Cuban Five

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This poster from a Swedish-Cuban friendship organization says: Free the 5 Cubans, political prisoners in the USA.

The Cuban Five are Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando Gonzáles, and René Gonzáles are five Cuban nationals who were arrested and convicted of various crimminal activities committed in the United States. All five are currently serving prison terms in the United States.

1 Arrests, Convictions and Sentances
2 Cuban Reaction and Defense
3 International Reactions
4 External links

[edit] Arrests, Convictions and Sentances

The U.S. arrested the Cuban Five as part of a group of alleged spies known as the "Wasp Network". One member of the five, Gerardo Hernandez, infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue and sent information back to Cuba that led to the downing of the plane. The remaining four lied about their identities and sent 2,000 pages of unclassified information obtained from U.S. military bases to Cuba.

All five were arrested in Miami, Florida in September 1998 and were indicted by the U.S. government on 26 different counts. The charges included: the use of false identification, espionage and conspiracy to commit murder.

After the arrests, petitions by the defense to move the trial out of Miami were refused, although the jury consisted of no Cuban-Americans [1]. They spent almost three years in jail between their arrest and the beginning of their trial. The trial went on for seven months and jury deliberations lasted four days.

On June 2001, they were convicted of all 26 counts by a U.S. federal court in Miami and in December sentenced to varying terms in maximum-security prison: two consecutive life terms for Hernández, life for Guerrero and Labañino, 19 years for Fernando Gonzáles, and 15 years for René Gonzáles.

On August 9, 2005, a three-judge appellate panel of the 11th circuit court of appeals in Atlanta overturned the convictions and sentences of the Cuban Five and ordered a new trial saying that the Cuban exile community in Miami and the trial publicity made the trial unfavorable and prejudicial to the defendants.

[2] In November 2005 this ruling for a new trial was reversed by the full panel of 11th circuit court [3] . As of now the original convictions are reinstated. A rehearing is pending in the 11th United States circuit court of appeals.

[edit] Cuban Reaction and Defense

The arrest and conviction incited an uproar from the Cuban government and sympathetic groups. The five convicted men claim that they were in Miami to monitor anti-Castro Cuban exile groups operating out of that city, which they claim were engaging in terrorist activities against Cuba.

Defenders of the Cuban Five claim that terrorism against Cuba has been carried out by exile groups such as CORU, Alpha 66, Omega 7 and Brothers to the Rescue, with impunity.

The Cuban government upholds this position as well. In a 2001 report by Cuba's Permanent Mission to the United Nations, the Cuban government catalogued 3,478 deaths as a result of "terrorism", "aggression", "acts of piracy and other actions". [4] The events cited span the course of four decades and pertain to attacks such as plane bombings as well as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the long civil war between the government and anti-communist rebels in the Escambray Mountains.

Paintings of the five are displayed throughout Cuba, and there are state sponsored posters explaining the Cuban position hanging in most resorts.

[edit] International Reactions

Since their conviction, there has been an international campaign for the case to be appealed, with support groups in twenty-seven countries. In the United States, the campaign is most conspicuously represented by the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five[5], which is represented in fourteen cities. Many other American groups, such as the Socialist Workers Party has been known to campaign for the release of the Cuban Five, as have international groups like the Free People's Movement.

Amnesty International criticizes the US treatment of the Cuban Five as human rights violations, as the wives of René Gonzáles and Gerardo Hernández have not been allowed visas to visit their imprisoned husbands. [6] Furthermore, Amnesty International has declared, in a 2006 open letter to the U.S. State Department, that they are following closely the status of the ongoing appeals of the five men of numerous issues challenging the fairness of the trial which have not yet been addressed by the appeal courts. [7]

Eight international Nobel Prize winners have written and sent a document to the U.S. Attorney General calling for freedom for the Cuban Five, signed by Zhores Alferov (Nobel Prize for Physics, 2000), Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize, 1984), Nadine Gordimer (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1991), Rigoberta Menchú (Nobel Peace Prize, 1992), Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (Nobel Peace Prize, 1980), Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1986), José Saramago (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1996), Günter Grass (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1999). [8]

In Britain, among other actions, six MPs wrote a letter to Tony Blair calling on the government to apply pressure on the US to act against terrorists in Florida and to immediately release the Five.