Vol. 73/No. 29      August 3, 2009

Hernández was sentenced to a double life term plus 15 years on false charges, including “conspiracy to commit murder.” In an unprecedented accusation, U.S. prosecutors held Hernández responsible for the sovereign act of the Cuban government in shooting down two hostile planes that invaded its territory.

On Feb. 24, 1996, three planes left Opa-locka airport near Miami and flew well into Cuban airspace. The planes were piloted by members of Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR), a counterrevolutionary Cuban American group that for years had organized provocative flights over Cuban territory despite Havana’s repeated warnings to Washington. This time, after they defied warnings by Cuban air traffic controllers, two of the planes were shot down by Cuba’s air force.

U.S. officials, however, have tried to turn the victim into the criminal and the criminal into the victim. They claim Brothers to the Rescue was on a “humanitarian” mission to rescue Cubans drifting on rafts toward U.S. shores. They assert the planes were downed in international, not Cuban, airspace. And they allege Hernández knew beforehand of a plan to shoot down the planes that day.

What are the facts?  
 
Basulto’s record: CIA-trained thug
Far from being a humanitarian, José Basulto, the founding leader of BTTR, is a CIA-trained counterrevolutionary. Questioned during his March 2001 testimony in the federal trial against the five Cuban revolutionaries, Basulto proudly acknowledged his decades-long record.

Basulto testified that after the victory of the Cuban Revolution he had been trained by the CIA in Panama, Guatemala, and the United States “in intelligence, communications, explosives, sabotage and subversion,” reported the March 13, 2001, Miami Herald. The CIA infiltrated him into Cuba, under the identity of a physics student at the University of Santiago, to help prepare the ground for the 1961 U.S.-organized mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs, which Cuban working people crushed in 72 hours.

In August 1962, Basulto and other counterrevolutionaries took a speedboat mounted with a 20-mm cannon off Havana’s shores and fired on the Sierra Maestra Hotel and a nearby theater. In the 1980s he flew supplies to the U.S.-organized contras seeking to overthrow the Nicaraguan revolution.

Basulto, who became a well-off Miami businessman, said in the trial testimony that he launched Brothers to the Rescue in 1991 as a “humanitarian rafter-rescue group.” That was the cover under which the outfit carried out numerous provocative operations off Cuban shores—and reeled in millions in “nonprofit charity” donations. BTTR shifted its tactics, however, after the 1994 and 1995 Cuba-U.S. migration accords, under which U.S. authorities returned sea-borne Cubans to the island. “Without rafters, the money dried up,” Basulto acknowledged in his testimony, the Miami Herald reported.  
 
Provocations against Cuba
Emboldened by Washington’s lack of action, BTTR stepped up its provocative flights over Cuba in 1994. On November 10 that year the group flew two planes from the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo and dropped leaflets calling on people to revolt. The outfit publicly acknowledged that in July 1995 and twice in January 1996 it organized flights directly over Havana, dropping antigovernment leaflets.

Cuban officials reported that over a 20-month period, BTTR carried out 10 violations of Cuban territory. Havana repeatedly demanded that Washington prevent them. After a July 13, 1995, low-altitude incursion over the capital city, Cuba issued a public statement that “any boats from abroad can be sunk and any aircraft downed” if they entered Cuban territory for hostile reasons. Yet Washington did nothing to stop these escalating provocations—not even revoke the pilots’ licenses.

On Feb. 24, 1996, two hostile incursions into Cuban airspace took place, Cuban authorities reported. In the first, three Cessna planes retreated after being intercepted by Cuban MiG fighters jets.

In the second incursion that day, the Havana air traffic control center detected one of the three Cessnas again heading toward Cuban airspace north of Havana. It warned the pilot, who, according to a Cuban foreign ministry statement, “said it was clear he could not fly in that zone but he was going to do it anyway.”

A transcript released by Washington, based on U.S. intelligence recordings, contains the following radio exchange between the Havana air control tower and Basulto.

Havana: “We inform you that the area north of Havana is activated. You are taking a risk by flying south of 24 [the 24th parallel].

