Vol. 72/No. 28 July 14, 2008
An article last week, the first in a series highlighting key aspects of this case, described how the Cuban Five, as they have become known, were arrested by federal cops on Sept. 12, 1998.
In June 2001 Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero, and René González were convicted in a federal court on 26 counts. These false charges included “conspiracy to commit espionage,” acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government, and, in the case of Hernández, “conspiracy to commit murder.”
In reality, the five men had been keeping the Cuban government informed of the activities of Florida-based counterrevolutionary groups that have a record of planting bombs and carrying out other deadly attacks on Cuba from U.S. territory—assaults that are part of Washington’s nearly 50 years of hostile actions against the Cuban Revolution.
From the arrests to the trial and imprisonment of the five men—two U.S.-born citizens and three Cuban-born immigrants—every aspect of this case has been a travesty of justice, one that threatens the constitutional rights of all.
FBI wiretapping and break-ins
The U.S. government used the case to justify violations of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which bars unreasonable search and seizure. FBI cops acknowledged that over three years starting in 1995, they spied on and repeatedly broke into the south Florida homes of all five men. Under the cover of a federal warrant, they conducted electronic surveillance on their apartments, secretly recorded their phone conversations, copied computer diskettes, and seized family photos, personal correspondence, and other belongings, government officials told the press.
“FBI agents ransacked the $850-a-month, one-bedroom apartment” of Gerardo Hernández, Reuters news agency reported Sept. 16, 1998. “They took everything,” his building manager said.
“They have three years of wiretaps, room bugs, even surreptitious entries—burglaries—and they don’t have any specifics,” said Jack Blumenfeld, an attorney for Antonio Guerrero, according to the Oct. 6, 1998, Miami Herald. He spoke at the time a federal grand jury brought indictments against the five.
Blumenfeld noted that the FBI conducted these break-ins and snooping operations despite the fact that the indictments did not allege a single act of espionage against the U.S. government. None of the 1,400 pages presented as “evidence” at the trial showed that the defendants had handled any classified documents.
How the did the U.S. Justice Department get around this problem? By bringing charges of “conspiracy.”
“Conspiracy has always been the charge used by the prosecution in political cases,” defense attorney Leonard Weinglass explained in an interview quoted by the National Lawyers Guild in June 2008. Such a charge frees the government from having to prove an illegal action, only a vague “agreement” to commit such an action at some unspecified time in the future.
The trial jury “was asked to find that there was an agreement to commit espionage. The government never had to prove that espionage actually happened. It could not have proven that espionage occurred,” Weinglass noted.
Numerous violations of rights were committed during the trial against the five, from the use of secret evidence to the judge’s refusal of defense motions to move the proceedings out of Miami because of the atmosphere of intimidation and bias there. A subsequent article will take up in more detail what happened at the trial.
Denied bail, months in ‘hole’
For 33 months, from their arrests through the end of the trial, the five were held without bail at the Federal Detention Center in Miami. In addition, for 17 months before the trial they were kept in solitary confinement—the notorious “hole,” isolating them from contact with their families and limiting contact with their lawyers.
After they were convicted on frame-up charges, while the judge went on vacation before proceeding to the sentencing, the five were returned to the hole for another 48 days. They were moved out of the isolation cells only after repeated efforts by their attorneys.
And in March 2003 the men, now locked up in five prisons across the country, were placed in solitary once again—this time, under even more restrictive conditions known as the “box”—a hole within the “hole.” They were denied communication with their attorneys by telephone or letter, and all their writing materials were confiscated. The Justice Department said only that this action was for unspecified “national security” reasons.
Weinglass, who gained admission to visit Hernández once during that time, wrote, “He is confined in a very small cell barely three paces wide, with no windows and only a slot in the metal door through which food is passed. His clothes were taken from him and he is allowed to wear only underpants and a T-shirt, but no shoes. He cannot tell if it is day or night. His is the only cell where the lights are on 24 hours a day.”
It was only after an international campaign of public protests that U.S. authorities returned them to the general prison population.
