To justify the harsh sentence, Lenard claimed the acts of Guerrero were "the most palpable and transparent" among the five defendants, adding, "His illegal actions were for the sole purpose of obtaining national security information."

Guerrero, who was born in Miami, worked for a period as a janitor at Key West's Boca Chica Naval Air Station. The prosecution claimed he used his job to try to pass U.S. military secrets to Havana. Government attorneys, however, failed to produce a shred of evidence of any such information ever being sent to Cuba by Guerrero or any of the other four defendants.

"If you want to find out how the Navy fights, go rent a video of Top Gun,'' said defense attorney William Norris in an earlier interview. "You'll learn a lot more than Tony Guerrero could see'' by watching aircraft at the Key West air base where he worked as a janitor for five years. Norris was ridiculing a prosecution contention that Antonio Guerrero was endangering secret U.S. battle doctrine by watching aircraft land and take off on training exercises.

Guerrero denounced the verdict. "If I were asked to do something like this again, I would do it with honor," he said, speaking in the courtroom after his sentence was read out. In good spirits, he blew a kiss to his mother, Mirta Rodríguez, 69, who was in the courtroom, before being led back to jail.

Jack Blumenfeld, Guerrero's attorney, said he was not surprised by the sentence. "I shall be filing a notice of appeal in the next day or so," he told the press December 27.

All five defendants have stated they were simply investigating activities of right-wing Cuban-American groups in Florida with a record of terrorist activities against Cuba, carried out with knowledge and complicity from Washington. They have announced they will fight their convictions through appeals.

The Cuban government, which has waged an international campaign in defense of the Miami Five, called a special session of the country's National Assembly December 29. With a unanimous vote, the Assembly bestowed Cuba's highest honor on the five patriots, "Heroes of the Republic of Cuba," because they completed "with exemplary dedication, dignity, and steadfastness the sacred mission of defending the nation and protecting it from terrorism."

Cuban president Fidel Castro reportedly told the National Assembly that 2002 would be dedicated as the "Year of the Heroic Prisoners of the Empire" because of the importance of the fight to free the Miami Five.  
 
Frame-up convictions
In 1998 the FBI announced with much fanfare and media hype that 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" right-wing Cuban-American groups in Miami that seek to overthrow the revolutionary government of Cuba. A charge of "conspiracy to commit murder" was tacked on later against one of the five.

On June 8 a jury in a federal courtroom here handed down guilty verdicts against the five men on all 23 charges of "spying" for the government of Cuba. 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 down in 1996 by the Cuban air force. A number of defense witnesses offered ample evidence that these rightists repeatedly violated Cuban airspace and refused to heed warnings to head back before they were downed near Havana.

In mid-December, Hernández received two consecutive life terms plus 80 months in jail for these trumped-up charges. Days later, Ramón Labaniño was sentenced to one life term; René González received consecutive 10-year and five-year sentences; and Fernando González got 19 years in jail.

These convictions and sentences are an attack directed not only at revolutionary Cuba but at workers' 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's "evidence" consisted of information the FBI claimed to have collected in these raids, and from short-wave radio transmissions government agents asserted they intercepted between Havana and the defendants. The judge refused a defense motion to move the trial out of Miami, even after several potential jurors, especially Cuban-Americans, disqualified themselves for fear of reprisals if they voted "not guilty." No evidence of any military secrets being stolen from the United States and turned over to Cuba was ever presented by the prosecution.

As with Washington's attacks on workers' rights under the guise of fighting terrorism since September 11, the U.S. rulers used the "spy scare" case against the Miami Five as a means to justify broader powers for the FBI, including sanctioning break-ins and electronic eavesdropping, frame-up trials on scanty evidence, and harsh prison conditions, such as extended solitary confinement solely based on the character of the charges against the defendants.

This past October the FBI also arrested and jailed Ana Belen Montes, a senior analyst for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, for allegedly providing classified information to the Cuban government. As with those arrested in Florida, FBI break-ins into Montes's apartment and electronic eavesdropping are also featured in government actions against her.  
 
 
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