Basulto: “We are aware that we are in danger each time we fly into the area south of 24, but we are willing to do it as free Cubans.”

The three planes penetrated Cuban airspace. After they ignored warning passes by the air force planes, two of the planes were shot down, well inside the island’s 12-mile territorial limit. The third plane, piloted by Basulto, left the other two behind and headed back into international airspace.

Cuban authorities provided evidence that the two planes had been shot down over Cuban waters, including personal items from the four downed pilots and debris from the wreckage. After that decisive action, the hostile flights over Cuba ended.  
 
Sovereign action in Cuban airspace
Washington has maintained that the shootdown took place in international airspace, although it acknowledged that Basulto briefly violated Cuban territory. This position was echoed by the International Civil Aviation Organization, which relied heavily on data provided by the U.S. government.

The Clinton administration used these claims to justify passage of the Helms-Burton Act, a major tightening of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. And in January 2001 Clinton signed an executive order giving $96 million in frozen Cuban funds to families of the rightists killed in the shootdown. The money was seized from payments owed to Cuba’s telephone company for phone services between the two countries.

The U.S. government’s assertions, however, were contradicted during the trial by retired U.S. air force colonel George Buchner. Testifying as a defense witness on March 21, 2001, he said the evidence showed the BTTR pilots were well inside Cuba’s airspace when they were downed.

Buchner, a former commander of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), said he had reviewed transcripts—provided by the U.S. National Security Agency—of conversations between the MiG pilots and a Cuban commander on the ground. He concluded the two planes were shot down about six miles and 5.5 miles, respectively, off the Cuban coast.

“The trigger was when the first aircraft crossed the 12-mile territorial limit,” he testified. “That allowed the government of Cuba to exercise their sovereign right to protect its airspace.”

In fact, Buchner said, the Cuban air force pilot “showed restraint” by breaking off pursuit of Basulto’s plane as it headed toward international airspace.

Moreover, the Miami Herald reported, “Buchner said the Cessnas had given up their civilian status because they still carried the markings of the U.S. Air Force and had been used to drop leaflets condemning the Cuban government.”

Over the years, in fact, U.S.-based counterrevolutionaries have used Cessnas and other “civilian” aircraft to unleash biological weapons on Cuban canefields and other crops, drop firebombs, and introduce saboteurs and spies on the island.  
 
Shootdown not a ‘plot’
Gerardo Hernández was charged with murder conspiracy for allegedly giving Cuban authorities information on the BTTR flight plan for Feb. 24, 1996, as part of a supposed plot to shoot down the group’s planes.

In fact, BTTR itself had reported its flight plan to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which then transmitted that information to the Havana air control authorities.

After months of escalating BTTR provocations and Cuba’s warnings that these would not be tolerated, both Washington and Havana were anticipating an incident. The day before the shootdown, an internal FAA memo warned that “it would not be unlikely that the [BTTR would] attempt an unauthorized flight into Cuban airspace tomorrow, in defiance of the government of Cuba and its policies” and that Havana “would be less likely to show restraint this time around.”

Nor was the shootdown a surprise to BTTR leaders. Juan Pablo Roque, a former Cuban air force pilot who had gone to Miami in 1992 and, posing as a counterrevolutionary had entered Brothers to the Rescue to monitor its actions, returned to Cuba the day before the shootdown. Appearing on Cuban TV three days later, Roque exposed some of the group’s activities. This included, he said, plans to introduce antipersonnel ammunition into Cuba and blow up high-tension pylons to disrupt the energy supply.

In a Feb. 27, 1996, CNN interview, Roque said he had told Basulto that Cuban authorities were expecting a provocation and were ready to shoot down intruding U.S. aircraft.

“I tried to persuade Brothers to the Rescue not to continue their flights,” he said. “But they would not listen. My opinion did not count, because they wanted martyrs to boost their anti-Castro industry.”
 
 
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U.S. gov’t denies visa to spouse of Cuban 5 prisoner, 9th time  
 
 
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