[Marxism] The Cuban Five

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Cubans Jailed in U.S. as Spies Are Hailed at Home as Heroes

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 3, 2006; A01

HAVANA -- European tourists here send home postcards with stamps bearing 
the images of five faces, known simply as los muchachos (the young men) or 
los cinco (the five). The faces, usually surrounded by billowing Cuban 
flags, stare out, larger than life, from factory walls, apartment 
buildings, billboards.

The five are heroes in Cuba, but villains to exiles in the United States, 
where they are serving long prison terms for espionage-related convictions 
in 2001.

Their case, once cheekily cast in the Miami news media as a "spy-vs.-spy," 
Cold War-era throwback, illuminates the resilience of the complicated, 
decades-long standoff entangling Cuba, the U.S. government and Cuban exile 
groups based in Florida. It is now also raising nettlesome questions about 
the nuances of terrorism and international espionage.

American officials tend to paint Cuban agents as infiltrators bent on 
undermining U.S. national security. But the Cuban government asserts they 
are men of courage, sent to the United States to ferret out terrorism plots 
by Cuban exile groups waging war against President Fidel Castro.

Since the Cuban Five were convicted, the reach of Havana's 
information-gathering machine -- described by a former CIA Cuba analyst, 
Brian Latell, as "among the four or five best anywhere in the world" -- has 
become even more apparent. In 2002, Ana Belen Montes, a senior analyst on 
Cuban affairs for the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, was 
convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Cubans; the year 
before, a high-ranking U.S. immigration official in Miami was convicted of 
disclosing classified information to Cuba. In January, a longtime professor 
at Florida International University and his wife, a mental health counselor 
at the college, pleaded not guilty to charges that they acted as spies for 
Castro.

But none of those cases has generated as much debate as that of the Cuban 
Five. There has been a groundswell of support for the five acknowledged 
agents among some American liberal groups and celebrities, including Alice 
Walker, author of "The Color Purple," actor Danny Glover and author Noam 
Chomsky. A San Francisco group maintains a Web site called "National 
Committee to Free the Cuban Five." The Detroit City Council even passed a 
resolution in March calling for their release, saying the agents were 
attempting to prevent terrorism against Cuba.

The calls for their release gained momentum last August when a three-judge 
panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, 
overturned the convictions and ordered a new trial, because of a "perfect 
storm" of bias in the Cuban exile bastion of Miami. The decision is now 
being reviewed by the full court.

In a recent interview, Ricardo Alarcon -- president of Cuba's National 
Assembly and the third-most-powerful political figure on the island after 
Castro and his brother, Raul -- described the work of secret agents as the 
right of a sovereign nation to defend itself. He called Cuba an object of 
terrorism, a nation under threat of violence.

Alarcon said hundreds of Cuban citizens have been killed in terrorist 
attacks since Castro came to power in 1959 and recalled banners saying 
"Iraq now, Cuba later" at demonstrations in Miami before the U.S.-led 
invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Asked whether Cuba would continue to send agents to the United States, 
Alarcon shifted from Spanish to English and said emphatically: "Yes, with a 
capital Y."

The Wasp Network

José Basulto, founder of an anti-Castro group in Miami, remembers a young 
man named Ruben Campa hanging around the airport where Basulto kept his 
planes in the mid-1990s. The planes were being used to save Cuban refugees 
stranded in the ocean between Florida and Cuba, and to drop anti-Castro 
leaflets in Havana, a tactic that infuriated the Cuban government.

Campa was quick to make friends and "eager to jump on the bandwagon," 
Basulto recalled, and soon he was flying missions for the group, Brothers 
to the Rescue.

After the spies were arrested in September 1998, Basulto said he learned 
that Ruben Campa was an alias borrowed from a dead Texas boy and that his 
recruit's real name was Rene Gonzalez. Gonzalez and nine others were 
arrested and accused of running "La Red Avispa" -- the Wasp Network -- 
which prosecutors said was spying on U.S. military bases and Cuban exile 
groups.

Indictments were eventually handed up against four others, bringing the 
total to 14 and making the prosecution one of the largest 
multiple-defendant spying cases in U.S. history. Also, three months after 
the initial arrests, three Cuban diplomats at the United Nations were 
expelled for alleged involvement with the Miami spy network.

Five of those accused pleaded guilty. Four others have remained fugitives, 
but Gonzalez and the others in the Cuban Five -- Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio 
Guerrero, Ramon Labañino and Fernando Gonzalez (no relation to Rene 
Gonzalez) -- have fought the charges.

