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Who are the Cuban Five?
The Cuban Five, Antonio Guerrero, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González and René González took up the task in the 1990's of gathering information for the Cuban government about the activities of anti-Cuban terrorist groups in the Miami so as to help Cuba defend its people from the ongoing terrorist attacks launched against Cuba from the US. The Cuban government gave their findings to the FBI who, instead of stopping the criminals, arrested the five Cubans in September 1998 and accused of them of spying on the United States. They were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage and other offences. One of them, Gerardo Hernández, was also charged with conspiracy to commit murder. The alleged murder involved the deaths of four people in the February 1996 shooting down of two private airplanes, launched by a terrorist group from southern Florida, as they threatened to make another in a series of unauthorized entries into Cuban airspace after being warned repeatedly that they would be stopped.
After 33 months in jail, including 17 months in solitary confinement, The Five's trial began before a Miami court in an atmosphere of local media hysteria and intimidation of potential jurors. Despite this, the trial judge refused the defense attorneys' requests for a change of venue. The ability of the defendants to refute the charges at trial was hampered by the fact that investigators had declared many of the defendants' own documents to be secret, under the Classified Information Protection Act, thus preventing the Five from showing that all the information they had gathered was publicly available. Still, evidence presented at their seven-month trial by high-ranking US military and intelligence officials proved conclusively that none of the information gathered by the five men was harmful to the national security of the US. Nevertheless, they were convicted by the jury on all counts and were given maximum sentences.
On August 9, 2005, a 3-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the convictions and ordered a new trial on all charges. This echoed earlier findings by the United Nations Panel on Arbitrary Detentions of the Human Rights Commission which found the proceedings against the Five illegal and arbitrary.
The US government rejected its own judges' decision and ordered a re-hearing by the full, 12-judge court. Their decision, exactly a year later reversed the earlier decision of their 3 colleagues, reinstated the sentences, denied the Five a new trial, and ordered the case back to the original panel for consideration of some remaining 9 issues.
Today, the Cuban Five remain in 5 separate, widely-dispersed maximum-security prisons, (so as to hamper visits by consular officials and the legal team by forcing them to travel long, grueling distances).
The Cuban Five's families were unaware of their activities and yet two of their wives are not permitted to visit them, while the others find their visiting dates are often changed just after they have completed the lengthy visa application process. This sabotaging of the family members' visits not only contravenes the constitution of the US but also the UN Charter of Human Rights.
This is clearly a case where justice has been supplanted in favour of vindictiveness, harassment and revenge against Cuba and its people.