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
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
U.S. made more than $70,000 in secret payments to journalists
Five American journalists who wrote inflammatory articles about the Cuban Five during their detention and trials received more than $70,000 in secret payments from the U.S. government between November 1999 to December 31, 2001.
Details of the payments, which were uncovered as the result of a freedom of information request, were revealed during a Washington press conference on Tuesday (June 2).
Free the Five's Gloria La Riva
Gloria La Riva, coordinator of the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, said the payments may have been illegal under American law. The Smith-Mundt Act bans the government from “propagandizing U.S. citizens… What makes the secret payments so egregious,” she added, “is that they were made by the same government that was prosecuting the five Cubans.”
The five Cubans—members of La Red Avispa, a group of intelligence agents Cuba says it sent to Florida to infiltrate Cuban exile groups in order to prevent terrorist attacks against it—were arrested in 1998. Convicted in 2001, all are currently serving lengthy terms in American prisons.
During the press conference, the Free the Five Committee—along with the Partnership for Civil Justice, the National Lawyers Guild and the ANSWER Coalition—demanded that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder “take action immediately to free the Cuban Five” based on this new evidence of “government and prosecutorial misconduct.” The Partnership has also published an open letter on its website, calling on Holder to free the five jailed Cubans immediately.
The journalists who received the payments—Pablo Alfonso and Wilfredo Cancio Isla of El Nuevo Herald, Ariel Remos and Helen Ferre from Diario Las Américas, and Enrique Encinosa, a commentator with Radio Mambí WAQI—all wrote for U.S.-based Hispanic media, whose audience included much of the potential jury pool for the trial of the five Cuban spies.
La Riva described their reporting as “extremely prejudicial” and “highly inflammatory.” Among the stories cited at the press conference: unsubstantiated allegations that Cuba was “’lending or selling its intelligence services’ to Islamic terrorist groups” and suggestions Cuba had used LSD and other hallucinogens to make its intelligence agents “more aggressive and sure of himself.”
That latter story, in fact, appeared just as the unsequestered jury were set to begin their deliberations in June 2001.
The Free the Five Committee says it’s continuing to press the government to release the details of its contracts with the journalists and is also demanding release of additional information about other secret payments it believes may have been made to these and other journalists around the time of the September 1998 arrest of the Cuban Five.
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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