The reversal of the convictions means that legally “my client is innocent now,” attorney Paul McKenna told a telephone news conference just hours after the decision was issued. McKenna represents Gerardo Hernández, one of the Cuban Five, as they are known by their supporters.

“The first thing I will be focusing on is to get him out of that maximum security prison. He is not convicted of anything,” said McKenna, adding that the defense attorneys will now ask that the five be freed on bail while awaiting retrial. They have been jailed since 1998, when they were arrested by the FBI under the Clinton administration.

“What the U.S. government should do is grant them freedom immediately,” said Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba’s National Assembly, according to the Cuban weekly Granma International. Cuba’s revolutionary leadership has been waging a vigorous campaign, at home and internationally, for the release of the five.

“There remains a long road ahead before they return to Cuba,” said Adriana Pérez, who is married to Hernández, “but we have fought, and we know that we are defending a just cause because we have maintained our positions and have not crumbled despite the injustices committed against us,” Granma International reported.

Pérez and other relatives of the Cuban Five are in Caracas, Venezuela, participating in the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students.

The ruling is “a real victory,” said Max Lesnik, a leader of Miami-based Alianza Martiana, in an August 10 phone interview. “These people are innocent. The only espionage they committed was to protect the Cuban and American people from the terrorism of the right-wing Cuban exile community in Miami.” Alianza Martiana is a Cuban-American group that opposes the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González, René González, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino were convicted in a frame-up trial in 2001 on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage, to act as unregistered foreign agents, and—in the case of Hernández—to commit murder. Guerrero and Labañino were given life sentences, and René González and Fernando González were sentenced to 15 and 19 years, respectively.

Hernández was serving a double life sentence on charges of responsibility for the 1996 death of four pilots, members of the rightist group Brothers to the Rescue, who were shot down by the Cuban air force while carrying out provocative violations of Cuban air space.

The five were in the United States on a mission from the Cuban government to monitor the activities of Cuban-American counterrevolutionary organizations based in Miami that have a history of carrying out violent attacks against Cuba with the complicity of the U.S. government.

The judges cited numerous examples—from the jury selection, to the testimony in court, to the media circus that surrounded the trial, as well as “the government’s use of inflammatory statements during closing arguments”—as factors that made it impossible for the men to receive a fair trial.

During jury selection, for example, the individual chosen as jury foreman, David Buker, said, “Castro is a communist dictator and I am opposed to communism so I would like to see him gone.” Numerous prospective jurors were disqualified because they said they could not give an impartial ruling for fear of retribution from right-wing forces when they returned to their jobs and communities in Miami.

During the trial, some jurors complained that they were filmed by reporters for right-wing TV stations as they left the courthouse, including the license numbers on their cars.

Guerrero’s attorney, Leonard Weinglass, told the August 9 press conference that the U.S. attorney now had a choice between requesting a review of the three-judge panel’s ruling by the full appeals court, or accepting the decision and preparing for a retrial.

If no appeal is granted, he said, then the five are supposed to be transferred to a detention center in Miami. Following their convictions, the five were dispersed to prisons far away from each other as part of Washington’s efforts to isolate them from their supporters and break them.

“They have to be treated like all pretrial prisoners,” McKenna said in an August 9 phone interview. “In that situation you have unlimited access to your attorney like they did after they were first arrested. You can use the telephone. Defendants who are preparing a joint defense, as the five are, get to meet together, get to spend time together with their lawyers and full access to materials to prepare their defense.”

McKenna added that the five would renew their petition to be allowed visits from their relatives in Cuba. Adriana Pérez and Olga Salanueva, who is married to René González, have repeatedly been denied entry into the United States to visit their imprisoned husbands.

The U.S. National Committee to Free the Five has launched a renewed campaign to demand the U.S. government grant immediate entry visas to Pérez and Salanueva.
 
 
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Free the Cuban Five!  
 
 
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