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CounterPunch
September
1, 2002
Cuban Political
Prisoners...in the US
by William Blum
The Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
gave the defense team its "Against All Odds" award,
named for a deceased public defender who championed hopeless
causes.{1}
Defending pro-Castro Cubans in Miami,
in a criminal case utterly suffused with political overtones,
with the US government wholly determined to nail a bunch of commies,
is a task on a par with conducting a ground war with Russia in
the wintertime.
Even in the absence of known anti-Castro
Cuban exiles on the jury, the huge influence the exiles have
on the rest of the community is an inescapable fact of life in
Miami, a place where the sound of the word "pro-Castro"
does what the word "bomb" does at an airport.
President Bush has assured the world
repeatedly that he will not heed the many calls to lift the Cuban
trade embargo unless Fidel Castro releases what Washington calls
"political prisoners". Bush tells us this while ten
Cubans sit in US prisons, guilty essentially of not being the
kind of Cubans George W.  loves. If a political prisoner can be
defined as one kept in custody who, if not for his or her political
beliefs and/or associations would be a free person, then the
ten Cubans can be regarded as political prisoners.
It all began in September 1998 when the
Justice Department accused 14 Cubans in southern Florida of "conspiracy
to gather and deliver defense information to aid a foreign government,
that is, the Republic of Cuba" and failing to register as
agents of a foreign government.{2} Four of the accused were never
apprehended and are believed to be living in Cuba.
Five of the 10 arrested, having less
than true-believer faith in the American-judicial-system, copped
plea bargains to avoid harsher penalties and were sentenced to
between three and seven years in prison.
The US Attorney said the actions of the
accused -- who had been under surveillance since 1995 -- were
an attempt "to strike at the very heart of our national
security system and our very democratic process".{3} Their
actions, added a judge, "place this nation and its inhabitants
in great peril".{4}
Such language would appear more suitable
for describing the attacks of September 11, 2001 than the wholly
innocuous behavior of the accused. To add further to the level
of melodrama: in the Criminal Complaint, in the Indictment, in
public statements, and in the courtroom, the federal government
continuously squeezed out as much mileage as it could from the
fact that the Cubans had gone to meetings and taken part in activities
of anti-Castro organizations -- "duplicitous participation
in and manipulation of" these organizations is how it was
put.{5} But this was all for the benefit of media and jury, for
there is obviously no law against taking part in an organization
you are unsympathetic with; and in the end, after all the propaganda
hoopla, the arrestees were never charged with any such offense.
The Cubans did not deny their activities.
Their mission in the United States was to act as an early warning
system for their homeland because over the years anti-Castro
Cuban exiles in the US have carried out literally hundreds of
terrorist actions against the island nation, including as recently
as 1997 when they planted bombs in Havana hotels. One of the
exile groups, Omega 7, headquartered in Union City, New Jersey,
was characterized by the FBI in 1980 as "the most dangerous
terrorist organization in the United States".{6}
Some exiles were subpoenaed to testify
at the trial, which began in December 2000, and defense attorneys
threw questions at them about their activities. One witness told
of attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and of setting Cuban
buses and vans on fire. Based on their answers, federal prosecutors
threatened to bring organized crime charges against any group
whose members gave incriminating testimony and the Assistant
US Attorney warned that if additional evidence emerged against
members of Alpha 66, considered a paramilitary organization,
the group would be prosecuted for a "long-standing pattern
of attacks on the Cuban government."{7}
Cuba has complained for many years that
US authorities ignore information Havana makes available about
those in the US it claims are financing and plotting violence.{8}
None of the exiles who testified at the trial about terrorist
actions or the groups they belonged to were in fact prosecuted.
The arrested Cubans were involved in
anti-terrorist activities -- so cherished by the government of
the United States in word -- but were acting against the wrong
kind of terrorists. Some of what they uncovered about possible
terrorist and drug activities of Cuban exiles -- including information
concerning the 1997 hotel bombings -- they actually passed to
the FBI, usually delivered via diplomats in Havana. This presumably
is what lay behind the statement in the Criminal Complaint that
the defendants "attempted manipulation of United States
political institutions and government entities through disinformation
and pretended cooperation"{9} -- i.e., putting every action
of the Cuban defendants in the worst possible light.
