NY Review of Books, SEPTEMBER 24, 2020 ISSUE
The Battle Over the Cuban Five
by José Manuel Prieto
North of Havana: The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy,
and the Trial of the Cuban Five
by Martin Garbus
New Press, 255 pp., $26.99
On September 12, 1998, ten alleged Cuban spies from the group known as
La Red Avispa (the Wasp Network) were arrested in South Florida by the
FBI during an early-morning raid. They were charged with conspiracy to
commit crimes against the United States, conspiracy to commit espionage,
and acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government. Half of the
accused cooperated with the district attorney’s office and received
reduced sentences. The others—Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio
Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González, who came to be known as
the Cuban Five—denied the accusations. The saga of their imprisonment,
trial, and release is the subject of North of Havana by Martin Garbus,
the renowned civil rights attorney who joined the case in 2012, after
the death of the Cuban Five’s lawyer, Garbus’s longtime friend Leonard
Weinglass.
Fidel Castro, Cuba’s Communist president, had sent the Wasp Network to
the US in the early 1990s for two purposes: to monitor US Southern
Command in order to warn Cuba if the US were planning an aerial invasion
of the island, and to infiltrate the exile community in Miami, which was
led by anti-Communists who had fled Cuba after Castro came to power in
1959. This Miami community had a history of bellicosity against the
Cuban government, including participating in the US-backed invasion of
the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, which had
supported the Communist regime in its first three decades, Cuba
experienced its greatest economic crisis, the so-called Special Period.
Some Cuban exiles saw an opportunity to hasten the regime’s collapse,
attempting to inspire a revolution through infiltrations, bombings, and
other subversive activities on the island. Castro, Garbus writes, felt
he “was under threat from right-wing Cuban exiles.” Cuban intelligence
shared “much of what they learned with American intelligence agents” in
the hope that conspirators “could be identified—and then, if the
Americans would intervene—arrested, tried, and jailed.” In view of the
tense diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba, as well as the US’s
previous support of Cuban anti-Communists, there is little reason to
believe the FBI would have diligently followed up on threats against the
Castro government.
During the Special Period, Cubans began leaving the island in ever
greater numbers on balsas, or homemade rafts, with hopes of reaching the
United States, where they would be guaranteed a legal path to residency
thanks to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. In 1991 José Basulto—a
participant in the Bay of Pigs invasion who, two decades after the
failed coup, declared himself a supporter of Gandhi-style
pacificism—founded a group called Brothers to the Rescue (Hermanos al
Rescate). The Brothers flew small Cessna planes over the open sea to
locate Cuban refugees. When the Brothers spotted a balsa, they would
report it to US authorities, who would then pick up the refugees and
bring them to the mainland. Juan Pablo Roque and René González, two of
the Wasp Network’s agents, successfully infiltrated the Brothers and
flew planes for them.
At the height of the balseros crisis, in 1994, more than 37,000 people
were apprehended by the coast guard or border patrol. That year, Cuba
and the Clinton administration negotiated a deal that limited the number
of visas given to Cuban émigrés to 20,000 per year. Cubans who left the
island on balsas now risked being turned back. The number of balseros
decreased, and Basulto changed his organization’s mission: the Brothers
began dropping anti-Castro leaflets and copies of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights over Havana. Havana reported those flights
to US authorities, who did little to stop them. Basulto further provoked
the Cuban government after a flight in 1995 during which he had to
refuel in Havana. He later boasted that he had infiltrated Cuban air
space, declaring on Radio Martí, the anti-Castro broadcasting network,
“I showed the Cuban people I can easily go through Cuban air defenses
and I ask for their courage now to overthrow their dictator.”
On the morning of February 24, 1996, the anniversary of José Martí’s
1895 revolution against the Spanish colonial power, three small planes
belonging to Brothers to the Rescue took off from the Miami-Opa Locka
airport. The Cuban authorities were informed by American air traffic
control of their flight route. During the flight, Basulto also informed
Havana that his plane and the others were crossing the 24th parallel and
approaching Cuban air space, and he received a warning from the Cuban
air traffic controller.
That afternoon, a pair of Cuban MiG-29s shot down two of the Brothers’
planes, piloted by the forty-five-year-old Armando Alejandre, the
twenty-four-year-old Mario Manuel de la Peña, the twenty-nine-year-old
Carlos Alberto Costa, and the thirty-year-old Pablo Morales, all four of
whom were killed. All except Morales were US citizens. According to
Basulto, the attack took place above international waters (his claim was
later supported by the International Civil Aviation Organization), but
the Cuban government stated that the planes were well within its
territory. Basulto managed to escape and return to Florida.
