The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 71/No. 31      September 3, 2007

 
Case of Cuban Five to go
before federal appeals court
(feature article)
 
BY PAUL PEDERSON  
A federal court in Atlanta will hold hearings August 20 in an appeal on the case of the Cuban Five. As the date nears, the case of the five Cuban revolutionaries, who have spent more than nine years in U.S. prisons after being framed up on “conspiracy to commit espionage” and other conspiracy charges, has received some coverage in the big-business press, which up to now has largely maintained a wall of silence on the case.

“Judge Lenard threw the book at them,” the New York Times reported August 5, describing the 2001 federal trial in Miami. Gerardo Hernández is serving two consecutive life sentences. Ramón Labañino and Antonio Guerrero are serving life terms. Fernando González and Rene González are serving 19- and 15-year terms, respectively.

“I reiterate [the charge] was conspiracy,” Hernández said in a July 3 interview with BBC. “The government said, ‘Oh wait a minute, all right, they didn’t commit espionage, but they would have tried to commit it some time.’ So that’s conspiracy to commit espionage. But not a single piece of secret information, nothing related to the national security of the U.S., was gathered or transmitted.”

“If you go to the worst espionage cases in U.S. history, those people got life sentences for stealing very secret and damaging documents for foreign powers,” Hernandez said in an interview published July 24 by Reuters. “I got life for stealing nothing.”

In reality, the five men were reporting to Cuba on the activities of right-wing groups that have a history of organizing violent attacks against Cuba with the complicity of the U.S. government.

Adding to the political frame-up, the court also convicted Hernández of “conspiracy to commit murder.” This was for allegedly providing information that the Cuban air force used to shoot down hostile planes that violated Cuban airspace in 1996. But the right-wing group that organized that incursion, Brothers to the Rescue, had announced their plans publicly in a news conference. Its leader, José Basulto, has a long record of sabotage and other attacks against Cuba. In 1962 he boated into Havana harbor and sprayed cannon fire at a hotel.

A July 19 BBC article notes that Adriana Pérez and Olga Salanueva, the wives of Hernández and René González, respectively, “are campaigning to be allowed to visit them in jail” because “for some 10 years the American authorities have repeatedly refused to grant them visas.”

Interviewed by the Times, Elizabeth Palmeiro, the wife of Labañino, said that in her efforts to free her husband and his four comrades, “I feel a mixture of pain, of sadness, of fury, and pride.”

“In Cuba the five men are national heroes,” the BBC acknowledges.

Supporters of the five are organizing a fall campaign of activities from September 12 through October 8 to help win their freedom. To get involved, contact the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five (www.freethefive.org) or supporters of the Militant near you listed in the directory.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home