Cooked-up charges
After their arrest in 1999, the Cubans were imprisoned for almost three years. 17 months of this was spent in solitary confinement. As time went by, new charges were cooked up. By the time of the trial, the Cubans faced charges of conspiracy, spying, conspiracy to commit murder, possession of false documents and failure to inform the US government that they were foreign agents!
The most serious charge of conspiracy to commit murder relates to an incident in 1995 when two planes flown by members of Brothers to the Rescue illegally violated Cuban airspace. Previous violations of Cuban territory by planes and boats from Florida had resulted in Cubans being attacked. After warnings were repeatedly ignored, the intruders were shot down by the Cuban airforce. Gerardo Hernandez had warned Cuba that the flights were about to take place. For that, he was charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In fact, Miami air control had already told the Cubans that the planes were on their way.
The only intention of the Miami Five was to gather information that might help prevent further acts of terrorism by the Miami mafia against Cuba. Their activities posed no threat to US citizens nor US state security. On the contrary, the plots they uncovered were also reported to the US security agencies. On one occasion this led to the arrest by the FBI of Hector Viamonte, director of the anti-Cuban Democratic Union Party, for drug trafficking, but usually the US agencies took no action against their partners in crime.
Rigged trial
The trial was rigged by the Miami mafia and their influential contacts. During the trial, US Attorney General John Ashcroft described it as ‘a victory for Miami’ while guest of honour at a Cuban American National Foundation dinner. Head of the Miami FBI, Hector Pesquera and Miami police chief Raul Martinez were also guests at a CANF celebration. Chief prosecutor Guy Lewis was photographed embracing José Bas-ulto, leader of Brothers to the Rescue.
From the start, the local media assumed the Cubans’ guilt and referred to them as spies. It was impossible for jurors to remain untainted in that atmosphere. Requests by defence lawyers for the trial to take place away from the anti-Cuban hysteria of Miami, a right under the Sixth Amendment, were turned down. The prosecution rejected any potential juror who was at all critical of the anti-Cuban mafia. In an atmosphere reminiscent of the McCarthy era, one of the defence lawyers had to swear that he was not a communist. Worst of all, defence lawyers were denied access to crucial FBI files proving the involvement of Miami mafia organisations in terrorism.
The Cubans have now been dispersed to high security prisons in five different states, separated by thousands of miles and allowed visits from their families just once a month.
Terrorist hypocrites
The Miami mafia is an integral and influential section of the US ruling class, tied into the network of power both official and covert. Most of them have their origins in the rich Cuban elite that fled the island in 1959 and that has ever since dreamed of renewing its profitable exploitation of the Cuban people. As such, it shares the aspirations of the whole US capitalist class, and these don’t stop at Cuba. Counter-revolutionary agents such as Orlando Bosch and Posada Carrilles have been responsible for more than a hundred terrorist actions against Cuba, including blowing up a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing all 73 civilians on board.
They are also implicated in CIA terrorist campaigns against other progressive movements, such as supplying arms to the Contra counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua and the assassination of Chileans in exile on behalf of Pinochet’s fascist junta.
While the five Cubans who tried to prevent terrorism suffer in prison, Orlando Bosch walks freely on the streets of Miami. Bosch was freed from a Venezuelan prison by Otto Reich, then US ambassador. Reich is now head of US Latin American policies. He is one of many high-ranking US officials involved with the Miami mafia-CIA network. Others include President Bush; George Bush Snr; Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida; John Negroponte, the godfather of military terrorism in Central America, who is Ambassador at the United Nations; Adolfo Franco, who channels funds to the Miami mafia from his central position in the US Agency for International Development and Elliot Abrahams, who hatched the Iran-Contra scandal, and is now a member of the National Security Council responsible for ‘promoting democracy and human rights’!
Fight imperialism – free the Miami Five
The imprisonment of the Miami Five is part of the political war on socialist Cuba by the whole of the US ruling class and that war is part of the global offensive by imperialism, where those that resist imperialism are labelled rogue or terrorist states. Cuba has never harmed a single US citizen by any terrorist act and yet has suffered thousands of deaths and permanent injuries at the hands of terrorists operating out of the USA. The case of the Miami Five highlights the hypocrisy that the ‘war against terrorism’ has anything to do with championing ‘human rights’. Freedom for the Miami Five would not just right an injustice; it would lay bare the bloody and corrupt means by which the imperialists maintain power and the ideological mystifications and ‘moral’ pretensions by which imperialism tries to justify its exploitation of the whole world. It would be a victory for all the working and oppressed people of the world.
For more information about the Miami Five campaign contact RATB
c/o FRFI BCM Box 5909, London WC1N 3XX;
e-mail [email protected]
or International Action Center: www.iacenter.org;
e-mail: [email protected]
