René González responds to Washington Post editorial on Alan Gross
On December 31, 2011, the Washington Post published an editorial demanding the return of Alan Gross, an American government contractor sentenced to 15 years in Cuban prison for illegally bringing telecommunications equipment into the country.
In the editorial, the Post claimed Cuba saw Gross as a "potential bargaining chip" to win the release of the Cuban Five, a group of Cuban intelligence agents sentenced to harsh prison terms in the U.S. for "conspiracy to commit" espionage.
"There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the illegal espionage of the Cubans and the conduct of Mr. Gross. The five Cubans were sentenced to long prison terms in 2001 for, among other things, operating as undeclared foreign agents and infiltrating U.S. military installations in South Florida. All are acknowledged intelligence officers, unlike Mr. Gross, a would-be humanitarian who got himself caught up in the U.S.-Cuban dispute over U.S. efforts to promote civil society on the island."
René González, the only one of the Five to be released from prison—but who is still currently forced to serve his parole in the U.S.—has written a powerful, thoughtful response to the editorial (see below).
He's encouraging others to read the Post's editorial and write their own letters to the editor to challenge the inaccuracies in the piece and to push the American media to finally report completely and fairly on the case of the Five.
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From: René González
mailing address: undisclosed for personal safety.
relation to the issue: I'm one of the Cuban Five mentioned in the editorial.
Telephone: undisclosed for personal safety.
Dear Editor:
Your editorial regarding the case of Alan Gross -and in passing the one of the Cuban Five- is so charged with factual inaccuracies that it can only be explained -at least in part- by the astonishing decision by the American media to not publish anything of the longest "espionage" trial in the history of the country, which ended up on such harsh sentences that would suggest a danger to the US that everybody on the planet should have been aware of. I won't burden you with all the inaccuracies and will only refer to a few of them.
It is true that it is illegal for Cuba to connect to the Internet. After all, the whole country is banned by the US government to hook up to the underwater cable that runs parallel to the Cuban coast, just north of the island. It strains credibility that the Washington Post wouldn't be able to find the truth about such a simple factual matter. That the same government that prohibits the whole island to connect to the web then devices a clandestine operation to decide which Cubans will have the privilege to circumvent the very prohibition that he imposes on the country's citizenry can hardly be considered of a humanitarian character.
That the Jewish Cuban community had anything to do with that operation has been the most often repeated lie of the last two years. The cynicism of having played the Jewish card on this case lies on somebody else other than any Cuban official, and has been the basis of the mayor disinformation on this issue. It would surely be easy for the Washington Post also to find out the truth by simply contacting the people that the editorial cites as having visited Mr Gross in prison: The Cuban Jewish leaders, whose community enjoys every benefit when it comes to communications that a country under so much limitations in that regard can give them.
Well before the arrest of Mr Gross the Group on Arbitrary Detentions of the United Nations Humans Right Commission, Amnesty International, more than a hundred Brithish MP's, ten Nobel price winners, the entire Mexican Senate, 56 Canadian MP's and thousands of personalities, political and civil organizations all over the world called for an end to the vindictive and arbitrary treatment of the Five. It would have taken any news outlet, including the Post, to just read the decision of the Appellate panel on the 11th Circuit -August 5, 2005-, where the terrorist activities against Cuba which we were watching on are listed, to explain why so many people support us.
That also explains the reasons of my incapacity to give you my mailing address or telephone number. After all, during my sentencing, the prosecutors asked the Judge
-who granted it- that "the defendant should be prohibited from associating with terrorists or to visit places where it is known that terrorists, people who promote violence or organized crime figures meet". They forgot, nevertheless, to offer me the same protection against the terrorists, who enjoy any freedom to come after me if they only new my location.
Some times bad actions have unintended consequences, and this applies now. Every one of those who decided to spill on the five of us his hatred towards the Cuban government, now has put that same government on a position when it would be impossible for him to exercise the generosity that -to take just an example- was exercised with the Bay of Pigs invaders. I have nothing personal against Mr Gross and wish him well, but it is not wise -as suggested by the editorial- to think that the recycling of the same arrogance and lies will do him any good. It doesn't make sense to mistreat somebody and at the same time demand generosity from him. That logic should come to an end, the sooner the better for our two peoples.
I respectfully suggest that there is still time for the Post to take this matter seriously. Open a real debate on all this issues and don't keep going down the same worn out path that goes nowhere.
It reads in the Bible that "the truth will set you free". That might apply to Mr Gross today.
Respectfully submitted.
René González Sehwerert
Copyright 2012 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Welcome to America’s war on terrorism (fighters)… continued
On Friday, October 7, René González will become the first member of the Cuban Five to be released from an American prison. In 2001, the Five were convicted in Miami of spying for Cuba. Cuba insists they were—justifiably—trying to prevent anti-Castro exiles from launching terrorist attacks against their homeland. The Five have since become heroes in Cuba, and their case has sparked international controversy—as has González’s pending release. Last week, the same Florida judge who originally sentenced him decided González must remain in the United States during his parole rather than granting his request to return home to his family in Havana. Why?
On the eve of René González’s release Friday from an American prison—but not his prison America will now become—it’s worth reminding ourselves what terrible crimes he committed.
Why was he sentenced to 15 years in jail? And why do American officials now insist he serve his post-prison parole in The United States instead of in Cuba?
In 1998, González—a member of the Cuban Five spy ring— was charged with failing to formally register as an agent of a foreign government.
Guilty as charged.
René González
In December 1990, González “stole” a small plane from a Havana airfield and “defected” to Florida. Not surprisingly, he didn’t tell authorities he was a Cuban intelligence agent whose mission was to infiltrate militant Miami exile groups.