Less than one month after the incident, Clinton, who was embarrassed by
his earlier efforts at détente with Cuba, signed the Helms-Burton Act,
also known as the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad)
Act, which intensified the US’s trade embargo on goods from the island
and signaled a clear deterioration of the already tense relations
between the countries.
The revelation of the Wasp Network profoundly shook Miami’s Cuban
community. The FBI had known about the group’s existence since 1995 and
had secretly searched Hernández’s apartment, copying more than two
hundred of his computer disks. But the US attorney for southern Florida
didn’t bring any charges against the spies until 1998, when the Miami
FBI came under the control of Hector Pesquera, a Puerto Rican special
agent who was sympathetic to anti-Castro exiles. In May 1999, eight
months after his arrest on espionage and conspiracy charges, Hernández
was charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder by providing
the Cuban government details about Basulto’s 1996 flight.
When the trial of the five Cuban spies began in late 2000, it aroused
little interest in the US press outside Miami and was soon eclipsed by
the bitter dispute surrounding the balserito Elián González, the
six-year-old boy who was taken out of waters off the Florida coast on
November 25, 1999, and whose relatives in Miami claimed custody of him.
Elián was eventually returned to his father in Cuba, causing profound
unrest in Miami. Garbus argues that the turmoil was stoked by the
powerful Cuban American National Foundation and Jorge Mas Canosa, the
most influential politician of the Cuban exile community. The furor over
the Elián González case weighed heavily in the fate of the Cuban spies.
Miami’s Cuban population clearly wanted some kind of revenge against
Castro after Elián was sent back.
Although Cuba and the defense attorneys argued that the Wasp Network was
only instructed to gather intelligence on Cuban exiles, not on US
military activity, the FBI had proof that they had also monitored
military bases in southern Florida, supporting the charge that the
network was spying on the US itself. This much was clear from the
evidence. The trial was controversial, however, for two separate
reasons: the additional charge against Hernández relating to the deaths
of the four pilots and, more importantly, the challenge of, as Garbus
writes, “selecting an impartial jury in Miami.”
“There was a level of misconduct involving pretrial publicity in this
case that I had never seen before,” Garbus writes. In his opinion, news
outlets such as the Spanish-language Nuevo Herald, under pressure from
Mas and Miami’s anti-Castro right, made a fair trial impossible.
(“During the 194-day trial,” Garbus notes, one newspaper—El Nuevo
Herald, the Spanish counterpart to the Miami Herald—published 806
articles advocating conviction.”) The defense attorneys tried six times
to change the venue of the trial, without success. During voir dire,
many prospective jurors said that they would have difficulty remaining
impartial or that they feared reprisals from the Cuban-American
community if the spies were not convicted. Though the jury didn’t
include a single Cuban-American member, most jurors expressed strong
disapproval of the Cuban government. David Buker, the foreman of the
jury, testified to the judge, “Castro is a communist dictator and I am
opposed to communism so I would like to see him gone and democracy
established in Cuba.”
Garbus, who did not attend the initial trial, says that he has read the
20,000-page court record twice. A lawyer with vast experience—in his
sixty-year career, he has represented Daniel Ellsberg, Cesar Chavez, and
Leonard Peltier, among others—he argues that many things had gone wrong
from the beginning. “The prosecutor’s opening statement was a blatant
misstatement of the facts of the case,” he contends. “Cuban intelligence
operations were described as ‘an intelligence pyramid’ with Fidel Castro
at the top.” It did not help that “mentions of Cuba were often
accompanied by one adjective: ‘repressive.’” At one point, “the
prosecutors showed photographs of the dead pilots and had a Brothers
pilot choke back tears as he read their death certificates. It’s hard to
counter that kind of appeal.”
Garbus also believes that the Five were unlucky in drawing Judge Joan A.
Lenard, who “had never tried a federal case of this duration with these
legal complexities.” Though the trial lasted seven months (Garbus notes
that Timothy McVeigh’s trial lasted only six weeks), “less than 10
percent of the nearly 20,000 documents collected in the government raids
on the defendants’ apartments were presented as evidence.” A more
experienced judge, he argues, would likely have prevented the tearful
reading of the Brothers’ death certificates. Garbus writes that Lenard
“showed the highest integrity, she tried hard and worked hard,” but he
concludes that the “justice system required far more than she could do.”
“The prosecution strategy was simple,” Garbus writes: “show that the
Brothers were devoted American patriots, that the Cuban Five were
killers, and that their leader, Gerardo Hernández, was directly
responsible for the death of four pilots” because he had provided
information to the Cuban government. The defense, by contrast, focused
“on an argument [it] could not win.” Instead of arguing that the Cuban
government didn’t need any information from Hernández to learn of
Basulto’s plans for his flight on February 24, 1996, which Basulto
himself had broadcast on Radio Martí, “the defense…spent much of the
trial parsing the logistical details of the shoot down, because it was
crucial to their argument that it occurred in Cuban airspace and was,
therefore, legally justified.”
