"There are going to be other people picked up on this matter here," Héctor Pesquera, the special agent in charge of FBI operations in this city, told the Miami Herald in an interview published July 10. "We haven't finished our investigation, and I am confident that additional people will be charged in this intelligence network operation."

Asked why these alleged suspects were not charged and indicted earlier, when the FBI arrested 10 people in September 1998, Pesquera replied in vague terms, "There are some investigative and prosecutorial strategies employed in any case."

Paul McKenna, one of the defense attorneys of the five Cubans recently convicted, said the threatened indictments would most likely be brought against individuals who live in Cuba.

Pesquera and other U.S. officials, however, "acknowledge there are more Cuban spies working in the United States," the Herald reported--a statement calculated to sending a chill down the spine of all opponents of Washington's policy toward Cuba."We are continually monitoring as many of the people who are here to conduct illegal or intelligence activities on behalf of the Castro regime as we can," Pesquera said.

On June 8, three Cuban citizens--Gerardo Hernández, Ramón 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." They could face life in prison. Fernando González and René González, convicted of "conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent," face possible 10-year sentences. The sentencing is expected to take place in September.

Gerardo Hernández also faces a life sentence on charges of "conspiracy to commit murder" in the deaths of four pilots belonging to the rightist Cuban-American group Brothers to the Rescue. The pilots were shot down by the Cuban air force in 1996, after provocatively entering Cuban air space and ignoring repeated warnings. The prosecution justified the charge by claiming Hernández had provided the Cuban government with flight information about the Brothers to the Rescue operation.

The Cuban government has launched a campaign to oppose the convictions and condemn Washington's hostile policies against Cuba.

The five Cubans were part of an operation to "discover and report on terrorist plans hatched against our people," the Cuban government said in a statement published in the June 20 issue of the Cuban daily Granma.

The arrests and convictions of the five constituted an attack directed not only at revolutionary Cuba but at democratic rights in the United States. FBI agents broke into their homes repeatedly over the three years prior to the arrests, violating the Fourth Amendment protection against arbitrary search and seizure. The prosecution "evidence" consisted of information the FBI claimed to have collected in these raids, and from short-wave radio transmissions assertedly intercepted between Havana and the defendants. The judge refused a defense motion to move the trial out of Miami. And the big-business media all but convicted the five as spies even before the trial began.

The media here is reporting favorably on the FBI threats of more prosecutions. "I advocate charging anyone who had anything to do with the [1996] shoot-down and the network whom we can meet the [legal] threshold on," said Pesquera. "I will pursue each of those individuals vigorously. We haven't turned the switch off on this particular network and the shoot-down."

Argiris Malapanis is a meat packer in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.  
 
 
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