More Intrigue Regarding the Cuban Five
From The Center for International Policy Cuba Report
By Wayne S. Smith
Stephen Kimber’s forthcoming book “ What Lies Across the Water?” is perhaps the most complete account of the Cuban Five I’ve yet read – and I came away from reading it with a renewed sense of depression. No wonder! The case has long befouled the image of the United States as dedicated to justice, honor and fairplay. As Kimber notes, the trial back in 2001 was such a complete farce that it drew massive international criticism – from 10 Nobel Prize winners, from hundreds of jurists, members of parliaments and various other organizations all over the world, many of whom joined 12 amicus briefs asking the Supreme Court to review the case. And for the first time in history, the UN Human Rights Commission condemned a trial in the United States.
Kimber follows the Cubans as they are assigned to the United States as undercover agents, not to work against the U.S. but to gather information on exile terrorist activities against Cuba. The Cuban government then invited representatives of the FBI to come to Havana to receive and discuss the evidence of these terrorist activities and plans gathered by the agents. The meeting took place in June of 1998. The Cubans then waited for the United States to take action against the exile terrorists. But none was taken. The only action, rather, was the arrest of the Cuban Five, they who had provided much of the evidence turned over to the FBI.
At the time, I wrote this off as simply another example of the U.S. government’s almost chronic inability to respond rationally to Cuba – and in this case to do what in fact would have served U.S. interests. Having read Kimber’s book, however, I now see there may have been more to it than that. We knew about the Havana meeting with the FBI. But few knew – and I certainly did not – that the meeting had in effect been prompted by Fidel Castro in a message delivered in the White House by Gabriel Garcia Marquez to President Clinton’s top Latin American adviser, Thomas Mack McLarty, and three senior NSC officials. The core of the message had been to suggest a joint effort against exile terrorism – especially in light of Cuban information that the exiles were planning new plane bombings – such as those carried out earlier by Luis Posada Carriles. According to Garcia Marquez, the American reaction to the idea of a joint effort had been decidedly positive.
What then had happened? Why the exact opposite of what seems to have been intended? Kimber believes it had to do with the FBI’s assignment of a new Agent in Charge, Hector Pesquera, who was close to the hardline Cuban exiles. Kimber writes that “in an interview with a Miami radio station soon after the verdicts, Pesquera claimed he was the one who switched his agents’ focus from spying on the spies to filing charges against them.” [1]
And “after the verdict in the Cuban Five trial, Pesquera was quick to claim credit for persuading officials in Washington to OK his plan,.i.e., to go after the Cuban Five rather than the exile terrorists. He told the Miami Herald the case ‘never would have made it to court’ if he hadn’t lobbied FBI Director Louis Freeh directly.” [2]
Kimber goes on to write that “at the same time, Pesquera apparently discouraged investigations into exile terrorism. An FBI agent told journalist Annie Bardach, that they’d thought it would be a slam dunk to charge and arrest Luis Posada Carriles. But then they had a meeting with the chief [i.e. Pesquera] who’d said no, that “lots of Folks around here think Posada is a freedom fighter. We were in shock. And then they closed down the whole Posada investigation.”[3]
Kimber tried repeatedly to interview Pesquera, but without success. The latter retired from the FBI and then simply stopped responding to Kimber’s e-mails.
The outcome, Kimber concludes, was the exact opposite of what had been contemplated at that White House meeting all those years ago. Rather than efforts to halt exile terrorist acts, the United States arrested the Cuban Five – although “tried” is not the right word, for the trial was a sham. The prosecutors had no real evidence and so fell back to the old standby of trying them for “conspiracy” to commit illegal acts. No evidence, and they were tried in Miami where anti-Castro sentiment had reached such a level with the Elian Gonzalez case that there was no chance of empanelling an impartial jury. Defense lawyers requested a change of venue, but incredibly, it was denied.