One of the Cubans, Antonio Guerrero,
was employed as a manual laborer (ditch digger, sheet-metal worker,
etc.) at the US naval base in Boca Chica, Florida, near Key West.
The prosecution stated that Guerrero had been ordered by Cuba
to track the comings and goings of military aircraft in order
to detect "unusual exercises, maneuvers, and other activity
related to combat readiness".{10} Guerrero's attorney, to
emphasize the non-secret nature of such information, pointed
out that anyone sitting in a car on US 1 could easily see planes
flying in and out of the base.{11}
This particular operation of the Cuban
agents is difficult to comprehend, for it is hard to say which
was the more improbable: that the US government would undertake
another attack against Cuba, or that these Cubans could get timely
wind of it in this manner, or any other manner.
The FBI admitted that the Cubans had
not penetrated any military bases and that activities at the
bases were "never compromised". "They had no successes,"
declared an FBI spokesperson. The Pentagon added that "there
are no indications that they had access to classified information
or access to sensitive areas".{12}
These statements did not of course rise
from a desire to aid the Cubans' defense, but rather to assure
one and all that the various security systems were impenetrable.
But, in short, the government was admitting that nothing that
could be termed "espionage" had been committed, or
even intended. Nevertheless, three of the defendants were charged
with communicating to Cuba "information relating to the
national defense of the United States ... intending and having
reason to believe that the same would be used to the injury of
the United States."{13}
The FBI agents who closely surveilled
the Cubans for several years did not seem worried about the reports
the "espionage agents" were sending to Havana and made
no attempt to thwart their transmission. Indeed, the FBI reportedly
arrested the Cubans only because they feared that the group would
flee the country following the theft of a computer and disks
used by one of them, which contained information about their
activities, and that all the FBI surveillance would then have
been for nought.{14}
Somewhat more plausibly, those arrested
were each charged with "acting as an unregistered agent
of a foreign government, Cuba." Yet, in at least the previous
five years, no one in the United States had been charged with
any such offense{15}, although, given the broad definition in
the law of "foreign agent", the Justice Department
could have undoubtedly done so with numerous individuals if it
had had a political motivation as in this case.
In addition to the unregistered foreign
agent charge, which was imposed against all five defendants,
there was the ritual laundry list of other charges that is usually
facile for a prosecutor to come up with: passport fraud, false
passport application, fraudulent identification, conspiracy to
defraud the United States, aiding and abetting one or more of
the other defendants (sic), conspiracy to commit espionage, and
furthermore tacked onto all five -- conspiracy to act as an unregistered
foreign agent.
There was one serious charge, which was
levied eight months after the arrests against the alleged leader
of the Cuban group, Gerardo Hernández: conspiring to commit
murder, a reference to the February 24, 1996 shootdown by a Cuban
warplane of two planes (of a total of three), which took the
lives of four Miami-based civilian pilots, members of Brothers
to the Rescue (BTTR). In actuality, the Cuban government may
have done no more than any other government in the world would
have done under the same circumstances. The planes were determined
to be within Cuban airspace, of serious hostile intent, and Cuban
authorities gave the pilots explicit warning: "You are taking
a risk." Indeed, both Cuban and US authorities had for some
time been giving BTTR -- which patrolled the sea between Florida
and Cuba looking for refugees -- similar warnings about intruding
into Cuban airspace.{16} Jose Basulto, the head of BTTR, and
the pilot of the plane that got away, testified at the trial
that he had received warnings that Cuba would shoot down planes
violating its airspace.{17} In 1995, he had taken an NBC cameraman
on a rooftop-level flight over downtown Havana and rained propaganda
and religious medals on the streets below,{18} the medals capable
of injuring people they struck. Basulto -- a long-time CIA collaborator
who once fired powerful cannonballs into a Cuban hotel filled
with people{19} -- described one BTTR flight over Havana as "an
act of civil disobedience".{20} His organization's planes
had gone into Cuban territory on nine occasions during the previous
two years with the pilots being warned repeatedly by Cuba not
to return, that they would be shot down if they persisted in
carrying out "provocative" flights. A former US federal
aviation investigator testified at the trial that in the 1996
incident the planes had ignored warnings and entered an area
that was activated as a "danger area".{21}
Also testifying was a retired US Air
Force colonel and former regional commander of the North American
Air Defense Command (NORAD), George Buchner. Citing National
Security Agency transcripts of conversations between a Cuban
battle commander on the ground and the Cuban MiG pilots in the
air, he stated that the two planes were "well within Cuban
airspace" and that a Cuban pilot "showed restraint"
by breaking off his pursuit of the third plane as the chase headed
toward international airspace.
