{"id":520,"date":"2013-10-07T11:56:20","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T11:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cubasupport.com\/latest\/?p=520"},"modified":"2020-05-04T22:01:19","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T22:01:19","slug":"the-cuban-five-were-fighting-terrorism-why-did-we-put-them-in-jail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cubasupport.ie\/latest\/the-cuban-five-were-fighting-terrorism-why-did-we-put-them-in-jail\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cuban Five were fighting terrorism. Why did we put them in jail?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

by Stephen Kimber<\/p>\n

Reprinted from\u00a0Washington Post<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Consider for a moment what would happen if American intelligence agents on the ground in a foreign country uncovered a major terrorist plot, with enough time to prevent it. And then consider how Americans would react if authorities in that country, rather than cooperate with us, arrested and imprisoned the U.S. agents for operating on their soil.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Free<\/a>
Miami Five 15th anniversary protest in central Dublin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Those agents would be American heroes. The U.S. government would move heaven and Earth to get them back.<\/p>\n

This sort of scenario has occurred, except that, in the real-life version, which unfolded 15 years ago last month, the Americans play the role of the foreign government, and Cuba \u2014 yes, Fidel Castro\u2019s Cuba \u2014 plays the role of the aggrieved United States.<\/p>\n

In the early 1990s, after the demise of the Soviet Union made the collapse of Cuba\u2019s communist government seem inevitable, Miami\u2019s militant Cuban exile groups ratcheted up their efforts to overthrow Castro by any means possible, including terrorist attacks. In 1994, for example, Rodolfo Frometa, the leader of an exile group, was nabbed in an FBI sting trying to buy a Stinger missile, a grenade launcher and anti-tank rockets that he said he planned to use to attack Cuba. In 1995, Cuban police arrested two Cuban Americans after they tried to plant a bomb at a resort in Varadero.<\/p>\n

Those actions clearly violated U.S. neutrality laws, but America\u2019s justice system mostly looked the other way. Although Frometa was charged, convicted and sentenced to almost four years in jail, law enforcement agencies rarely investigated allegations involving exile militants, and if they did, prosecutors rarely pursued charges. Too often, Florida\u2019s politicians served as apologists for the exile community\u2019s hard-line elements.<\/p>\n

But the Cubans had their own agents on the ground in Florida. An intelligence network known as La Red Avispa was dispatched in the early 1990s to infiltrate militant exile groups. It had some successes. Agents thwarted a 1994 plan to set off bombs at the iconic Tropicana nightclub, a tourist hot spot in Havana. And they short-circuited a 1998 scheme to send a boat filled with explosives from the Miami River to the Dominican Republic to be used in an assassination attempt against Castro.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 1998, Cuban agents uncovered a plot to blow up an airplane filled with beach-bound tourists from Europe or Latin America. The plot resonated: Before 2001, the most deadly act of air terrorism in the Americas had been the 1976 midair bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455, which killed all 73 passengers and crew members.<\/p>\n

Castro enlisted his friend, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to carry a secret message about the plot to President Bill Clinton. The White House took the threat seriously enough that the Federal Aviation Administration warned airlines.<\/p>\n

In June of that year, FBI agents flew to Havana to meet with their Cuban counterparts. During three days in a safe house, the Cubans provided the FBI with evidence their agents had gathered on various plots, including the planned airplane attack and an ongoing campaign of bombings at Havana hotels that had taken the life of an Italian Canadian businessman.<\/p>\n

But the FBI never arrested anyone in connection with the airplane plot or the hotel attacks \u2014 even after exile militant Luis Posada Carriles bragged about his role in the Havana bombings to the New York Times in July 1998. Instead, on Sept. 12, 1998, a heavily armed FBI SWAT team arrested the members of the Cuban intelligence network in Miami.<\/p>\n

The five agents were tried in that hostile-to-anything-Cuban city, convicted on low-bar charges of \u201cconspiracy to commit\u201d everything from espionage to murder and sentenced to impossibly long prison terms, including one double life sentence plus 15 years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Author: Stephen Kimber<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fifteen years later, four of the Cubans still languish in American prisons.<\/p>\n

