Despite Cuban Media Blitz, Little Hope for Five Imprisoned
Spies
Nick Miroff World Press Review
correspondent Havana, Cuba March 5, 2003
A Havana girl stands
by a mural depicting five Cuban men imprisoned in
the United States as spies (Photo: Adalberto
Roque/AFP).
They have received
scant press coverage in the United States, but in Cuba, their
images are everywhere: plastered on billboards, flashing
across television screens, haunting the lobbies of hedonistic
tourist resorts. Cuban schoolchildren memorize their poems,
musicians venerate them in song, and larger than life
portraits of their smiling faces are now as ubiquitous in
Havana as those of martyred revolutionary icons Che Guevara
and Camilo Cienfuegos. Glorified by Cuba’s communist
government as anti-terrorist crusaders who sacrificed their
freedom for their fellow countrymen, their patriotic
apotheosis is nearly complete.
Known across the island
as “The Heroes,” “The Patriots,” “The Prisoners of the
Empire,” or simply “The Five,” they are five Cuban agents
currently serving prison sentences ranging from 15 years to
life at five federal penitentiaries scattered around the
United States. Their 2000-2001 trial and subsequent imprisonment has
prompted the Cuban government to launch a public opinion
campaign on a scale not seen since the Miami-Havana tug-of-war
over young shipwreck survivor Elián González. Unlike little
González, however, it doesn’t appear that the five agents will
be coming home anytime soon.
The Cuban government and
other “Free the Five” supporters were dealt a setback on Feb.
10, 2003, when U.S. Florida District Judge Joan Lenard denied
a motion by the agents’ U.S. attorneys for a new trial. Led by
prominent defense attorney Leonard Weinglass, whose former
clients include Mumia Abu-Jamal and Daniel Ellsberg, the
agents’ defense team had argued that “newly discovered
evidence” in the case mandated both a new trial and a change
of venue out of Miami-Dade County, where the original trial
was held. They cited the “contradictory” position displayed by
the court in relation to its June 2002 decision to grant a
change of venue in another politically-charged case, Ramírez vs. Ashcroft, in which
Mexican-American Immigration and Naturalization Service
Special Agent Ricardo Ramírez, who had participated in the
Elián González raid, alleged his supervisors were
discriminating against him because of his ethnicity.
The Cuban agents’ lawyers had also attempted to have
the trial moved outside Miami-Dade County—where hostilities to
Cuban President Fidel Castro’s government run high—prior to
their original trial in 2000-01. That effort was rejected by
the Florida Attorney General’s office, which characterized
Miami as an “extremely heterogeneous” urban area of “great
diversity” where it would be possible to have a trial “free of
external influences.”
One year later, though, when
faced with Ramírez’s civil law suit, the same Attorney
General’s office requested a change of venue out of
Miami-Dade, which it then described as having “deep-rooted
feelings and prejudices” that made it “virtually impossible”
for a fair and impartial trial to be held. The motion of the
Attorney General Office was approved and the change of venue
granted.
Defense attorney Weinglass’ new motion argued
that the court’s decision in Ramírez vs. Ashcroft
constituted “two contradictory positions” and that “the
government misrepresented to the court both factually and
legally their position when they knew and had to know, as they
knew one year later in the Ramírez vs. Ashcroft case,
that a fair trial could not be held in the Miami district.”
But Judge Lenard denied Weinglass’ motion, citing factual
differences between the two cases, and ruled that “the
government's arguments in favor of the change of venue in
Ramírez do not in any way demonstrate prosecutorial
misconduct.”
Weinglass blasted the ruling as
“completely ludicrous.” The agents’ attorneys have filed a
separate motion which will be heard on April 7 at the 11th
Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
Predictably, the
Cuban government was furious at Judge
Lenard’s
decision. “Is this not a blatant example of prevarication, of
double standards?” Cuban National Assembly Director Ricardo
Alarcón protested at a Havana press conference three days
later. Alarcón went on to accuse Judge Lenard of
“manipulating” the defense attorneys’ motion and “falsifying
the facts” of the two cases the defense sought to compare.
Alarcón also assailed the paucity of U.S. media
coverage of the agents’ case, singling out The New York
Times for specific criticism. He said that in August 1998
the Cuban government gave Times reporter Timothy Golden
classified information, which was also given to the FBI,
extensively detailing the terrorist activities of militant
anti-Castro groups in Southern Florida. But the Times
exposé the Cuban government had hoped Golden would write never
materialized and the Cuban authorities felt betrayed. “He
knows we know what he knows,” Alarcón said darkly.
In
contrast to the lack of media attention in the United States,
the five agents’ legal odyssey has been covered by Cuba’s
government-owned media in painstaking detail. “Round-table”
discussions are held regularly on nightly television to update
Cubans on the status of the agents’ appeals process and
personal well-being. Stirring accounts of the harsh treatment
the agents have received in their separate U.S. prisons,
including solitary confinement and denial of visitations, and
of their families’ thwarted efforts to obtain U.S. visas in
order to visit them, have evoked the sympathy of many Cubans.
“Free the Five” solidarity groups have sprouted up in some
U.S. cities and in countries around the world, as have
websites like www.freethefive.org and www.miami5.org
From the start, the Cuban government’s media blitz has
eagerly sought to link the agents’ spy mission to the new
international war on terrorism. It claims the agents were sent
to the United States to infiltrate dangerous anti-Castro
terrorist groups in Southern Florida that U.S. authorities
were allowing to operate with impunity. Havana maintains that
the agents sought no strategic information, posed no threat to
U.S. national security, and by keeping watch on violent
militants, were protecting U.S. citizens as well.
But
according to hundreds of court documents used as
incriminating evidence in the original trial, only one of the
five convicted agents, René González, actually gained entry
into any anti-Castro exile groups. Ramón Labañino, for
example, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to life in
prison for attempting to infiltrate U.S. Southern Command,
which coordinates almost all U.S. military operations in Latin
America from a base in west Miami-Dade County. Antonio
Guerrero, also currently serving a life sentence, took
detailed notes about the comings and goings of U.S. military
aircraft at Boca Chica Naval Air Station, in Key West,
Florida. Such evidence clearly complicates the agents’
prospects for an eventual acquittal, and has been vigorously
rejected by the Cuban government. Perhaps because this
evidence would seemingly detract from the hallowed image of
anti-terrorist heroes, it has been virtually omitted from the
Cuban media’s portrayal of the agents’ mission, too.
This has led some to wonder if the Cuban government
hasn’t created an unrealistic sense of hope among the many
Cubans who have become emotionally invested in the “Free the
Five” campaign, given the unlikelihood that the agents will be
freed from prison and allowed to return to Cuba. After nearly
two years of a steady barrage by the government media, others
have privately complained they’re tired of hearing about the
Patriots’ plight. “With Elián, it was like OK, we’re going to
bring this kid home,” one 34-year old Havana resident said.
“But at this point, I don’t think anybody really believes ‘the
five’ are coming back anytime soon. The Commandante
[Castro] is just doing it because he feels bad that they’re in
jail.”
His friend objected: “Sure, we’re tired of
hearing about it, like anything you hear about over and over
and over again, but that still doesn’t mean we’ve given up on
them.”