After closing arguments were given in June 2001, “the jury deliberated
for five days, a very short time for a trial of this length and
complexity,” Garbus writes. The accused were found guilty of the
twenty-three acts with which they had been charged. Hernández received
two life terms plus fifteen years. The other four received sentences
ranging between fifteen years and life in prison. Years later,
Hernández’s defense attorney, Paul McKenna, admitted to Garbus, “I made
a lot of bad decisions. These guys should not be in jail.”
The ruling was political, the prison terms disproportionate to the
crimes. The verdict received strong condemnation from Amnesty
International, which raised “serious doubts about the fairness of the
proceedings leading to [the] conviction, in particular the prejudicial
impact of publicity about the case on a jury in Miami.” Castro launched
a tireless international campaign on behalf of the imprisoned men that
lasted more than sixteen years. In 2001 he established the National
Committee to Free the Cuban Five, which organized hundreds of public
events, collected signatures worldwide in support of the prisoners, and
paid for large billboards in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Cuban
Five gained support from celebrities such as the actor Danny Glover. The
prima ballerina assoluta of the Cuban National Ballet, Alicia Alonso,
took out full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Nation, and
The Washington Post. One hundred members of British Parliament signed a
petition demanding the Five’s release, as did Nobel Prize–winning
activists and writers including Rigoberta Menchu, José Saramago, Wole
Soyinka, Zhores Alferov, Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass, and Dario Fo.
A billboard showing the Cuban Five and reading ‘They Will Return,’
Cienfuegos, Cuba, December 2010
The efforts to free the Cuban Five dominated Cuban political life for
years. The streets and public spaces of the island were inundated with
their pictures and slogans demanding their release. The Cuban Parliament
gave the Five the honorific title of Héroe de la República de Cuba, or
Heroes of the Republic of Cuba, and, in the revolutionary style of
naming years, decided to call 2002 the Año de los Héroes Prisioneros del
Imperio, or “Year of the Hero-Prisoners of the Empire.” State television
broadcast endless round tables in which experts from all over the world
were invited to discuss the details of the case. The government went so
far as to ask a well-known artist to make a replica of the
fifteen-by-seven-foot cell in which Hernández spent seventeen months in
solitary confinement in flagrant violation of the law. The peculiar
installation was exhibited in the Palace of Fine Arts, the Cuban museum
of modern art in downtown Havana.
In 2002 Leonard Weinglass became the Cuban Five’s attorney and appealed
the initial decision. On August 9, 2005, the defense scored a victory
when a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled
that a fair trial had been impossible in Miami. The original conviction
was overturned, and the appeals court ordered a new trial in a new
location. But in June 2008 Judge William Pryor upheld Hernández’s
original sentence, even while reducing the sentences for three of the
condemned. “When the planes were shot down,” Pryor wrote, “everything,
including the unjustified killing in the jurisdiction of the United
States, went according to plan. Hernández’s conviction for conspiracy to
murder is affirmed.” In June 2009 the Supreme Court denied review.
After Weinglass’s death in 2011, the Cuban government contacted Garbus
to ask if he would agree to defend Hernández. Before making a decision,
Garbus traveled to Cuba to interview Ricardo Alarcón, then president of
the Cuban Parliament. Alarcón told him, “I have spent more time on the
Cuban Five case than I did at the parliament,” adding that “sometimes it
was my main job.”
Alarcón asked Garbus whether it would be possible to reverse the initial
verdict. At that point, Garbus writes, “the defendants had only one
remedy left…. Habeas corpus relief allows the court to review the entire
trial and appellate record in light of newly discovered evidence.” The
new evidence included reports that “Miami journalists [took] US pay”
when covering the trial and advocating for conviction. But even if
Hernández were granted habeas corpus relief, the chances that the
verdict would be overturned were small.
Nevertheless, Garbus took on the case:
I believed that Gerardo and his co-defendants were innocent. The legal
issues in the case involved a dramatic clash between First Amendment
rights to…a fair trial and due process and raised questions about a
prejudiced media that are among the most important issues in American
jurisprudence. I believed the prosecution was politically motivated.
At the end of Garbus’s Havana trip, Alarcón took him to meet Fidel
Castro: “I listened to the aging leader in his baseball jacket for three
hours,” Garbus writes. “He knew the case thoroughly…. ‘I will take care
of the politicians,’ Castro said. ‘You take care of the law.’”
