Vol. 72/No. 27 July 7, 2008
The big-business media reported that those arrested were accused of trying to “penetrate” the Pentagon’s Southern Command, pass U.S. military secrets to the Cuban government, “infiltrate anti-Castro groups,” and “manipulate U.S. media and political organizations.”
They had sought “to strike at the very heart of our national security system and our very democratic process,” U.S. attorney Thomas Scott alleged at a highly publicized press conference at FBI headquarters.
Federal prosecutors singled out five of those arrested as their main targets. They were Gerardo Hernández, 33; Ramón Labañino, 35; Antonio Guerrero, 39; Fernando González, 35; and René González, 42. The government announced that they faced espionage charges carrying sentences of up to life in prison.
The truth is that the Cuban Five, as their case has become known internationally, were framed up by the U.S. government.
What was their “crime”? The five Cubans explained—proudly—that they had accepted assignments to keep the government of Cuba informed about counterrevolutionary groups based in South Florida that have a long record of carrying out attacks on Cuba from U.S. soil, such as a string of bombings of hotels in Havana in 1997. Not only has Washington not prevented such attacks—it has given these groups a green light through five decades of U.S. economic and military aggression against the Cuban Revolution.
In 2001 the five were convicted after an unfair trial marked by violations of elementary rights, and despite the fact that the prosecution admitted they had never handled any classified information. Hernández was sentenced to a double life term, Labañino and Guerrero to life in prison, René González to 15 years, and Fernando González to 19 years.
Purpose of frame-up
The railroading of the Cuban Five had a double purpose.
It was one more attempt by the U.S. billionaire class to punish revolutionary Cuba for having the audacity to make a socialist revolution and set an example for working people worldwide fighting against exploitation and oppression.
It was also aimed against workers and farmers here in the United States. The message was: think twice before standing up to the employers and their government.
The U.S. rulers thought they would get away with this frame-up. However, they underestimated the resistance by these five working-class fighters and how the case would strike a chord among increasing numbers of people.
For the past 10 years the Cuban Five have been on the front lines of those fighting against government and employer assaults on the rights and living conditions of working people. Not only have they stood up to harsh treatment by their jailers—including long stints in solitary confinement and the restriction or outright denial of visas for their loved ones to visit them—they have reached out in solidarity to many others fighting for justice, both inside and outside prison walls, in the United States and abroad.
This record is consistent with the exemplary role they played in Cuba, whether as student leaders or as internationalist combatants among the thousands of Cuban volunteers who helped defeat the racist government of South Africa when it invaded Angola.
Over the past decade, the unfair trial, frame-up, and arbitrary treatment of the Cuban Five by U.S. authorities have led growing numbers to demand their release. They have become an example to others fighting for justice, from meat packers jailed for working without proper papers to those opposing the execution of Troy Davis, a Black man in Georgia framed up by police.
The five are well aware that their battle for freedom is a long-term one. Because of their refusal to give up, however, the frame-up has suffered some cracks in the legal arena.
In 2005 a federal appeals court panel overturned their convictions on the basis that they received an unfair trial. A year later, after the U.S. government challenged the ruling, the full court restored the convictions. Then in June 2008 a third appeals court decision, while upholding the convictions, threw out the sentences against three of the five—including two life sentences—as being excessive even by U.S. legal standards. These cases now go back to the original trial judge for resentencing.
Today, the fact that the five have remained locked up for 10 years leads many people, as they learn the facts, to say: Enough is enough—elementary justice demands that they be freed!
This article is the beginning of a series the Militant will publish on the facts of case to get out the truth as broadly as possible.
Refuse to ‘cooperate’ with gov’t
In September 1998, a few days after their arrests, Hernández, Labañino, Guerrero, René González, and Fernando González were dragged before federal magistrate Barry Garber, who ordered them held without bail at Miami’s Federal Detention Center (FDC). “Each represents a danger to the community,” he stated, agreeing with the prosecutors. They were assigned public attorneys.