Buchner's conclusion was at odds with
earlier analyses conducted by the United States and the International
Civil Aviation Organization (which relied heavily on intelligence
data provided by the US). However, he added that the three planes
were acting as one and that Cuba was within its sovereign rights
to attack them -- even in international airspace -- because the
plane that got away had entered Cuban airspace, a fact not disputed
by the prosecution or other investigators.
"The trigger," said Buchner,
"was when the first aircraft crossed the 12-mile territorial
limit. That allowed the government of Cuba to exercise their
sovereign right to protect its airspace." He stated, moreover,
that the BTTR planes had given up their civilian status because
they still carried the markings of the US Air Force and had been
used to drop leaflets condemning the Cuban government.{22}
Two days after the incident, the New
York Times reported that "United States intelligence officials
said that at least one of the American aircraft -- the lead plane,
which returned safely to Florida -- and perhaps all three had
violated Cuban airspace." United States officials agreed
with the Cuban government that "the pilots had ignored a
direct warning from the air traffic control tower in Havana".{23}
Hernández was charged with murder for allegedly giving
Cuban authorities the flight plan of the planes flown by Brothers
to the Rescue.{24} Even if true, the claim appears to be rather
meaningless, for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stated
after the incident that after BTTR had filed its flight plan
with their agency, it was then transmitted electronically to
the air tower in Havana.{25} In any event, on that fateful day
in February, when the three planes crossed the 24th parallel
-- the beginning of the area before entering Cuba's 12-mile territorial
limit which the Cuban government defines as an air-defense identification
zone -- Basulto radioed his presence to the Havana Air Control
Center and his intention to continue further south. Havana,
which was already monitoring the planes' flight, replied: "We
inform you that the area north of Havana is activated [air defense
readied]. You are taking a risk by flying south of twenty-four."{26}
Hernández was also accused of
informing Havana, in response to a request, that none of the
Cuban agents would be aboard the BTTR planes during the time
period in question; one of them had flown with BTTR earlier.
This too was equated in the indictment with "knowingly ...
to perpetrate murder, that is, the unlawful killing of human
beings with malice aforethought".{27}
In the final analysis, the planes were
shot down for entering Cuban airspace, for purposes hostile,
after ignoring many warnings from two governments. After a January
13, 1996 BTTR overflight, Castro had issued orders to his Air
Force to shoot down any plane that entered Cuban airspace illegally.{28}
And just two weeks prior to the shootdown, a delegation of retired
US officials had returned from Havana warning that Cuba seemed
prepared to blow the Brothers' Cessnas out of the sky.{29} Gerardo
Hernández was not responsible for any of this, and there
was, moreover, a long history of planes departing from the United
States for Cuba to carry out bombing, strafing, invasion, assassination,
subversion, weapon drops, agricultural and industrial sabotage,
and other belligerent missions.{30} According to a former member
of BTTR -- who redefected to Cuba and may have been a Cuban agent
all along -- Basulto discussed with him ways to bring explosives
into Cuba to blow up high tension wires critical to the country's
electrical system and plans to smuggle weapons into Cuba to use
in attacks against leaders, including Fidel Castro.{31}
At the time of the shootdown, Cuba had
been under a 37-year state of siege and could never be sure what
such enemy pilots intended to do.
