Vol. 73/No. 35      September 14, 2009

Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González are known internationally as the Cuban Five.

Before their arrest in September 1998, they had been monitoring the actions of counterrevolutionary Cuban American groups that have carried out bombings and other armed attacks against Cuba with Washington’s complicity. For this, they were framed-up by the U.S. government on allegations of acting as “unregistered” foreign agents and various “conspiracy” charges. Three were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage and one with conspiracy to commit murder.

Last year a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of all five prisoners, but ruled that the sentences handed down to Labañino, Guerrero, and Fernando González were excessive. The three are now in a Miami jail awaiting resentencing. They are being held in solitary confinement, as all five were for the first 17 months of their incarceration.

Their resentencing will be presided over by the same Miami judge that sentenced all five of them in June 2001.

Labañino and Guerrero were each given life sentences for “conspiracy” to commit espionage and concurrent shorter sentences for lesser charges. The judges’ decision pointed out that they were given the maximum punishment based on guidelines related to the “actual gathering or transmission of top secret information.” The panel overturned the sentences, they say, because the government presented no evidence and never accused them of any act of espionage.

Fernando González was sentenced to 19 years for acting as an unregistered foreign agent, conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent, and charges related to possession of false documents. The sentence for the latter charge was ramped up based on allegations that González was a “manager or supervisor” of a conspiracy to use false documents, which the judges ruled the government presented no evidence to support.

The court upheld the 15-year sentence for René González and two life sentences plus 15 years for Gerardo Hernández.

The three judges said that the reasons for vacating Labañino and Guerrero’s sentences for conspiracy to commit espionage apply equally to the same charge against Hernández. However, they declined to overturn his sentence. Because Hernández is concurrently serving another life sentence on the false charge of conspiracy to commit murder, they said, any change to his prison term for conspiracy to commit espionage would be “irrelevant to the time he will serve in prison.”

From the outset, the Cuban Five requested a change of venue from Miami on the basis that they could not receive a fair trial there, given the atmosphere of bias and intimidation. This was denied.

One of the three judges in last year’s decision attached a dissenting statement in which he reiterated his support for change of venue from Miami given the “pervasive community prejudice” and role of the media.

The five have received worldwide support, including from nine Nobel Prize winners, some 6,000 intellectuals and artists, more than 1,000 elected politicians, the UN Human Rights Commission, various civil libertarian and human rights organizations, and many others.

Most recently, on August 25 American Federation of Teachers Local 2121 in San Francisco unanimously passed a resolution calling on President Barack Obama to pardon and release the Cuban Five. The union local requested the San Francisco Labor Council endorse the resolution.
 
 
Related articles:
Free the Cuban Five now!
Treasury Dept. issues fine over Cuba embargo
Write to the Cuban Five  
 
 
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