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National Committee To Free The Cuban Five
Bulletin
Dear Friends of the Five:
The New York Times covers the Cuban Five!
 The New York Times has finally let its readers know about
the Cuban Five! A major article in Sunday's
paper covers almost all aspects of the case -
the original trial, the history of the appeals
process including the upcoming August 20 appeals
hearing, their status as heroes in Cuba, and the
denial of visas to Olga Salanueva and Adriana
Pérez (the wives of René González and Gerardo
Hernández, respectively). It discusses how the
release of Posada Carriles has strengthened the
contention of the defendants that the U.S. is
hypocritical when it talks about its so-called
"war on terror," and more. It quotes from the
recent BBC interview with Gerardo Hernández,
illustrating how every success in breaking the
media silence can lead to further breakthroughs.
The New York Times is, as most of you know, considered a
"national newspaper." Not only does it reach
readers across the United States (and the world)
directly, but hundreds of newspapers across the
country routinely reprint its articles on
national and international issues such as this
one. As a result, millions of new people are
going to learn about the case of the Cuban Five
from this important article.
Call your local daily newspaper!
It is important to act now to get the New York Times article
more broadly disseminated. National and
international recognition of the cause of
Gerardo, Ramón, Antonio, René and Fernando is
essential to help win their freedom.
Call your city's daily newspaper(s) and ask the editors to
publish the New York Times article on the Five.
Distribute to your lists.
Interview with Leonard Weinglass, Monday
With the Atlanta appeals hearing rapidly approaching, Gloria
La Riva, coordinator of the National Committee
to Free the Cuban Five, has conducted an
interview with appeals attorney Leonard
Weinglass. This interview, which explains the
issues to be heard on August 20, will appear on
our website on Monday. Watch for it!
(National Committee To Free The Cuban Five ) 05-08-2007
Fate of 5 in U.S. Prisons Weighs on Cubans’
Minds
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
HAVANA, July 29 — In
Cuba,
they call them “the five.” Their faces are
plastered on walls and billboards everywhere.
Merely being a relative of the five grants
celebrity status. Even children know them by
their first names — Gerardo, René, Ramón,
Fernando and Antonio.
They are not a boy band.
They are middle-aged men who have been sentenced to long
prison terms for spying, Cuban officials
maintain, not on the United States government,
but on right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami who are
considered terrorists by the government here.
“The whole country knows their story by heart,” said Elena
Portala, a 50-year-old bookbinder, as she walked
by a blocklong wall with the men’s names and
inspirational quotations from each of them. “The
radio and the press talk constantly about them.
They should be let out of prison. They haven’t
done anything wrong.”
These days, many Cubans are pinning their hopes on a hearing
set for Aug. 20, before the United States Court
of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta,
where federal judges will decide on whether the
evidence was insufficient to support the
convictions.
The five men were among 10 Cuban immigrants arrested in
September 1998 and accused of being part of a
spy ring called the Wasp Network. Four others
were indicted but never apprehended. Prosecutors
presented evidence that the network had
infiltrated
Brothers to the
Rescue and other militant exile
groups in Miami. Some were also accused of
seeking United States military intelligence.
Half of the arrested men pleaded guilty, but the famed
remainder stood trial in Miami after a Federal
District judge, Joan A. Lenard, denied a motion
to move the proceedings to another venue. In
June 2001, a federal jury in Miami convicted
them. No Cuban-Americans were on the jury.
All five — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio
Guerrero, René González and Fernando González —
were convicted of acting as unregistered foreign
agents and conspiracy to commit crimes against
the United States. Three were also convicted of
conspiracy to commit espionage, on the strength
of evidence that they had gathered information
on military activity at a naval air station in
Key West. In addition, Mr. Hernández was
convicted of conspiracy to murder in connection
with the deaths of four Cuban exiles whose two
light aircraft were shot down by the Cuban Air
Force over the Straits of Florida in 1996.
Judge Lenard threw the book at them. Mr. Guerrero and Mr.
Labañino were sentenced to life in prison.
Fernando González was sentenced to 19 years, and
René González to 15 years. (They are not
related.) Mr. Hernández was sentenced to two
consecutive life terms.
Since their convictions, the five have been on a legal roller
coaster. In August 2005, a three-judge federal
appellate panel in Atlanta threw out the
verdicts, saying the defendants could not
receive a fair jury trial in Miami because of
anti-Castro bias among the exiles. Two months
later, a majority of the 11th Circuit reinstated
the convictions but agreed to hear an appeal on
the sufficiency of the evidence, among other
issues.