Yet Hernández was sentenced to
spend the rest of his life in prison. Ramón Labañino
and Antonio Guerrero, the manual worker at the US naval base,
were also sentenced to life terms; they and Hernández
were all found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage. Fernando
González was put away for 19 1/2 years, and René
González received 15 years. All five were convicted of
acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government as well
as conspiracy -- that great redundancy tool that is the lifeblood
of American prosecutors -- to do the same. All except René
González -- who is an American citizen -- had the laundry
list of identification frauds thrown at them.
For most of their detention since being
arrested, the five men have been kept in solitary confinement.
After their convictions, they were placed in five different prisons
spread around the country -- Pennsylvania, California, Texas,
Wisconsin and Colorado -- making it difficult for supporters
and attorneys to visit more than one. The wife and five-year-old
daughter of René González were denied visas to
enter the United States from Cuba to visit him. Hernández's
wife was already at the Houston airport with all her papers in
hand when she was turned back, although not before undergoing
several hours of FBI humiliation.
The United States is currently engaged
in a world-wide, open-ended, supra-legal campaign to destroy
the rights of any individuals who -- on the most questionable
of evidence or literally none at all -- might conceivably represent
any kind of terrorist threat.
But if the Cubans -- with a much longer
history of serious terrorist attacks against them by well known
perpetrators -- take the most reasonable steps to protect themselves
from further attacks, they find that Washington has forbidden
them from taking part in the War Against Terrorism. This is particularly
ironic given that the same anti-Castro exiles have committed
numerous terrorist acts in the United States itself.
NOTES
1. Associated Press (AP), May 11, 2001
2. US District Court, Southern District
of Florida, case #98-3493, Criminal Complaint, September 14,
1998, "Conclusion" paragraph. Hereafter, "Criminal
Complaint".
3. EFE News Service (based in Madrid,
with branches in the US), March 28, 2001
4. Miami Herald, September 18, 1998
5. Criminal Complaint, paragraph 7
6. New York Times, 3 March 1980, p. 1
7. EFE News Service, March 28, 2001
8. See for example Miami Herald, March
28, 2001, p.1B
9. Criminal Complaint, paragraph 7; see
also paragraph 26.
10. Ibid., paragraph 19
11. Miami Herald, September 23, 1998
12. Washington Post, September 15, 1998,
Miami Herald, September 16, 1998
13. US District Court, Southern District
of Florida, Case No. 98-721, Second Superseding Indictment, May
7, 1999, Count 2, Section D
14. Miami Herald, September 16, 1998
15. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, reported
to author by John Scalia, statistician
16. Associated Press, May 8, 2001
17. EFE News Service, March 28, 2001
18. Carl Nagin, "Backfire",
The New Yorker, January 26, 1998, p.32
19. Jefferson Morley, "Shootdown",
Washington Post Magazine, May 25, 1997, p.120.
20. EFE News Service, February 1, 2001
21. Ibid., March 1, 2001
22. Associated Press, March 21, 2001,
Miami Herald, March 22, 2001
23. New York Times, February 26, 1996,
p.1
24. Associated Press, December 5, 2000
25. New York Times, February 26, 1996,
p.1. It is not clear from the article whether the transmission
was made by the FAA or by BTTR.
26. The New Yorker, op. cit., p.34
27. Second Superseding Indictment, see
op. cit., Count 3, Section A
28. The New Yorker, op. cit., p.33
29. Newsweek, March 11, 1996, p.48
30. Jane Franklin, Cuba and the United
States: A Chronological History (Ocean Press, Australia, 1997),
see index under "Planes used against Cuba"; William
Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World
War II (Common Courage Press, Maine, 1995), Cuba chapter.
31. Washington Post, February 27, 1996
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military
and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue
State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc
Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.
He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
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