2004 Bay Area Cuba Conference

by Jeff Mackler & Leonard Weinglass

Renown civil rights and human rights attorney Leonard Weinglass toured the San Francisco Bay Area on the weekend of May 22-23 to mobilize support for the Cuban Five. Weinglass was at the center of several historic legal defense cases, from the Pentagon Papers trial to the trial of the Chicago Seven. For a decade he was chief counsel to Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Weinglass was the keynote speaker at a May 23 conference in solidarity with Cuba and the Cuban Five hosted by Socialist Action and co-sponsored by a dozen Cuba solidarity groups as well as the National Lawyers Guild, the Peace and Freedom Party, and several other political and social justice organizations. About 130 people attended the day-long event.

The morning session opened with a presentation by Patty Mote, representing the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of 80 groups. Mote outlined the conference's major themes and workshops, in addition to the case of the Cuban Five. Other issues included opposition to the government's reactionary travel restrictions and blockade of Cuba, opposition to the overt threats of a U.S. war on Cuba, and defense of Cuba's actions against the U.S.-sponsored and financed "dissidents."

Representatives of the US/Cuba Friend-shipment, the Venceremos Brigade, the Freedom Socialist Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, Global Exchange, and USA/Cuba Infomed participated in these workshops.

The afternoon session, chaired by Jeff Mackler, National Secretary of Socialist Action, included greetings from National Lawyers Guild attorney Stephen Bingham and Gloria La Riva of the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five. Longtime journalist Karen Wald and USA/Cuba Infomed activist Francisco Rodriguez rounded out the program.

Keynote speaker Leonard Weinglass detailed the case of the Cuban Five (see excerpts from his presentation on these pages). Weinglass represents one of the Cuban Five defendants, Antonio Guerrero.

Greetings to the conference were received from Mumia Abu-Jamal, and presented by his new federal appeals attorney, Robert R. Bryan. Each of the Cuban Five had previously prepared a copy of their book, "With Honor, Courage and Pride," with personal inscriptions to Mumia. The book had been presented to Socialist Action members Dave Bernt and Jeff Mackler during a visit to the D.C.-based Cuban Interests Section several weeks earlier. Conference participants in turn signed the book, which will be forwarded to Mumia at SCI Greene federal prison in Pennsylvania.

Jeff Mackler outlined the context of the present attacks on revolutionary Cuba. He called special attention to the fact that the successful conference was the product of the collective efforts of the co-sponsoring groups. Three thousand dollars was raised to benefit the defense of the Cuban Five and the work of the Cuban solidarity movement.

The May 23 conference was part of a Bay Area weekend visit by Weinglass. His tour began with a reception and rally in Palo Alto, attended by 100 people; a special fund-raising reception hosted by Mark Van Der Haut of the National Lawyers Guild; and a Saturday evening rally organized by the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, attended by 120 people.

Leonard Weinglass speaks in defense of the Cuban Five

Noted civil liberties attorney and Cuban Five counsel Leonard Weinglass was the featured speaker at a May 23 Cuba solidarity conference at the Socialist Action Bookstore in San Francisco. (See the article about the conference at right.) Below we print major excerpts from Weinglass’ speech.

When you speak about any political case, you have to start with the historical context in which the case evolved. And in the case of the Five, we have to go back to 1990-1991 and ‘92, when, as you know, the economy of Cuba fell into a deep crisis because of the end of the Soviet bloc countries and their economies and their assistance that over the years had helped the Cuban people survive the embargo from the United States.

The Cuban government at that point, with a population that was literally near starvation, had to make a difficult decision on how to save its own people and the revolution. And one of the decisions they arrived at was that they would build a tourism industry and begin to attract tourism from Europe, Canada, and South America. To that end they began to form joint ventures with tourism companies in Italy, in France, and some in Spain. Hotels began to sprout up in Cuba. They built a brand-new air terminal and new buses to bring the tourists in from the terminal to transport them around the island. The economy began in ‘93-’94 to begin to show signs of a turn-around as tourists’ dollars flowed in. I might point out to you that this year, Cuba will entertain two million tourists.

But the folks in Miami, some of the 650,000 Cuban-American exiles, over the previous three decades had intermittently launched attacks through their most extreme right-wing elements, which formed mercenary bands, even trained in camps in southern Florida, camps that were filmed and shown on Miami TV….

These groups had not succeeded in 30 years in intimidating the Cuban people or in any way deterring the Cuban Revolution. But now with Cuba wanting to invite in tourists and building a tourist industry as a way of salvaging and restarting its economy, they realized that they had a vulnerable people—the tourists.

Tourists do not want to go on vacation and be frightened. They don’t want to go on vacation and feel insecure. They want to take their families, and they want to relax on a beach. So they are a very vulnerable population. We learned this in 9/11, when the tourist industry throughout the United States suffered so terribly because of the impacts in New York.

So they began to launch a campaign against the tourist targets in Cuba. And 10 hotels were bombed [in 1997 alone]. They even brought a ship off the coast of Cuba and fired a cannon into hotels that lined the ocean in Havana.

An Italian tourist who was reading a newspaper in a lobby in Havana was killed by a bomb that exploded in the lobby. A bomb was found at the air terminal. Bombs were found on buses.