Meanwhile, the “five heroes” have become the biggest
propaganda tool that the one-party, Communist
government of Cuba has come up with since Che
Guevara. Their names and faces appear on walls
and signs all over Cuba, with the word “volverán,”
meaning “they will return.” Cuban officials
never fail to mention them as heroes in official
speeches and ceremonies.
One reason for their popularity is the government’s
simplified version of their ordeal: brave men
who tried to ferret out right-wing terrorists
determined to hurt Cuba while sheltered in the
United States.
That approach carries the message that Washington is
hypocritical in its “war on terror,” jailing the
five for the equivalent of trying to find
Osama bin Laden
in his presumed haven of Pakistan.
That argument has become even more persuasive to Cubans since
May, when Luis Posada Carriles was released from
jail in the United States. The Cuban government
has long accused Mr. Posada Carriles, now 79, of
plotting to assassinate Mr. Castro and says he
masterminded the 1976 bombing of a Cuban
airliner, which killed 73 people, and a string
of bombings of Havana hotels and nightclubs in
1997. Efforts to extradite him to Venezuela,
where he is also wanted in the jetliner bombing,
have failed.
“I am convinced they are real heroes,” said an accountant
who, like many Cubans, preferred to remain
anonymous to avoid possible harassment from the
police. “Any person who is against terrorism has
to be for them. And the government of the United
States is very unjust to have them locked up
while Posada Carriles is free.”
Even 13-year-olds here follow the government’s argument.
“They are like brothers to us,” said Lizbet
Martin, a schoolgirl. “They shouldn’t be
jailed.”
In a recent interview with the BBC, Mr. Hernández
acknowledged he was gathering information about
what he described as paramilitary groups
determined to topple the Cuban government. He
maintained that the Cuban government informed
the
Federal Bureau of
Investigation about the groups.
“They are people who’ve got training camps there in
paramilitary organizations and they go to Cuba
and commit sabotage, bombs and all kinds of
aggressions,” he told the BBC. “And they had
impunity, so at a certain point Cuba decided to
send some people to gather information on those
groups and send it back to Cuba to prevent those
actions.”
But Mr. Hernández denies vehemently that he helped the Cuban
Air Force shoot down the two exile planes. “They
needed to blame somebody, and they chose me,” he
said.
Alicia Valle, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s
office in Miami, declined to comment on the
case. According to court documents, the United
States government agreed that the five had spied
on anti-Castro groups like Brothers to the
Rescue and Movimiento Democratico.
But the United States government maintained that they were
well-trained spies, not amateurs, involved in a
range of espionage, and that none of them
informed the government of their presence, as
federal law requires, court documents show.
The case of the Cuban five has spawned some strange
commentary. High-ranking officials in the Cuban
government, which regularly jails people without
public trial for speaking out against Communism,
talk at length and in detail about the lack of
evidence in the case, and they rail about the
lack of “due process” in American courts.
In a recent interview, Ricardo Alarcón, the president of
Cuba’s National Assembly, said the men’s
sentences were excessive in comparison with
other spy convictions and insisted they were not
seeking information about the United States
government. He noted that in July a former F.B.I.
analyst, Leandro Aragoncillo, had received only
10 years for passing top secret documents to the
Philippine government.
The families, too, have become celebrities, if to a lesser
degree. They are asked to appear at all sorts of
state affairs. In one week in July, family
members attended a graduation of Cuban doctors
and the annual National Rebellion Day
celebration. Speakers at each event tipped their
hats to the families, calling the jailed men
heroes.
But after the hoopla, back at home, some said, they must face
the task of raising children without fathers and
living without husbands.
“It has turned my life upside down,” said Olga Salanueva, the
wife of René González, who was a pilot at an
airport where one of the exile groups kept
airplanes. “No one is prepared to live so
separated from her husband. And to see a person
so humane, so noble, suffer again and again.”
She added: “We don’t have much confidence in the justice
system of North America. We know it is very
difficult, because it has become a political
matter.”
Ms. Salanueva said that the United States had repeatedly
denied her a visa to visit her husband on the
grounds that she was deported in 2000 and under
current rules can never apply for a visa again.
Adriana Pérez, the wife of Gerardo González, has also been
turned down every year for a visa to visit him.
State Department officials declined to comment
on the women’s visa applications. Elizabeth
Palmeiro, the wife of Mr. Labañino, said she
feels pained every time she looks at their two
daughters, now 15 and 10, and realizes how much
of their lives he has missed. One girl was an
infant and the other was 5 when he was
imprisoned.
“I feel a mixture of pain, of sadness, of fury, and pride,”
she said.
(ICAP) 05-08-2007
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