Now you begin to understand why the Cuban Five \u2014 as they have become known \u2014 are national heroes in their homeland, why pictures of their younger selves loom on highway billboards all over the island, why every Cuban schoolchild knows them by their first names: Gerardo, Ren\u00e9, Ramon, Fernando and Antonio.<\/p>\n

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has stated that the Cuban Five \u201cwere all convicted in U.S. courts of committing crimes against the United States, including spying, treason.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is true that three of the five men \u2014 Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Laba\u00f1ino and Fernando Gonzalez \u2014 did have, in part, military missions beyond simply infiltrating and reporting back on the activities of Miami\u2019s exile groups. But their purpose was not to steal America\u2019s military secrets or compromise U.S. security.<\/p>\n

During the 1990s, Cuban authorities believed theirs might be the next Caribbean country to face an American military invasion. It wasn\u2019t a stretch when you consider Grenada (1983), Panama (1989) and Haiti (1994). Then, too, there was the growing influence of militantly anti-Castro lobbying groups such as the Cuban American National Foundation, which were pushing Washington to overthrow Castro and his brother.<\/p>\n

Based on its assessments of those earlier invasions, Cuban intelligence had developed a checklist of signals that an invasion might be imminent: a sudden influx of combat and reconnaissance aircraft to a southern military base, for example, or unexpected, unexplained visits by military brass to Southern Command headquarters in Miami.<\/p>\n

Agents such as Antonio Guerrero \u2014 who worked as a janitor at the Boca Chica Naval Air Station in Key West from 1993 until his arrest in 1998 and is serving 22 years in prison \u2014 were Cuba\u2019s low-tech equivalents of U.S. spy satellites, counting planes on runways and reporting back to Havana.<\/p>\n

Of course, Cuban authorities were eager to vacuum up every tidbit of gossip their agents could find, and Havana occasionally pressured Guerrero to up his game; he responded mostly by sending clippings from base newspapers. No wonder. Guerrero spoke little English and had no security clearance; military secrets were well above his pay grade. And U.S. military secrets were never Cuba\u2019s real priority \u2014 it just wanted to know if the Yankees were about to invade.<\/p>\n

Seven months after the FBI charged the five with relatively insignificant counts \u2014 failing to register as foreign agents, using false identities and, more seriously but less specifically, conspiracy to commit espionage \u2014 prosecutors tacked on the charge that would galvanize Cuba\u2019s exile community.<\/p>\n

They charged Gerardo Hernandez, the leader of the network, with conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the shootdown three years earlier of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.<\/p>\n

Brothers to the Rescue, an anti-Castro group that had been rescuing rafters in the Straits of Florida but had lost its raison d\u2019etre after a 1994 immigration deal between Washington and Havana, had been illegally violating Cuban airspace for more than a year, occasionally raining down anti-government leaflets on Havana. The Cubans protested the flights. The U.S. government did its best to prevent further incursions, but the wheels of the FAA bureaucracy ground slowly.<\/p>\n

In early 1996, the Cubans sent messages to Washington through various intermediaries, warning that if the United States didn\u2019t stop further Brothers flights, the Cubans would.<\/p>\n

Washington didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

So the Cubans did. On the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1996, Cuban fighter jets blew two small, unarmed Brothers to the Rescue aircraft out of the sky, killing all four men aboard.<\/p>\n

The Cubans claim that the planes were inside their territory. The U.S. government claims \u2014 and the International Civil Aviation Organization agreed \u2014 that the planes were in international airspace when they were attacked.<\/p>\n

But did Hernandez really know in advance that the Cuban government planned to shoot down those planes? Was he involved in the planning?<\/p>\n

My answer is no. During my research for a book on the Cuban Five, I reviewed all 20,000-plus pages of the trial transcript and sifted through thousands of pages of decrypted communications between Havana and its agents. I found no evidence that Hernandez had any knowledge of, or influence on, the events that day.<\/p>\n