Over the past decade the five have been put in the hole for shorter periods as well. On several occasions they have also been subjected to prison lockdowns by the authorities.
On top of the long sentences and harsh treatment—unsuccessful attempts to break the five revolutionaries—they have been denied the normal right to receive visits from their loved ones. Their wives, mothers, and children, who live in Cuba, have been able to visit only once a year on average because of the long delays in obtaining visas. And U.S. authorities have outright denied all visa requests by Adriana Pérez and Olga Salanueva to visit their husbands, Gerardo Hernández and René González, respectively.
Stepped-up attacks on workers rights
The frame-up of the Cuban Five—beginning with the 1995-98 FBI operation that led to their arrest—was carried out by the Clinton administration and its Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Janet Reno, at a time when the U.S. capitalist rulers were stepping up their assaults on workers rights as well as on the wages and social gains of working people. U.S. district judge Joan Lenard, who presided over the November 2000-June 2001 trial, is herself a Clinton appointee.
In 1994 the government enacted the Crime Bill, which undermined Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary search and seizure in private homes, allowing prosecutors to use illegally obtained evidence in court. It allocated funds to put 100,000 more cops on the streets.
The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded the immigration cops’ powers to seize and deport undocumented workers without the right to judicial review or appeal. The migra was expanded to become the largest federal police agency.
The 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act allowed immigration police to jail immigrants using secret evidence. It broadened government powers to use wiretaps and hold an accused person without bail in preventive detention.
The government further restricted prisoners’ appeal and parole rights. Mandatory minimum sentences and longer terms became more common, including life without parole.
The government expanded to about 60 the number of federal offenses punishable by death, and executions accelerated after the adoption of the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act. The Comprehensive Terrorism Protection Act of 1995 denied the right of death row prisoners to submit more than one habeas corpus petition for federal court review of their cases.
Under the Clinton presidency, between 1993 and 2001, the number of people behind bars jumped by 42 percent. Lockdowns and solitary confinement increasingly became the norm. Today 2.3 million people in the United States are behind bars.
In 1999 the U.S. government framed up Taiwanese-born scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was accused of stealing nuclear secrets for China. While the government could not prove a case of espionage, it denied him bail and kept him in solitary confinement for nine months, using the case to strengthen its arbitrary powers in the name of “national security.”
In April 2000, heavily armed commandos of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) carried out a raid to take six-year-old Elián González from a home in Miami. The White House exploited its half-year-long refusal to return the child to his father in Cuba in order to burnish the image of the INS, reinforce the agency’s powers that are exempt from judicial review, and deal a blow to the right to be safe from unreasonable searches and seizures. The Miami raid was conducted in the months before the trial against the Cuban Five opened.
The Bush administration, inaugurated in January 2001, extended its predecessors’ encroachments on political rights. It seized on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to win passage of the Patriot Act and other laws to authorize expanded police wiretapping of phones, interception of e-mail, and spying on political groups and individuals. The sentences against the Cuban Five—with terms of up to a double life sentence—were issued in December 2001, as Washington escalated its “antiterror” campaign.
Under the banner of “homeland security,” the government has sought to legitimize the use of “preventive detention” with no charges, secret courts, and even torture. It is moving to try Guantánamo prisoners in military tribunals where they would be denied elementary rights.
Meanwhile, immigration cops have stepped up their raids of factories and working-class neighborhoods, increasing deportations and bringing criminal charges against foreign-born workers.
Because of the experiences by millions of workers and farmers with these assaults on their rights and conditions of life—and the growing resistance to them—the case of the Cuban Five strikes a chord among many. Working people engaged in protests against immigration raids, police frame-ups, and other class injustices are the most responsive to appeals to support the campaign to free them. By standing up, fighting, and extending their solidarity to others, these five working-class fighters have themselves been in the front ranks of the class struggle in the United States.
The next article will take up the stories of each of the five men and their years-long records of struggle on behalf of working people—in Cuba, the United States, and internationally.
How the U.S. gov’t framed the Cuban 5