Garbus was amazed by the courage and composure of Hernández, who had not
given in to the tremendous pressures of solitary confinement:
Gerardo was singled out for particularly brutal treatment: as the only
one of the five who had contact with Havana prior to their arrest,
officials apparently believed he could testify against Havana officials
who ordered the shoot down and implicate Fidel and Raúl Castro.
The lawyer established a personal bond with his defendant: “I was struck
by his quiet dignity and self-respect in the face of unspeakable
circumstances… A perfect example of Hemingway’s definition of courage as
grace under pressure.”
Garbus comes off as a trustworthy guide to the Cuban Five Case. I find
his recapitulation of the evidence honest and his motivations for
writing North of Havana well intended, as he clearly wanted to leave a
testimony of this unique case in the history of American jurisprudence.
Besides, the author is clearly fascinated by the story he tells: “It is,
by turns, a spy story, a love story, a portrait of a man who couldn’t be
broken, a tale of international intrigue, and a legal thriller with
several astonishing surprises.”
In December 2009 a sixty-year-old US government contractor named Alan
Gross was arrested in Havana and sentenced to fifteen years in prison
for espionage. “Finally, finally,” Garbus writes, “the Cuban Five got
lucky. Very lucky.” Gross had previously been a government contractor
with USAID in Iraq. In 2009 he decided to travel to Cuba and established
contact with the remnants of its once-flourishing Jewish community,
which now included about 1,500 people. His declared intention was to
improve overseas communication by providing Cuban Jews with better
Internet access than they were receiving from the state.
Alarcón claimed that Gross was “contracted to work for American
intelligence services,” which Gross vehemently denied: he said he was
just providing satellite telephones, computers, and external hard
drives. He said USAID never informed him that his activities were
illegal under Cuban law (and he later sued the agency).
According to the Cubans, Gross was looking to instigate a coup, by, in
the jargon of revolutionary propaganda, undertaking a “subversive
project of the US government that aimed to destroy the Revolution
through the use of communication systems out of the control of
authorities.” The Cubans claimed that USAID was a CIA front and Gross a
spy. Some say that the American—who lost a hundred pounds during the
five years he spent in jail—had always been seen by the Cubans as a
token to be exchanged for their own imprisoned agents. “The Cuban regime
is obviously looking for some kind of US concession, callously using the
contractor as a bargaining chip,” said Representative Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
from Florida, in 2010. The US continued to deny that Gross was an
intelligence agent. After intense and secret negotiations that included
the mediation of the Vatican, the parties agreed to exchange Gross for
the three Wasp Network agents who were still imprisoned. (René González
had been freed in October 2011, and Fernando González in February 2014;
in Cuba, both were received as heroes.)
On December 18, 2014, a photo of the freed Cubans was printed on the
front page of Granma, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of
the Cuban Communist Party, with the banner headline “¡Volvieron!” (“They
Have Returned!”) Below it, there was a photo of Raúl Castro and Barack
Obama during their historic speeches in Havana announcing a
reestablishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries. The
message was that Cuba was more interested in the return of the spies
than the historic visit of an American president, the first in
eighty-eight years. Havana cheered. The Five had returned from the
“entrañas del monstruo,” the entrails of the monster—which is how the
United States is referred to in the official discourse of the island.
During the official celebrations with the Cuban agents upon their
return, Adriana Hernández, Gerardo Hernández’s wife, was in the late
stages of a pregnancy. Before Gerardo was released, the Obama
administration, in an unusual gesture of goodwill, had allowed an
artificial insemination procedure so that the couple could have a baby.
Journalists referred to it as “sperm diplomacy.”
Today the Five are part of civilian life and hold public office within
the Cuban nomenklatura: Hernández is the vice-director of the Higher
Institute of International Relations. They have become celebrities. They
travel around the world, and Cuban children recognize them in public and
take photos with them. Besides Garbus’s meticulous and fascinating
account, two other worthy books have addressed the spies and their
trial: What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five by
the Canadian journalist Stephen Kimber (2013) and The Last Soldiers of
the Cold War: The Story of the Cuban Five by the Brazilian journalist
Fernando Morais (2011) and translated into English by Robert Ballantyne
and Alex Olegnowicz in 2015. Morais’s book is the basis for Wasp
Network, a feature film directed by Olivier Assayas and starring Gael
García Bernal and Penélope Cruz that was screened at international film
festivals in 2019 and acquired by Netflix earlier this year. The Cuban
Five have now been immortalized in a movie, the ultimate consecration
for the accused spies the Castro regime turned into heroes.
—Translated from the Spanish by Regina Galasso
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#1192): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/1192
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76649262/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