The years before the arrests had been particularly tense.

In 1997, there was a series of terrorist bombings in Havana hotels. One 
Italian tourist was killed. The Cuban government suspected Miami exile 
groups of being involved in the attacks in an attempt to undermine Cuba's 
burgeoning tourist industry. At the time, the Cuban government saw Basulto, 
a CIA-trained operative, as a threat. In 1961, he had fired a cannon from a 
boat off Havana and hit a hotel.

Alarcon said that in the summer of 1998, Cuban intelligence officials 
delivered a packet of documents outlining their concerns to FBI agents at a 
meeting in Havana. Not long afterward, the Wasp Network arrests were 
announced in Miami. Alarcon was apoplectic.

"They shot the messenger," Alarcon recalled thinking at the time, arguing 
that the U.S. had double-crossed Cuba.

Guy Lewis, a former U.S. attorney who oversaw the Cuban Five prosecution, 
said in an interview that one of the agents worked as a mechanic at Naval 
Air Station Key West and another counted planes from his apartment near 
MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, where overseas military operations were 
coordinated.

"It's clear," Lewis said, "that Cuba's intelligence service maintains a 
contingency of very well-trained, organized and financed agents."
Trial in Miami

While the Cuban Five awaited trial, Miami's exiles were in an uproar about 
Elian Gonzalez, a 6-year-old boy found off Florida's coast after the boat 
that carried him from Cuba capsized, killing his mother and 10 other refugees.

Seven months after Gonzalez was returned to his father in Cuba, jury 
selection began in Miami for the Cuban Five trial over the objections of 
defense attorneys who argued that a fair trial would be impossible so soon 
after the Gonzalez case had inflamed a city full of anti-Castro exiles.

Jurors listened to testimony for six months about encrypted messages sent 
to Cuba and code names. The defense argued that the accused should be freed 
because they collected no classified data and did not get into off-limits 
areas of military bases. Prosecutors countered that it was their failure to 
register as foreign agents and their intent to collect sensitive 
information that warranted convictions.

The jury -- which included no Cuban Americans -- convicted all five. 
Hernandez was sentenced to life in prison on a murder conspiracy charge for 
tipping off Rene Gonzalez and another Cuban spy not to fly with Brothers to 
the Rescue on the day the Cuban military shot down two of the group's 
planes in 1996, killing four of its members.

The state-run daily in Havana, Granma, responded with a front-page 
editorial headlined: "A Heroic Behavior in the Entrails of the Monster."
'Hypocrites'

One recent afternoon, in a neighborhood behind the chipped and faded Jose 
Marti sports complex in central Havana, Antonio Lagé stepped over children 
playing beneath an apartment bulletin board that, like so many in Havana, 
carries a photo of the Cuban Five. "Hypocrites, that's what Bush and the 
Americans are -- hypocrites," he said. "They talk about fighting terrorism, 
but they keep these heroes in prison for trying to stop the terrorists in 
Miami."

Leonard Weinglass, a renowned U.S. defense lawyer, has taken up Hernandez's 
appeal after a career that includes representing members of the Chicago 
Seven antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago 
in 1968, and former Black Panther and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Weinglass persuaded the appeals court panel that the accused spies could 
not get a fair trial in Miami. Now his strategy is to concede that there 
was a technical violation of the law but argue that the actions of his 
client were necessary to protect lives.

"If they are under attack, does a country have the right to send agents to 
another country to get information?" Weinglass said, while sipping a mojito 
on the patio of the storied Hotel Nacional de Cuba. "That is a major 
intelligence question."

Weinglass and the wives and mothers of several imprisoned agents picked up 
more allies during a speech to a California legal group in Havana, among 
them 16-year Democratic congressman Esteban E. Torres.

"It's a real miscarriage of justice," Torres said. "It tells us something 
about our government and the judiciary and the intelligence service: 
Anything that they can do to get Fidel, they'll do."

Though Castro has never been connected to the case, U.S. intelligence 
experts say they believe the Cuban leader personally oversees high-priority 
spying missions.

"And he's good," said Latell, author of the book "After Fidel." "He's 
really, really good."

Alarcon said more agents would be sent to the United States, even though 
Cuba experts contend the threat from exiles -- whether perceived or real -- 
is diminishing.

Alarcon points out that John D. Negroponte, President Bush's director of 
national intelligence, recently said the United States had more than 
100,000 intelligence personnel.

Cuba does not have that many intelligence personnel, Alarcon said, but it 
has more agents than the five celebrated officers now in prison. The real 
number, he said, "is somewhere in between."


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