The five men—Fernando González, René González, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, and Ramón Labañino—are serving draconian sentences after being convicted in June 2001 on frame-up charges brought by the U.S. government. The Cuban Five, as they are known, had been carrying out an internationalist mission to gather information on ultrarightist organizations with a record of violent attacks on Cuba launched from U.S. soil with Washington’s complicity. They were arrested by FBI agents five years ago and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage and conspiracy to act as unregistered foreign agents. Hernández was also charged with conspiracy to commit murder. After their convictions, they were given sentences ranging from 15 years to a double life term, and sent to five federal prisons in different regions of the country.

The appeal of the convictions is based on a number of issues, Weinglass stated in a December 19 telephone interview with the Militant. These include, he said, the government’s failure to prove that there had been a conspiracy to commit espionage or murder; the court’s “failure to permit the necessity defense,” whereby the five men could demonstrate that “their actions were necessary to prevent a larger wrong,” that is, the violent actions carried out against Cuba by rightist groups based in the United States; and the government’s improper use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Classified Information Procedures Act to hamper the defense effort. He also pointed to the harsh prison terms handed down to the five as “excessive sentencing outside of all existing guidelines.”

The March 10 hearing will also take oral arguments on the appeal by attorneys for the Cuban Five demanding a new trial, based on new evidence, said Weinglass. The attorneys had brought this appeal to a lower court in November 2002, but the motion for a new trial was denied.

The defense had argued 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 men 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 “nothing could honor their memory more than to call to account their murderers,” referring to the deceased Brothers to the Rescue pilots, adding, “more than compensation, the families want the moral sting of a U.S. criminal prosecution in federal court.”

The five Cuban revolutionaries had filed for a change of venue for their trial, from Miami to Broward County—25 miles to the north. 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 v. 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.

The May 13 appeal of the ruling against the motion for a change of venue argues that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida “erred in failing to conduct any sort of hearing on the motion, effectively presuming the innocence and good faith of the government without considering such relevant questions as: Has the government ever before sought a change of venue because it could not receive a fair trial?” The appeal calls on the 11th Circuit Court to “direct the district court to grant the defendants a new trial. Alternatively, the Court should remand to the district court for an evidentiary hearing on the motion.”

Since their imprisonment the five men have faced continued, but unsuccessful, government attempts to break them. On February 28 all five were thrown into solitary confinement under an order by the Justice Department charging that the extensive solidarity they had received in the form of correspondence and the few visitors they were allowed made them a “national security risk.” An international campaign of protests was launched immediately by their supporters. They were released from the “hole” a month later.

In November, Washington denied visas for the fourth time to Olga Salanueva, the wife of René González, and Adriana Pérez, the wife of Gerardo Hernández, to travel from Cuba to the United States to visit their imprisoned husbands. The U.S. government rejection of the visas came four months after the women had submitted their applications, and claimed that the decision was made because Salanueva and Pérez were a threat to “national security.”  
 
 
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