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For more than 40 years, Cuban right-wing groups based in Miami have engaged in numerous terrorist activities against Cuba, also against Cuban Americans and other people who advocate a normalization of relations between the two countries and an end to the blockade.
In June 2001, René González Sehwerert, Ramón Labañino Salazar, Fernando González Llort, Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez and Gerardo Hernández Nordelo were convicted and will face possible life sentences in U.S. federal prison for defending their country of Cuba from terrorists based in Miami. They spent 17 months in solitary confinement. After conviction, they were placed into security housing units in total isolation, where they remain.
The five were convicted after a politically charged trial in which the U.S. government claimed they were engaging in espionage against U.S. military bases and threatening “national security.”
As the five maintained in their defense, they were strictly involved in monitoring the actions of the Miami-based right-wing groups. In fact, they shared information with U.S. officials when dangerous actions were planned by the terrorist groups they infiltrated.
Civil rights attorney Leonard Weinglass, who has joined the defense team for the five men, spoke out this weekend at the rally in Washington, D.C., about their case.
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AMY GOODMAN: We move now to some of the speeches given around the country this weekend against war, the first by Leonard Weinglass, civil rights attorney, in Washington, D.C., at the mass mobilization against war of more than 150,000 people.
LEONARD WEINGLASS: I’m here to speak to you today about five Cuban men who took up the struggle against terrorism directed at their country from the United States and are now serving life sentences in America’s prisons.
You might remember that the justification for the War in Afghanistan was that any country that hosts terrorists is as guilty as the terrorists themselves. For 40 years this country has hosted a network of terrorism in Florida directed at Cuba. It has recruited them, trained them and armed them. And when Cuba repeatedly asked the United States, the host country, to rein in our terrorists, they were met with inaction.
And so the Cubans sent a group of people here to monitor the activities of the terrorist network in Florida. And when they got too close, the FBI stepped in and arrested the five and prosecuted them before the exile community in Miami, and they were sentenced to life terms in prison. Their case is now under appeal and needs your support.
This case is more easily understood if you think of the case of Orlando Bosch, a member of that terrorist network, who planted a bomb on a Cubana airline in 1978 which exploded in midair, killing 73 people. Mr. Bosch applied for residence in the United States after that episode, and the Justice Department and the INS deemed him an undesirable person, pointed to 30 years of terrorist activity, including the bombing, and asked that he be barred from entry in the United States. But Orlando Bosch had a friend in Florida, a young man who wanted to be governor. His name was Jeb Bush. He intervened with his father, who was then the president of the United States, and George Bush Sr. overruled the Justice Department and the INS and granted Orlando Bosch residence in the United States. He now walks as a free man in Miami, Florida.
He walks as a free man, while the five, who had no guns, no explosives, created no harm in the United States, did not involve themselves in any classified information here, did not interfere with national security, are serving life in maximum-security prisons here in the United States. The next time the Bush administration moralizes about the war on terrorism, remember Orlando Bosch, and remember the Cuban Five. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Leonard Weinglass, civil rights attorney, speaking at the mass mobilization against war in Washington, D.C., where more than 150,000 people gathered this past Saturday. When we come back from our break, we’ll go to other protests and speak-ins and rallies that took place in the last few days. We’ll go to Madison, Wisconsin, and Boston, Massachusetts. You’re listening to Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
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