The Vengeance Verdict

It is as if the state insists upon an endless cycle of injustice. Time and time again, the United States government has continued to stubbornly turn the screws in an attempt to extract a false confession from the five Cuban anti-terrorists who have been imprisoned in that country for nearly 13 years.

It is a cycle that began with the very moment of their arrest on September 12, 1998: the 17 months of solitary confinement; the staged trial. Held on that Friday, June 8, 2001, the Miami trial confirmed what would come as no surprise: Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and Rene González were convicted guilty.

“There was a sense of exuberance among the prosecutors, FBI agents, and all of the members of the anti-Cuban terrorist organizations who gathered there; disappointment on the faces of the honest bailiffs and court room staff who had followed the process day in and day out and recognized deep down the innocence of the accused; discouragement among the lawyers who had waited until the last minute for a verdict in our favor, at the very least in the most infamous and false of the charges,” Antonio Guerrero wrote then.

Today, Wednesday, is another June 8, only 10 years later. And as if the injustices were few, on April 25, prosecutor Caroline Heck Miller urged the Miami court to reject the writ of habeas corpus filed on behalf of Gerardo in the name of the Obama administration.

What is left of those legal proceedings is based, among other technical aspects of the defense, on two questions that have risen to the surface as new evidence: the government’s concealment of the truth and the rigged media crusade developed with the intention of condemning the Cuban Five, for which the White House allocated more than a quarter million dollars to local journalists, using funds from the ill-founded Radio and TV Martí.

The writ of habeas corpus requires that the United States provide images from its satellites, which would prove that the planes of the terrorist organization Brothers to the Rescue were shot down in Cuban airspace on February 24, 1996, an action which had nothing to do with Gerardo. Even after multiple warnings from Havana to U.S. authorities, it was clear that Cuba would not permit a further violation of its sovereignty. However, Washington refuses to provide the evidence that would exculpate Gerardo. Why so much effort to hide it?

Furthermore, the prosecution asked the court to dismiss Antonio Guerrero’s appeal for habeas corpus, maintaining that he was challenging a motion presented by René González.

These three nearly concurrent events reveal the absurd nature of the case against the five men who were dedicated to defending their country from criminal acts that have been planned and executed with impunity from U.S. territory for more than half a century.

Interestingly, on May 25, 2001, a few days after the conviction and seven months before the sentencing, the government prosecutor issued an unprecedented official document. The charge, conspiracy to commit murder, in reference to the incident of the two Brothers to the Rescue planes that earned Gerardo one of his two life sentences, could not be sustained.

This “Emergency Petition” to the Court of Appeals explicitly stated, “in light of the evidence presented in this trial, this [the instructions to the jury] constitutes an insurmountable hurdle for the United States in this case, and will likely, result in the failure of the prosecution on this court.” In short: There was no evidence against Gerardo, according to the judge’s instructions to the jury. There was no way to convict him.

However, at that time, the document was ignored, and so it remains one decade later.

What happened next is history. The court rejected the emergency request without question or hesitation, and the whole jury—biased and intimidated by the prevailing climate in Miami—declared Gerardo guilty of the alleged crime in the first degree.

The silence from the American media has so far been the only response to a story that once could single-handedly fill the headlines. No wonder. The United States’ so-called freedom of expression is a fairy tale, and this case does not deviate from the script that was written in Washington in the very beginning.

Gerardo, Ramón, Antonio, Fernando, and René were arrested under a democratic administration. A republican sentenced them to prison and a democrat kept them there, despite the fact that a Nobel Peace Prize-winning president is sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.