One defendant, Gerardo Hernández, is being charged with "conspiracy to commit murder," which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The U.S. government has used these extreme charges and threatened sentences to try to break the defendants and gain their collaboration. Of the 10 individuals arrested in 1998, one person pleaded guilty, is now serving a four-year sentence, and has agreed to testify against the five currently on trial. Another four individuals subsequently pleaded guilty.

In a notorious trial in 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were charged with espionage and faced the death penalty. U.S. authorities hoped to break the Rosenbergs and use them to go after others as part of the antilabor witch-hunt at that time. Their trial was used as a warning to others opposing U.S. government policy or assaults by the employers. But the Rosenbergs did not crack, and they were executed.

The government's "conspiracy to commit murder" charge is based on the allegation that Hernández provided Cuban authorities with flight plans for pilots belonging to the right-wing group Brothers to the Rescue, who on February 24, 1996, carried out deliberate provocations that violated Cuban airspace. Two of the three planes were downed by the Cuban air force and their pilots died, although their chief, José Basulto, was careful to avoid being shot down.

In the ongoing trial, the government case rests on supposed evidence provided by the FBI after repeatedly breaking into private homes--an attack on constitutional rights. The "evidence" consists of electronic files that the FBI claims are copies from hard drives of computers in the residences of the defendants.

The credibility of the FBI's "evidence" will be questioned by anyone familiar with the political police agency's long record of frame-ups and fabrications, such as doctored tapes and other phony evidence they have used previously to frame Puerto Rican independence supporters, among others.

The big-business media has done its part by convicting the defendants as "Castro's spies" in their "news" articles and opinion columns.

If the U.S. rulers get away with these assaults on rights, they will use similar tactics against others--from striking unionists to protesters against police brutality to opponents of U.S. policy toward Cuba.

The spy trial is also part of the continuing U.S. attack on the Cuban Revolution. Washington and its supporters are seeking to smear Cuba for the 1996 shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes. In the trial, however, the defense has refuted some of the U.S. government's lies and provided authoritative testimony that the counterrevolutionary pilots were six miles inside Cuba's airspace when they were downed and that they were given repeated warnings from Cuban authorities.

Revolutionary Cuba has won wide respect among working people worldwide for taking decisive action to defend its sovereignty. Since the shootdown, the U.S.-based rightists have been much less eager to intrude into Cuban airspace. And Cuba has effectively shown that Washington is the real criminal--providing a base of operations for right-wing terrorist outfits, continuing its 40-year-long trade embargo against the island, and other acts of aggression.

What the U.S. rulers cannot reconcile themselves to--and what workers and farmers everywhere can draw strength from--is the fact that Cuba's working people refuse to get on their knees, and instead continue to defend their political power and gains of their socialist revolution.  
 
 
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