“The goal now for prosecutors is to persuade the alleged agents to cooperate,” the Miami Herald reported September 16, citing unnamed government sources.
Ramón Labañino described what happened to him: “Everything started on Sept. 12, 1998, at about 5:30 a.m. at home, when we were detained and taken to FBI headquarters in Miami for a ‘persuasive’ interview, where they asked us to collaborate and betray our country with promises offered in return. Obviously I had nothing to say, and after they were sure they were getting nowhere, they put us in a car and took us to the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami, where we’ve been all this time.”
Labañino wrote these lines to his wife, Elizabeth Palmeiro, in January 2001, as his trial was under way.
Under pressure, five of the 10 detainees soon pleaded guilty on lesser charges—acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government—and agreed to testify against the others. Among them were two married couples with children who were warned they faced long prison terms and might lose paternal authority over their children if they did not “cooperate.” In early 2000 they were sentenced to jail terms of between three and a half and seven years, with promises of early release and federal witness protection.
Meanwhile, the Cuban Five were kept in solitary confinement. They were confined to cramped, damp, moldy cells 23 hours a day, with only an hour of “recreation” to stretch their legs. They would stay in “the hole” for 17 consecutive months.
A federal grand jury brought a 26-count indictment. The five pleaded not guilty to all the charges, which included the following:
The initial indictment was brought in early October 1998. The charge against Hernández of “conspiracy to commit murder,” however, was added in May 1999, after it became clear the government had failed to break the defendants’ spirits despite eight months of solitary confinement.
In an unprecedented legal move, U.S. officials charged Hernández as responsible for an action by a sovereign government—Cuba’s 1996 shootdown of two planes flown over its territory by Brothers to the Rescue, a right-wing outfit that had repeatedly violated Cuban airspace despite widely publicized warnings.
Cops jail, deport Olga Salanueva
Federal officials tried other ways to break the five Cubans, but failed. One particularly crude method was their arrest and deportation of Olga Salanueva as a club against her husband, René González.
Salanueva wrote an account of what happened in Letters of Love and Hope: The Story of the Cuban Five, a collection of correspondence between the Cuban Five and their families. González, a U.S. citizen who grew up in Cuba, moved to Florida in 1990, and Salanueva joined him six years later, becoming a U.S. permanent resident. They have two daughters, Irma, born in Cuba, and Ivette, born in the United States.
On Aug. 16, 2000, FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service cops arrested Salanueva. They confiscated her green card. “They told me that I knew about my husband’s activities and that, as a result, my residency was invalid,” she wrote. “I was taken to the state prison in Fort Lauderdale.”
She explained, “The real objective of my detention was to pressure Rene into signing a confession prepared by the Southern Florida District Attorney in which he would declare himself guilty and testify against the other defendants.” The federal officials warned him that Salanueva, as a permanent resident, could also be charged. González refused to sign the confession and she was arrested three days later.
On the way to jail, the cops took Salanueva, dressed in an orange prison suit, to see González at FDC. “They wanted to show him that they had made good on their threat and that our daughters and I were at their mercy. He looked at me and said, ‘Orange looks good on you!’ Even in front of the guards, he hadn’t lost his sense of humor.” That was the last time she saw him.
“I didn’t cry that day,” Salanueva added. “When you’re among friends you cry—but not before your enemies. Dignity gives you strength and hardens you.”
During the three months Salanueva was jailed, González was not given her letters. “It was clearly an effort to try to destabilize him emotionally since he did not know anything about me directly and the beginning of the trial was near,” she noted.
They were barred from speaking to each other by phone. In a gesture of solidarity, a Peruvian-born coworker at Salanueva’s telemarketing job helped them get around that obstacle. Olga explained that “I called her and she recorded my message for Rene. He did the same. He called her, listened to my recording and then recorded” a message for his wife.
On Nov. 21, 2000, six days before the trial of the five began, Olga Salanueva was deported. For the past eight years the U.S. government has repeatedly denied her a visa to see her husband. She, along with other relatives of the five, has never stopped speaking out for their release.
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