The article below incorrectly reports Atlanta as the location of the court in which Fernando González, René González, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, and Ramón Labiñino will submit appeals to their frame-up convictions. The appeals will be heard in Miami by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Atlanta.

The FBI arrests of the five Cubans in 1998 were accompanied by highly publicized and sensational announcements that the federal cops had discovered a “Cuban spy network” in Florida whose members had tried to infiltrate the U.S. Southern Command and had passed military secrets to Havana. The men explained at their trial that they were in the United States to gather information on ultrarightist organizations that have been responsible for carrying out armed violent attacks on Cuba from U.S. soil with Washington’s complicity.

The five were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage and to act as unregistered foreign agents. Hernández was also charged with conspiracy to commit murder. They were given sentences ranging from 15 years to a double life term in the case of Hernández.

Attorneys for the defendants have submitted an extensive written appeal but have been allotted a total of 15 minutes, or three minutes for each prisoner’s lawyer, during the March 10 oral arguments. “We have filed a motion asking for additional time based on the extent of the trial and volume of the record,” Leonard Weinglass, the attorney for Guerrero, said in a February 13 phone interview with the Militant. “The court has not yet responded, but we are scheduled as the last case for that day, which increases the possibility that we will get more time.”

In a January 23 interview with Radio Havana Cuba, Weinglass outlined the main arguments of the appeal. The defense was hampered during the trial, he said, because the government wrongfully withheld documents the defense was entitled to, claiming they were secret. Weinglass added that the government broke its own laws when agents surreptitiously entered the apartments of Hernández and others and secretly downloaded information from their computers.

The appeal also states that the evidence was lacking for the charges of conspiracy to commit murder against Hernández and conspiracy to commit espionage leveled at Guerrero and two other defendants. It says that attorneys had asked for the trial to be moved out of Miami, contending that a fair trial would not be possible there.

Furthermore, said Weinglass, the sentences handed out to the defendants were excessive and in violation of U.S. law.

The written appeal also highlights the charged climate from the beginning of the trial that included, “hostile prospective jurors—among them a member of the right wing Cuban American National Foundation—blistering editorials and news articles throughout the trial…and the dogged following of jurors by Spanish-language media (including the government-sponsored Radio Martí).”

Radio Martí was set up by Washington to attempt to broadcast into Cuba illegally as part of Washington’s propaganda campaign against the Cuban Revolution.

With the aim of isolating them from supporters and each other, the government has placed the five men in separate jails across the country. On Feb. 28, 2003, all five were thrown into solitary confinement by order of the Department of Justice, which argued that the support they were receiving and the limited visits they were allowed posed a “national security risk.” They were released a month later following an international protest campaign.

Weinglass also told Radio Havana that his client was moved without prior notice from the prison where he had been held in Colorado while his mother was in this country visiting him from Cuba. At that time Guererro was taken to a prison medical facility in Springfield, Missouri, for minor surgery. Upon arrival he was placed in solitary confinement, where he was kept during consultations with the surgeon performing the procedure. Weinglass said that Guerrero was told that this is a normal practice in the prison.

Last December, for the fourth time, the U.S. government refused to grant visas to Olga Salanueva, the wife of René González, and Adriana Pérez, the wife of Gerardo Hernández, to allow them to come to the United States from Cuba to visit their husbands.  
 
 
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