Vol. 73/No. 23      June 15, 2009

Known internationally as the Cuban Five, Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González were arrested by FBI agents on Sept. 12, 1998. They had been gathering information on counterrevolutionary Cuban American groups that operate from south Florida with Washington’s complicity and have a history of violent attacks on Cuba.

The five were convicted in 2001 on charges that included “conspiracy to commit espionage” and failing to register as agents of a foreign government. They were given sentences ranging from 15 years to life in prison. Hernández, who was also falsely accused of “conspiracy to commit murder,” was sentenced to two life terms plus 15 years, and has been held since 2004 in the federal penitentiary in Victorville, California, where he was sent after the Lompoc, California, prison lost its “maximum security” designation.

The five Cubans have appealed their convictions to the U.S. Supreme Court. That court is expected to decide this month whether to hear the appeal.

The English translation of the interview was checked against the original Spanish and revised by the Militant. Footnotes are by the Militant.
 

Saul Landau: Later you went to prison at Lompoc, California?

Gerardo Hernández: Yes, we had to wage a legal battle to get out of the “hole” and into the general population. Then came the trial, and after the trial, another month in the “hole.” Then, after the sentencing, they sent us to different penitentiaries.

I was sent to Lompoc in 2003, and into the “box.”¹ That happened in all five prisons on the same day. It’s not clear why, or who gave the order. Lompoc is a very old prison, apart from the “hole,” which is for people who have attacked guards or set fire to mattresses, etc… .

[For] cases where there’s basically no alternative … there’s the “box,” a basement below the “hole”—10 double-doored cells. They put me down there, in my underwear, barefoot, for a month. I didn’t know if it was day or night, because you’re there 24 hours. In there, there’s no recreation hour or anything. There was a drain pipe from the cell above. Whenever that person flushed the toilet, dirty water would run down my cell’s walls.

I complained about the danger to my health from this. They had planned to keep us there for one year for “special administrative measures.” They had warned me I wouldn’t have any contact with anybody. No visits, no nothing. To communicate with my lawyer, I had to submit a letter. I had to make an envelope out of a piece of paper and seal it with toothpaste because there was absolutely nothing. Nothing to read, nothing to write with, nothing! That was quite a difficult month. They told us we’d be there for a year and that at the end of the year they’d review our cases; we could be there indefinitely.

When the guards would take me to bathe, three or four guards would take me, handcuffed. The other cells kept their exterior doors open. The interior door was an enclosed grating. But the other was an iron sheet that cut you off completely. They kept those open so that people wouldn’t go crazy. But mine was always kept closed. When they’d take me out, they’d close all the other doors so no one could even see me because one of the established rules was that I could have contact with no one.

I was there for a month, not knowing if it was day or night, dirty water running down the walls, barefoot, with the light on 24 hours a day; hearing screams of people around me, some of whom had lost their minds.

One day, a Thursday, they brought me papers to sign, saying I would be there for one year. The following Tuesday, without explanation, just as they’d brought me there, without me knowing anything, they took me out. We found out that lots of people had protested outside the Bureau of Prisons and that members of Congress had inquired about us.

Landau: Under what pretext were you thrown in the “box?” How did you keep sane?

Hernández: Pretext? None. The lieutenant who took me to the hole asked me, “Why are you going to the hole?” I said, “You’re asking me? You should be telling me.” When I asked, they’d tell me, “Orders from above.” Coincidentally, this took place a month before we were to present our appeals, when we most needed contact with our lawyers. We went to the “hole,” a mysterious coincidence, right before our appeal.

How could I endure it? We were aware of the support from people trying to get justice for us. That raised our spirits a lot. We knew Cuba would protest, and that our friends throughout the world, including in this country, would do everything possible to get us out of there. We did get out of the “hole,” finally. Indeed, protests took place in many countries and in front of the Bureau of Prisons. Such actions really give you a boost, a lot of strength. And you know you can’t let your compañeros down … people who won’t fail you and expect that you won’t fail them.

So, you spend all day thinking, “Nothing can happen to me in here, I can’t have a panic attack, a nervous breakdown, I cannot yield, not even a little bit, because there are too many people that I would be letting down.” That gives you tremendous strength.

Landau: Did you think about your family?

Hernández: The U.S. government won’t give my wife a visa to visit me—for the last 10 years.² Denying me the chance to see my wife is part of this same process: the interrogation, incentives to sell out, months of solitary confinement. But the FBI’s or administration’s plans didn’t succeed. Initially, they thought, “We’ll arrest these Castro agents, threaten them, and they’ll change their minds, because this is the richest and best country in the world and Cuba is a poor country, a dictatorship.” For the past 50 years, they’ve told Americans, “Cuba is hell, but you can’t go there to see for yourself.”³

Americans are free to do many things, but not travel 90 miles to visit that country to see if what their government says is true. They planned for the five to switch sides, put on a whole propaganda show: we’d denounce whatever they thought we should denounce, condemn the revolution, like they make any athlete or musician do.

When they come here, all they have to say is, “I come here seeking freedom.” They squeeze the maximum from them, then forget about them. That was more or less the plan for us, but it didn’t work. In retaliation, for 10 years they’ve made our lives as difficult as possible. Prisoners e-mail their families. They don’t let me use e-mail, not even to communicate with my wife.

Landau: What did Cuba do to the United States to deserve punishment for 50 years?