The reason he didn’t—the reason he’d been sent to Florida in the first place—was that U.S. authorities rarely charged Cuban exiles, even those clearly violating American Neutrality Act prohibitions against launching armed attacks on another country from U.S. soil.
Cuba certainly isn’t the only country to dispatch clandestine agents to other countries in order to protect its homeland from attack. Consider… well how about post-9/11 America? How many American agents are currently operating secretly inside Pakistan because the U.S. government believes Pakistan is unable or unwilling to deal with terrorist threats there? How many of those agents registered with Pakistani authorities?
It’s also worth noting how the U.S. has dealt with other unregistered foreign agents. Last year, 10 Russians pled guilty to being long-term Moscow agents inside the United States. Instead of sending them to prison, Americans authorities sent them home in a swap for four foreign nationals the Russians had convicted of spying on them.
The Cold War was over. Except, of course, when that hot-cold war involved Cuba. Welcome to America’s war on terrorism (fighters).
In addition to feloniously failing to tell American authorities he was not an anti-Castro “freedom fighter,” René González also stood accused of… “general conspiracy”?
General what?
Despite thousands of seized documents and two years’ of pre-arrest surveillance, prosecutors couldn’t produce a shred of evidence González had ever stolen—or tried to steal, or even thought about stealing—any of America’s state secrets.
So they charged him with… general conspiracy. Which apparently means if they can’t arrest you for what you’re doing, they’ll get you for what you’re thinking… or what they think you’re thinking.
What did González really do?
While researching a book on the Five, I spent months poring over 20,000+ pages of their trial transcript and other evidence.
Here’s what the record shows René González did.
He infiltrated—and reported back to Havana on—a militant Cuban exile organization called Partido Unidad Nacional Democracia, or PUND.
PUND trained in Florida for armed attacks against Cuba. They did so openly. In 1995, the FBI questioned members of the group in connection with one plot—but released them without charges.
González also infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, a supposedly humanitarian group that boasted of illegal incursions into Cuban air space. Thanks to González and other agents, Havana learned:
• Brothers’ founder José Basulto inquired about purchasing a used Czech fighter jet;
• Exile militants wanted to use a Brothers’ planes for a mid-air attack on an aircraft carrying Fidel Castro to the United Nations;
• Brothers to the Rescue members test-fired anti-personnel weapons for possible use in Cuba.
And González infiltrated another supposedly peaceful group— Movimiento Democracia—whose members openly violated Cuban territorial waters.
During his time as an agent in Florida, González even served briefly as an FBI informant. A PUND member had enlisted him to ferry cocaine from Puerto Rico to Florida to raise money to buy more weapons to attack Cuba. González tipped off the FBI.
Based on the evidence, that is the sum of René González’s “general conspiracy.”
U.S. prosecutors were so unsure of their conspiracy case they offered González ever sweeter—and more sour—inducements to cop a plea before his trial.
At one point, they dangled the carrot of avoiding trial by pleading guilty to a single count of being an unregistered agent. But “the last paragraph of the plea agreement draft,” González recalls, included “a not-so-veiled invitation to consider my wife’s resident status is at stake.”
González drew a middle finger in the space left for his signature.
The next day, August 16, 2000, immigration officials arrested his wife. In one final effort to change his mind, they brought her—now dressed in orange prison jumpsuit—to visit him in jail. When he didn’t relent, they deported her. He has not been allowed to see her since..
René González has now done his time. He’s been in jail since his arrest in 1998. He spent his first 17 months in solitary confinement. He has been, by all accounts, a model prisoner. He’s studied economics, taken up running, even completed a few half-marathons in his medium security prison. As required by Florida law, he will have served 85 per cent of his sentence inside prison before being paroled.
Now he wants to go home to Havana to see his family.
There’s no public benefit to forcing him to serve his parole in hostile Florida. He is not about to be “reintegrated” into American society, and he could be in physical danger from vengeful exiles. Still U.S. prosecutors opposed his application. The same judge who originally sentenced him sided with prosecutors.
The issue is that González continues to defend what he did.
“I have no reason to be remorseful,” González told his original sentencing hearing. He condemned the hypocrisy of the American justice system for charging him and his fellow defendants for the non-crime of trying to protect their country from terrorist attack while ignoring the real crimes of exile terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch who stood accused of the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight that killed 73 people, and a string of 1997 attacks on Cuban tourist hotels that killed a Canadian.
So on Friday René González will be released from his physical prison but only into another, psychic one.
Welcome to America’s continuing war on terrorism (fighters)…. Continued.
***
Stephen Kimber is a Canadian journalist who’s writing a book on the case of the Cuban Five.
Copyright 2011 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 night before René’s arrest
September 11/98
René González recalls the uneventful night before the FBI smashed in his door.
René González
"The day before the arrest was a regular day. I was preparing to start flying to Bahamas with a small company operated by a friend out of Opalocka airport—the same place where the Bay of Pigs brigade was flown to Central America from—and did some small errands in regards to that goal.
"Then I went back home early to say goodbye to my wife and stay with my daughters.
"My second daughter Ivette was born on April 24, 1998, at the Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital. She was over four months old by the time of the arrests. By then my wife had started working as a telemarketer, selling an English course over the phone. Her work day started at 2 pm until 11 pm, so Irmita [his older daughter] and I had to take care of the baby.
"Later in the evening I fed the baby. I lay in bed and bent my knees so as to make kind of a seat for her. She would then drink her milk with her back against my thighs, looking me straight in the eyes with that intense stare of hers.
That night she immediately fell asleep, so I put her over my chest face up, her arms wide open. That's how my wife found us after work, and she couldn't resist the temptation of taking a picture of us. It is a beautiful picture, myself laying on my back with the baby on my chest, her arms to the sides and a very satisfied expression on her face."
The following morning, at 6 a.m., armed FBI agents stormed his apartment.
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
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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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