Worst of all was the case of Gerardo Hernandez, who was accused of “conspiracy” to commit murder and given two consecutive life sentences, plus fifteen years – this in connection with the shoot down of the two Brothers to the Rescue planes in February of 1996. Never mind that there was no evidence that he was responsible. But there, behind bars, he remains today, mostly in solitary confinement and after all these years not allowed a single visit from his wife.
What may have begun with constructive intentions at that White House meeting all those years ago thus ends – so far – in shame.
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[1] Kimber, “What Lies Across the Water”, p. 286.
[2] Kimber, op. cit., p. 286.
[3] Kimber, op. cit., p. 286.
Wayne Smith
Director
LATIN AMERICA RIGHTS & SECURITY: CUBA PROJECT
Copyright 2012 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
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.
****
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
American verdict, American justice?
Friday’s too-soon-to-have-even-been-considered “not guilty” verdict in Luis Posada Carriles’ immigration fraud trial landed with a shocking thud.
Luis Posada Carriles
After a 13-week trial filled with conflicting testimony from 33 witnesses, a jury in El Paso, Texas, took just two hours and 57 minutes to conclude that Posada—the alleged mass-murdering mastermind of a 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing that killed all 73 people aboard; the confessed orchestrator of a 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign that killed an Italian-Canadian businessman; and an already convicted felon as the result of a botched 2000 attempt to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro in Panama—was not guilty.
The jury had, in fact, found Posada not guilty on 11 counts of lying to immigration authorities during his 2005 application for asylum in the United States. Incredibly, they even found him not guilty of three counts of lying about his role in those Havana hotel bombings—which he was heard on tape in court during the trial boasting about!
“The verdict,” under-stated Alfonso Chardy in the Miami Herald, “was a surprise to many observers who had expected the jurors to deliberate for a few days before reaching a decision. The observers also expected the jurors to find Posada guilty on at least some counts. No one had predicted an acquittal across the board on all perjury and fraud charges.”
But perhaps careful observers shouldn’t have been surprised at all.
For all sorts of reasons—including the political influence of the powerful Miami exile lobby and the hypocrisy inherent in the U.S. war on terror—the American government was never really keen to bring Posada to justice.
When Posada snuck into the U.S. in 2005, the Bush administration did its best to pretend it didn’t know he was in Miami until Posada himself called a press conference, almost forcing immigration authorities to charge him with having entered the country illegally.
For the next six years, the case raveled and unraveled its way through the U.S. justice system (see timeline).
Finally, in April 2009, the new Obama administration tagged three additional counts onto the piddling initial indictment. Those charged him with lying about his role in the Havana bombing campaign.
The new charges were a backdoor way of placating an international community that had been asking increasingly sharp questions about America’s real commitment to fighting terrorism. Although Posada was not charged with the bombings themselves, the case at least made it seem as if the United States finally wanted to deal with—and get past—its penchant for winking at Cuban exile terrorism.
The case should have been a slam dunk. Prosecutors had a string of witnesses and documents that thick-black-ink-connected the dots among Posada, his American financiers and the mercenaries who carried out the bombings at his behest. Even more compelling was the “testimony” of Posada himself. There were tapes from a 1998 interview with the New York Times and a Miami TV interview, in both of which Posada had claimed credit for the bombings.
So what happened?
It would be easy to blame the prosecution. Watching the opening days of Posada’s trial in El Paso, I remember being struck by the seemingly bumbling ineptness of the prosecution's examination of its first witnesses.
But eventually the trial settled down—as trials usually do—into good days and bad days, the prosecution scoring a point one day, the defence countering another, the judge’s decisions seeming to favour one side but then the other. (An aside: José Petrierria’s “El Paso Diaries” offers by far the best day-by-day narrative of Posada’s trial. A Cuban-born, Washington-based lawyer, Pertierra was in El Paso to keep a watching brief on the case for his client, the Venezuelan government, which still wants to extradite Posada to face justice in the Cubana Airlines bombing case. His nuanced, contextualized account of the unfolding trial offers a revealing window into the case, as well as the broader issue of how American justice actually works.)
