FRFI 162 August / September 2001
On 8 June, a Miami jury found five Cubans guilty of charges ranging from espionage, conspiring to kill and endangering the security of the United States. The five men, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labanino, Fernando Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero and Gerardo Hernandez have already spent nearly three years in jail, half of it in solitary confinement. They will be sentenced in September, almost certainly to life imprisonment.
The virulently counter-revolutionary exile community of Miami, led by the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) and enthusiastically echoed by the US press, has summoned up the jingoism of the Cold War to denounce the men as communist spies and attempt to whip up renewed hostility to Cuba. The judicial process amounted to little more than a show trial: the trial was held in Miami, despite a motion to have it moved to an impartial venue, in keeping with the US constitution; jurors were dismissed if they did not support the aims of CANF.
In practice, the Florida administration – run by Jeb Bush, brother of the US president and well-known for his links with CANF – has actively colluded with the counter-revolutionaries. The real aim of the five Cuban detainees was to infiltrate CANF and its sister terrorist organisations Alfa-66 and Comandos F-4, which have been responsible for acts of sabotage and assassination attempts against Cuba. In the last ten years alone, these groups have been responsible for:
• Continuous infiltration of the Mafia elements with weapons and explosives financed by CANF
• Over 10,000 violent acts registered and intensification of incitement to leave Cuba illegally
• Spraying of Thryps palmi pests over Cuban crops
• 25 violations of Cuban airspace, leading to the shooting down by Cuba of two pirate planes in 1996 which was then used as pretext for the imposition of the Helms Burton Law. The five Cubans now condemned for spying were initially charged in 1998 with the deaths of the four Brothers to the Rescue pilots involved in the incident.
• Bombings in Cuban hotels in 1997
• An assassination attempt in 1997 on Fidel Castro
• A thwarted attempt to blow up the popular Tropicana Cabaret in Havana in April 2001
In all, since 1990 there have been 16 plots to kill Fidel Castro and 140 terrorist acts. Small wonder, then, in the face of US inaction against paramilitary terrorist groups training and operating out of Miami, that Cuba took necessary steps to defend itself and pre-empt further atrocities.
These men are not criminals but Cuban political prisoners, victims of a savage plot by CANF and its cronies to rebuild their image and whip up renewed hostility to Cuba after the fiasco of the Elian Gonzales case. Their attempts to turn a six-year-old Cuban boy lost at sea into an anti-Revolution mascot backfired when the majority of US citizens – including many in Miami – supported Cuba in the battle to return the child to his family. The outcome was an overwhelming victory for the Cuban Revolution. And, just like the Elian Gonzalez case, this blatant show trial is uniting the people of Cuba in defence of the revolution and once again providing a platform from which to expose the hypocrisy, corruption and abuse of human rights that are the hallmark of US imperialism.
Hannah Caller
