Three Cubans--Gerardo Hernández, Ramon Labaniño, and Antonio Guerrero--were convicted in a federal court in Miami of "conspiracy to commit espionage" and "conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent," and could get life imprisonment. Fernando González and René González, convicted of "conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent," face possible 10-year sentences.

Gerardo Hernández also faces a life sentence on charges of "conspiracy to commit murder" in the deaths of four pilots belonging to the rightist Brothers to the Rescue. The pilots were shot down by the Cuban air force in 1996, following repeated warnings, after they had provocatively entered Cuban airspace. The prosecution won the conviction by asserting that Hernández had provided the Cuban government with flight information about the Brothers to the Rescue operation.  
 
Assault on rights
The arrest, prosecution, and conviction of the Cubans by U.S. authorities is a blow not only against revolutionary Cuba, but against the rights of working people in the United States.

In violation of Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure, FBI agents broke into the homes of the defendants many times over a three-year period prior to the arrests and searched through their belongings and computers. The prosecution's "evidence" consisted of information the FBI claims it collected from what it says were encoded messages copied from computer hard drives of the defendants and short-wave radio transmissions the government claims took place between Cuba and the defendants.

The judge denied a defense motion to move the trial outside of Miami even though several potential jurors--Cuban-Americans and Latinos in particular--asked to be disqualified for fear of recriminations if they voted "not guilty."

The big-business media in the Miami area all but convicted the five of spying before the trial began and kept up a steady stream of articles and editorials trying to bolster the government's case and to portray the trial as fair--even though not a shred of evidence was produced of "military secrets" supposedly stolen by "spies."  
 
'U.S. assault against Cuba'
The statement in Granma defends the five Cubans as patriots and prints a message from them "to the American people," stating that they "are the victims of a terrible injustice." In the letter the imprisoned Cubans say, "Our tiny nation, which has heroically survived four decades of aggressions and threats to its national security, of subversion plans, sabotage, and destabilization, has every right to defend itself from its enemies who keep using U.S. territory to plan, organize, and finance terrorist actions breaking your own laws in the process."

With media fanfare, the FBI arrested 10 people in 1998 and announced it had discovered a "Cuban spy network" in Florida. Those arrested were charged with trying to "infiltrate" the U.S. Southern Command, passing U.S. "military secrets" to Havana, and "infiltrating" and "disrupting" Cuban-American groups-- right-wing outfits that seek to overthrow the revolutionary government in Cuba. The charge of "conspiracy to commit murder" was added later.

In a interview with CNN reporter Lucía Newman shortly after the 1998 arrests, Cuban president Fidel Castro said, "Yes, we have sometimes sent Cuban citizens to infiltrate counterrevolutionary organizations, to report on destructive actions against our country, and I believe we have the right to do so as long as the U.S. government tolerates" efforts on its soil to launch terrorist attacks against Cuba.  
 
Defense's case
This was the stance taken by the Cubans in their defense at the trial. They were able to present extensive evidence to the court about the character and scope of the counterrevolutionary activities. Among the witnesses called by the defense were a former member of Alpha 66 who founded Commandos F-4, groups that have been responsible for armed attacks against Cuba and defenders of the Cuban Revolution in Miami.

The defense also put on the stand retired Air Force colonel George Buchner, who testified that National Security Agency records show that the Brothers to the Rescue planes were indeed inside Cuban airspace in contradiction to U.S. government statements.

The defense called to the stand another U.S. official and a Cuba military officer who said the U.S. government had been warned about a number of terrorist operations, including the Brothers to the Rescue activities. In addition, in response to defense questioning under cross-examination, Brothers to the Rescue leader José Basulto admitted he "broadly supports exile groups bent on overthrowing Fidel Castro violently."

The effectiveness of these defense efforts moved Ramón Saúl Sánchez, head of the rightist Democracy Movement, to urge opponents of the Cuban Revolution not to appear on the witness stand since the defense attorneys had turned the tables, putting them on trial instead of the defendants.

An article in Granma says that of the 10 arrested, five "were collaborators and friends who were unable to resist the terrible pressures and threats exerted on all the detainees." Of those five, four were from married couples with children who were told by U.S. authorities, according to the Granma report, that they faced "long prison terms, possibly life sentences, and that they would lose paternal authority over their children" if they did not cooperate with the prosecution. The five plea-bargained and received lesser sentences and the prosecution used their testimony in its case.

Granma noted that the U.S. government had "not been able to break the [other] prisoners," despite 17 months of solitary confinement, the severity of the charges levied against them, interrogations, and offers of lighter sentences. The government imprisoned the wife of one defendant for three months to bring maximum pressure to bear on him."

Speaking at a June 23 televised roundtable discussion, Castro said the five Cubans who had been convicted should be considered "political prisoners, prisoners of the empire." Noting that Washington never admits holding political prisoners, Castro added that the U.S. rulers "never consider Puerto Rican independentistas as political prisoners, those who have only committed the crime of loving their homeland, their nation, their culture, and aspiring to control their own destiny, for which they have fought many years."
 
 
Related article:
A miscarriage of justice  
 
 
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