Hernández: Cuba’s biggest “crime” has been its desire to be a sovereign and independent nation. This history goes back way more than 50 years. Cuba was winning the independence war against Spain when the United States said: “Uh-oh, this is not good for us!” Suddenly and mysteriously, the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, and that was the pretext for U.S. intervention to defeat Spain. Then they put the Platt Amendment in Cuba’s constitution allowing U.S. intervention.⁴

Let’s go back much further: Cuba, the ripe fruit, would fall into U.S. hands; Cuba the backyard of the United States. That little island suffers the misfortune of being 90 miles from the most powerful country in the world. Cuba refused to be their resort and brothel like in the famous days when marines urinated on the statue of Jose Martí.⁵ Those times remain present in the minds of Cubans. Cuba’s worst crime is to want to be a free and sovereign country without the U.S. ambassador dictating as he did for almost half a century. That’s why they cannot forgive Cuba; for wanting to have its own system.

Remember they owned the casinos, industries, the best land; they practically owned the country. That ended in 1959; something for which they don’t forgive us.

Landau: You’re being punished as a symbol of “disrespect?”

Hernández: Yes, but there’s another fundamental element, in my opinion. The FBI was in a bad spot, because it became known that it had penetrated Brothers to Rescue using Juan Pablo Roque.⁶ He was an agent; they paid him to give them information. When this came out, the FBI looked bad to the extreme right wing in Miami. The FBI looked for a scapegoat, so they could say, “We nabbed these five guilty ones.”

Landau: What did Brothers to the Rescue hope to achieve with your trial?

Hernández: Mainly, an economic goal. Some of them have legitimate political views and are patriots in their own way, but many are in it for economic reasons. The anti-Castro industry is a multimillion dollar industry. For 50 years, some people have lived off it: from radio commentators to heads of the 3,500 organizations sucking up federal money to “achieve freedom in Cuba” or taking donations from the elderly to buy arms for the “liberation of Cuba.”

It never occurred to [José] Basulto to fly into Cuban airspace while people were giving him money to patrol the waters off Florida. He’d bought a few small planes with that donated money. When the money ran out because people stopped giving—why should they, if when the Coast Guard is called they send the rafters back—he thought, “Uh-oh, I’d better invent something else.” That’s when he started violating Cuban airspace … to keep money coming in.⁷

Also, in my opinion, Basulto, who is very intelligent, may have wanted to provoke a serious conflict between the United States and Cuba. They dream of the day the U.S. Army would wipe all revolutionaries off the planet. Upon the ashes that remain they’d rebuild their own Cuba; the Cuba they had before the revolution. What they haven’t been able to do, the U.S. Army would do for them. That’s why they call the Bay of Pigs, Playa Girón, a “betrayal.” They thought the U.S. Army would come in behind them at Playa Girón.⁸ That was Kennedy’s betrayal. So, I don’t doubt Basulto intended to create an international conflict. It didn’t matter how many Cubans or Americans would die. All that mattered was getting their country back, what they consider to be their country.

Landau: In Miami, there was a rumor: Basulto was a Cuban agent. All his missions ended in failure or disaster.

Hernández: That second part is true, but the first part … I highly doubt it. It’s a shame that lives were lost, but I assure you Cuba did everything possible to avoid it. They sent 16 diplomatic notes through official channels, asking the U.S. not to allow Brothers to the Rescue to fly into Cuban airspace.

2. Adriana Pérez, who is married to Hernández and lives in Cuba, has not been allowed to see him for 11 years due to repeated visa denials by the U.S. government. In 2002, after being granted a U.S. visa and flying to Houston, she was detained for 11 hours and forced to return to Cuba without seeing him. Olga Salanueva, who is married to René González, another of the five jailed Cubans, has not been allowed to see her husband since August 2000.

3. Due to U.S. government restrictions, most U.S. residents cannot legally travel to Cuba.

4. From 1868 to 1898, Cuban independence fighters waged three wars against Spanish colonial rule of the island. José Martí’s Cuban Revolutionary Party launched the final war in 1895. As Cuban rebels were defeating Spanish forces, the U.S. government under President William McKinley intervened and declared war on Spain, using the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 as a pretext. The end of Spanish rule was immediately followed by U.S. military occupation. In 1901 Cuba was forced to incorporate into its constitution an amendment drafted by U.S. senator Orville Platt that gave Washington the right to intervene in Cuban affairs at any time and to establish military bases on Cuban soil.

5. On March 11, 1949, a U.S. Marine climbed the statue of Cuban independence leader José Martí and urinated on it. This provoked outrage, sparking protests in front of the U.S. embassy in Havana that were attacked by police.

6. Juan Pablo Roque, a former Cuban air force pilot, was one of the Cuban revolutionaries who had entered Brothers to the Rescue—a right-wing Cuban American group that claimed to be a humanitarian organization devoted to rescuing Cuban “rafters”—to gather information on it. Roque returned to Cuba shortly before Feb. 24, 1996, when Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces shot down two planes flown by Brothers to the Rescue after they provocatively entered Cuban airspace. Roque had also been giving information on the group to the FBI, and had warned José Basulto, head of Brothers to the Rescue, that Cuba would shoot down planes that entered Cuban airspace in defiance of previous warnings. Federal prosecutors charged Hernández with conspiracy to commit murder, claiming he was responsible for the Cuban shootdown of the planes. They also indicted Roque in absentia for not registering as a foreign agent.

7. Since the early 1960s Washington has granted legal residency to any Cubans who arrive in the United States and say they are fleeing the revolution. In 1995 the U.S. government implemented a “wet feet-dry feet” policy, where Cubans without U.S. entry visas who are intercepted at sea are sent back to Cuba but those who make it to U.S. soil are allowed to stay.

8. In April 1961 some 1,500 mercenaries, organized by the Kennedy administration, invaded Cuba at Playa Girón, near the Bay of Pigs. In less than 72 hours of hard-fought combat, Cuban armed forces, militias, and revolutionary police dealt them a stunning defeat.