. Right, left… The bombers wanted only one side represented.”
His criticism of the masterminds of the airline bombing—widely believed to be CIA-trained Cuban exiles Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada—brought him into the crosshairs of the militant exile groups. And not just those directly responsible for the airplane attack.
Replica’s offices were bombed 11 different times and Lesnik's life threatened many times. The threats were anything but idle. In 1975, Luciano Nieves, one of Lesnik's closest friends, was gunned down by a fellow exile after visiting his 11-year-old son in the hospital. Nieves’ sin: speaking publicly in favour of the United States government improving its relations with Cuba.
Miami, Lesnik has said, is a place where “terrorists are heroes” and “political assassination is regarded as heroic.”
Vivien and Max
Lesnik is about to tell me about how he’d first come to know one of those Miami terrorist “heroes”—Orlando Bosch—in Havana in the days before the revolution, but then he looks at his watch. He has to go. His mother, who is 100, is not well and he needs to go see her, he says. He hands me a DVD of The Man of Two Havanas, an award-winning but little seen documentary his daughter Viven Lesnik Weisman made about him two years ago. “It’s all in there,” he says simply as he makes his way out the door.
It is—as I discovered later—all in there indeed. Weisman has produced not only a quirky, entertaining personal documentary about her dad and his strange obsession with Cuba but also an insightful, informative primer on the even stranger world of Miami’s el elixio. I highly recommend it.
After Lesnik left, Andrés Gómez, a journalist and leader of the Miami-based Antonio Maceo Brigade, a pro-Cuban group, who works with Lesnik at Radio Miami, picks up the story of what it’s like to be a progressive Cuban-American in militantly right-wing, pro-blockade, Castro-must-die, our-terrorists-are-freedom-fighters Miami.
And I’ll pick up his story in the next Field Notes.
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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