Given the number of witnesses, the conflicting testimony and the sheer volume of the evidence presented during more than three months of on-again, off-again courtroom theatrics, how was it possible for the jury to have reached its unanimous conclusion before lunch on its first and only day of deliberation?
As I tried to make sense of that in the Friday afternoon aftermath of the case’s fly-in-the-face-of-all-the-facts verdict, I couldn’t help but think back to a conversation I’d had in Havana in February with Roberto González.
Roberto Gonzalez
González is a Cuban criminal lawyer but he’s also the brother of René González, one of the Cuban Five. During preparation for the Five’s 2000 trial, González worked with their Miami-based lawyers, helping them line up evidence and witnesses in Cuba. He then spent the entire five months of the trial in the courtroom in Miami, observing American justice up close.
What did he see as the main differences between the American and Cuban systems of justice, I asked him?
“The objective in each system is the same,” González explained, “but the procedures are very different.”
In Cuba, he said, most of the real action happens outside the court room during the “preparation” phase. Lawyers for the accused and the prosecution spend their time discovering each other’s witnesses, sorting out evidentiary truth from lies away from the glare of publicity—and then submit their reports and responses for the judge to consider. That’s why the public phase of the process—actual trials—happen late in the day and don’t usually last long in Cuba.
While we in North America often question what we consider speedy “show trials” in countries like Cuba—witness the American reporting of Allan Gross’s recent conviction in Havana—González makes a compelling argument that our own system offers no greater guarantee of justice.
One of the first things he had to do in the case of the Five, he recalled, was to convince their lawyers that the Five really didn’t want to strike a deal with prosecutors by pleading guilty in exchange for lesser sentences. “Ninety per cent of American cases result in deals,” González said, “so they assumed the Five would want to do that too.”
The trial itself was also an eye-opener. “In the U.S.,” he marveled, “the ‘discovery’ happens during the trial, which makes trials go on for so long. And what is important in that sort of trial is not truth or facts, but theatre. The outcome has to do with the acting capacity of the lawyers, the personality of the witnesses—more sympathetic witnesses, less sympathetic witnesses, a very attractive woman witness, a less attractive woman witness…”
While we in North America like to think our jury system is a guarantee we will be fairly judged by our peers, González sees its actual workings differently.
Juries aren’t selected for their expertise or their wisdom, he points out, but often because they don’t know anything about anything that matters in the case before them. “I call it “trial by ignorance.”
González, of course, was talking about the trial of the Cuban Five in Miami, but he could just as easily have been discussing the Posada case in El Paso.
That trial was definitely theatrical. Posada’s Miami lawyer, Arturo—“call me Art”—Hernandez filled the courtroom with his strutting ego and his histrionics. He filed 13 separate motions for mistrials. He badgered witnesses, launching personal and often specious attacks. He insinuated—without ever having to prove—that one witness who connected Posada to the bombings had once been the lover of a Castro relative. He unfairly and with impunity sliced and diced the journalistic reputation of author Ann Louise Bardach. He even attacked the credibility and credentials of an Havana coroner who simply came to El Paso to testify that Fabio DiCelmo, the Italian-Canadian businessman killed in one of the hotel bombings, had died instantly of a shrapnel wound.
As for the jury, it was—as González notes—chosen more for what it didn’t know about Posada and the history exile terrorism than for what it did. To be fair, jury members spent so much time being bounced in and out of the courtroom while the lawyers argued interminably over what they could be allowed to hear, or whether the trial should continue, or… it would have been impossible for even the wisest among them to find the narrative thread in the lanbryinth of conflicting, confusing witnesses.
All of which is to say that we do finally have a verdict in El Paso but that doesn’t mean we have justice.
Related:
- Livio Di Celmo remembers his brother's 1997 death in Havana
- Luis Posada caught on a Cuban intelligence wiretap bragging about the bombing campaign
- Journalist Ann Louise Bardach's reports for the New York Times in which Luis Posada Carriles admits his role in the 1997 bombing campaign against Havana hotels.
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
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
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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