In the motion, filed November 12 with the federal district court in southern Florida, attorney Leonard Weinglass, representing Antonio Guerrero, cited "misrepresentations of fact and law made by the United States Attorney in opposing the defendants’ motion for change of venue" at the time of the trial in November 2000.

Gerardo Hernández, another of the framed-up Cubans, joined Guerrero in the request for a new trial, Hernández’s lawyer, Paul McKenna, announced days later. Weinglass stated that he expected all five to join the motion.

Guerrero and Hernández, together with René González, Ramón Labañino, and Fernando González, were convicted on charges of conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign power, conspiracy to commit espionage, and conspiracy to commit murder. At the Miami news conference announcing the motion for a new trial, Weinglass noted that the government never charged any of the five with committing any action, nor claimed that they at any time "had in their possession any classified documents." U.S. district judge Joan Lenard, who sentenced them to prison terms of between 15 years and a double life sentence, will rule on the motion.

The five revolutionaries were in the United States on a mission to defend their country’s sovereignty and the Cuban Revolution. They were gathering information on the activities of counterrevolutionary groups that have a history of launching violent attacks on Cuba from U.S. soil with the knowledge and complicity of the U.S. government.

The motion for a new trial argues that a fair trial for the five could not have been held in Miami, and that government prosecutors knew it. The big-business media, with sensationalist articles about a "Cuban spy network," convicted the five Cuban revolutionaries before the trial even began. The motion highlights an editorial by the Miami Herald, the main daily in south Florida, that echoed Washington’s charges that the five were connected to the Cuban government’s shootdown of planes flown by pilots of the right-wing Brothers to the Rescue group in 1996, in which four of the counterrevolutionaries died.

As part of its campaign to inflame public opinion against the five, the Herald editorialized that for the pilots who were shot down, "nothing could honor their memory more than to call to account their murderers...more than compensation, the families want the moral sting of a U.S. criminal prosecution in federal court." The motion for a new trial also pointed to other media, such as Channel 23 and Radio Martí, which filmed jurors and their license plate numbers, as evidence of the campaign to create an atmosphere prejudicial to the defendants. Jurors, especially Cuban-Americans, had reason to fear reprisals if they voted "not guilty."

In the trial Gerardo Hernández was found guilty of the unprecedented charge of "conspiracy to commit murder" for allegedly providing Cuban authorities with flight plans of the four Brothers to the Rescue pilots whose planes were shot. A number of defense witnesses offered ample evidence that these rightists had provocatively violated Cuban airspace and refused to heed warnings to head back before they were downed near Havana.

The five Cuban revolutionaries had filed for a change of venue for their trial, from Miami to Broward County 25 miles to the north, and the U.S. attorney countered that Miami is a big city with "great diversity" and therefore should be able to produce a fair jury in a case of defendants charged with conspiring to spy for Cuba.

Just one year later, however, the same U.S. attorney, Guy Lewis, moved in Ramirez vs. Ashcroft, in an employment-related discrimination suit against Attorney General John Ashcroft, that there should be a change of venue, claiming a fair trial for the attorney general was "virtually impossible" because of "prejudice" among Cubans in Miami.

Weinglass stated that with "these two contradictory positions...the government misrepresented to the court both factually and legally their position when they knew and had to know, as they knew one year later in the Ramirez vs. Ashcroft case, that a fair trial could not be held in the Miami district" under those circumstances. Jacqueline Becerra of the U.S. attorney’s office said that prosecutors "are comfortable" with the convictions, and a government response is expected in mid-December.

In a separate legal proceeding, an appeal of the convictions is pending in the Eleventh Circuit Court in Atlanta.

In addition to the arguments cited for the new trial, the prosecution of the five Cubans represented violations of constitutional rights, including the Fourth Amendment protection against arbitrary search and seizure. FBI agents broke into their homes, and the prosecution’s "evidence" included information the FBI claimed to have collected in those raids.

Since their sentencing nearly one year ago, the five Cuban revolutionaries have been subjected to conditions meant to break their will. The U.S. government has dispersed the five to federal prisons in California, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Texas--three of them to maximum security prisons. Government officials have prevented visits by the wives of two of the men by denying them visas to enter the United States.

In a November 22 interview with the Militant, Leonard Weinglass stated that Ramón González "was suddenly told on November 14 to move from his prison in Pennsylvania," and that federal authorities had still not announced the location of the prison where he is being sent.
 
 
Related articles:
Free 5 Cuban patriots in U.S. jails  
 
 
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