The evidence instead paints a picture of a Cuban intelligence bureaucracy obsessed with compartmentalizing and controlling information. Hernandez, a field-level illegal intelligence officer, had no need to know what Cuba\u2019s military planned. The messages and instructions from Havana were ambiguous, hardly slam-dunk evidence, particularly for a charge of conspiracy to commit murder.<\/p>\n

In one message, for example, Hernandez\u2019s bosses refer to a plan to \u201cperfect the confrontation\u201d with Brothers to the Rescue, which prosecutors insisted meant shooting down the planes.<\/p>\n

But as Judge Phyllis A. Kravitch pointed out \u2014 in her 2008 dissent from a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upholding the murder charge against Hernandez \u2014 \u201cThere are many ways a country could \u2018confront\u2019 foreign aircraft. Forced landings, warning shots, and forced escorted journeys out of a country\u2019s territorial airspace are among them \u2014 as are shoot downs.\u201d She said that prosecutors \u201cpresented no evidence\u201d to link Hernandez to the shootdown. \u201cI cannot say that a reasonable jury \u2014 given all the evidence \u2014 could conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Hernandez agreed to a shoot down,\u201d Kravitch wrote.<\/p>\n

A \u201creasonable jury.\u201d There\u2019s the rub.<\/p>\n

By the late 1990s, Miami juries had become so notorious in cases involving Cuban exiles that federal prosecutors in a different case opposed a defense motion for a change of venue from Puerto Rico to Miami for some Cuban exiles accused of plotting to assassinate Castro.<\/p>\n

Miami \u201cis a very difficult venue for securing a conviction for so-called freedom fighters,\u201d former U.S. attorney Kendall Coffey explained to the Miami Herald at the time. \u201cI had some convictions, but some acquittals that defied all reason.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anti-Cuban militants, in fact, were considered heroes. In 2008, more than 500 Miami exile movers and shakers gathered to honor Posada\u2019s contributions to la causa \u2014 as the effort to overthrow Castro is known in the community \u2014 at a gala dinner.<\/p>\n

His contributions? Besides the Havana hotel attacks (\u201cI sleep like a baby,\u201d he told the New York Times, commenting on the tourist who was killed), Posada is the alleged mastermind of the bombing of Cubana Flight 455. Cuba and Venezuela have asked for his extradition. The United States has refused.<\/p>\n

In 2000, Posada was arrested in Panama in connection with a plot to assassinate Castro; he was convicted and served four years before receiving a still-controversial pardon. That pardon was revoked in 2008.<\/p>\n

The closest the U.S. government has come to prosecuting Posada was in 2009, when the Obama administration charged him \u2014 not for his role in the Havana bombings but for lying about his role on an immigration form. He was acquitted.<\/p>\n

Today, Posada, 85, walks the streets of Miami, a living contradiction in America\u2019s war on terrorism. How to square his freedom with President George W. Bush\u2019s post-Sept. 11 declaration that \u201cany nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime?\u201d How to square Posada\u2019s freedom with the continued imprisonment of the Cuban Five, whose primary goal was to prevent terrorist attacks?<\/p>\n

It is a contradiction Americans should consider.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stephen Kimber teaches journalism at the University of King\u2019s College in Halifax, Canada, and is the author of \u201cWhat Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Consider for a moment what would happen if American intelligence agents on the ground in a foreign country uncovered a major terrorist plot, with enough time to prevent it. And then consider how Americans would react if authorities in that country, rather than cooperate with us, arrested and imprisoned the U.S. agents for operating on their soil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101012,"featured_media":837,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8483,"url":"https:\/\/www.cubasupport.ie\/latest\/cuba-claims-it-thwarted-us-financed-terror-plot\/","url_meta":{"origin":520,"position":0},"title":"Cuba claims it thwarted US-financed terror plot","author":"Editorial Team","date":"July 11, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"Nearly three dozen people have been detained over ties to a supposed criminal group operating out of neighboring Florida Cuban authorities have foiled a suspected terror plot involving weapons smuggled from the US, Victor Alvarez Valle, lead criminal investigator with Cuba\u2019s Interior Ministry, said on Monday. 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