Cuba protested vehemently to the United States as each of these transgressions unfolded. And the United States did nothing. Then Cuba went to the United Nations, to the UN Security Council, in a session very similar to the one that we saw prior to the war in Iraq. Cuba’s representative to the United Nations, Ricardo Alarcon, laid out specifically the attacks, giving the dates, the amount of damage, and the number of injuries and the number of people killed that had happened against the tourist industry. But the United Nations Security Council tabled any action on Cuba’s resolution to condemn the United States for tolerating these acts. It was in that climate that the Cuban Five came forward.

Five men who left their country and came to the United States, without weapons, without explosives, without a true support network to draw on in the United States. But they had wit, courage, and intellect….

What did the Five do?

[Their objective was] to infiltrate the camps, to infiltrate even an air force which had been built up by the mercenaries, called Brothers to the Rescue, which initially had had a merciful mission of rescuing people who were on rafts coming over from Cuba but then converted itself into a more military group, and a militant group. They were practicing dropping pipe bombs on an open field at the time that one of the Five infiltrated that group.

Their intent was to infiltrate, to find out what the plans were and to report back to Cuba on these plans so that Cuba could defend itself. This was a last-ditch effort on the part of five brave people to aid their country when the international community and the United States were doing nothing to assist them as these attacks were increasing….

People have asked me, what did the Five really do? How did they report back? What did they say? I want to read to you from the trial record. This is one of the documents that the United States government intercepted that was sent by the Five to Cuba....

“On March 16, Andre Salvorino, who works in the prisons and is a member of the National Guard in Miami, told this source about having a project with the Cuban American National Foundation to form a group of 40 men with professional military experience, persons who are either on active duty now or are ex-military personnel, for the execution of a paramilitary mission against Cuba. It would be a force of mercenaries without ties to any existing Cuban group. They would be paid commissions, and they would have life insurance policies of $100,000 U.S. for their families.

“Roberto Martin Perez would be in charge of this project for this Cuban American National Foundation. One of the financial promoters would be Enrique Cassas, a Cuban millionaire and an ex-U.S. Army officer who has a boat company and arms deposits in Honduras that used to belong to the Nicaraguan Contras.”

Very plain are the connections between these groups and the Nicaraguan Contras. And so this was the kind of information sent back and that Cuba received and acted upon to protect itself.

The Cubans then compiled a large dossier of the information that was received. Some of it included these reports. And in June of 1998, the Cubans invited a high-level delegation from the FBI to come down to Cuba to receive information that the Cubans had compiled on criminality in the United States, because these acts, the act of training, the act of sending an armed force outside the United States to attack a third country, is a violation of United States laws.

It’s a violation of the Neutrality Act, which forbids any American citizen to participate in an action that’s going to be a military action against a third party.

The Cubans felt that if they brought the FBI in and gave them the information that they had gathered and collected, the FBI would be compelled to take steps to begin to mitigate the threat against Cuba. And so the information was turned over. It included over an hour and a half of video tapes.

And the FBI took the information, returned to Washington, and never again contacted the Cubans and never made a single arrest. When the Cubans saw this after five or six months had passed, they turned over the same dossier to The New York Times, hoping that at least The New York Times would reveal this because the dossier had names, places, dates, specific locations. It was the kind of thing that newspapers could easily confirm and check up on because it was so specific.

But The New York Times did not write a single article based on the information that was given to them. And so the Five continued with their work.

My client, Antonio Guerrero, who was a sheet metal worker, got a job on a Navy base, which was a training base, in Key West, Florida. This base is unprotected, it’s unfenced; there are no gates or guards at the front. Any member of the public can drive onto it. They even built a platform for the public to stand on to photograph planes taking off and landing.

What was he doing on the military base? He was watching the build-up, or the lack of build-up, of aircraft so that Cuba would know whether or not an attack by the mercenary forces would be pending.

It was the theory of the Cubans—because they learned at the Bay of Pigs, in 1963, that attacks by mercenaries are frequently, if they’re large enough, coordinated with the U.S. military—that a build-up of aircraft on this base might be a forerunner of an attack on Cuba.

Was that espionage? The answer is no. Espionage requires that there be military secrets. The taking off and landing of aircraft was not a military secret. It’s a public event. Anyone of the public could have seen it. Any reporter for any news magazine could have watched it and reported on it….

The government charges “conspiracy”

When the Five were arrested in September 1998 and they were charged with a conspiracy to commit espionage, the government charged not the act of espionage, not the crime itself, because they said they could not prove espionage. There were no secrets. But they charged a conspiracy, which means an agreement.

The government’s theory was that the Five must have agreed that at some unspecified time in the future they would commit espionage. That’s what was put to the jury, with the government attorney arguing in his opening statement to the jury that the government of the United States has 800 documents … 15,000 pages, but ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we don’t have a single page of classified information….

Now, after he was convicted, Antonio Guerrero and two of his codefendants received the maximum sentence for conspiracy to commit espionage. They received life sentences, and he is serving life in a case where there’s not a single page of classified information. …

But it wasn’t only a conspiracy to commit espionage that was charged. Seven months after they were arrested, the government amended the indictment and added a new charge, and that was a charge of conspiracy to commit murder.

Well, did the Five commit murder on U.S. soil? No. It had nothing to do with anything that happened in the U.S. What it had to do with was in February 1996, two planes that were part of the Brothers to the Rescue overflew, or attempted to overfly, Cuba, and as they entered Cuban airspace, they were shot down by the Cuban Air Force, which was exercising the sovereign right to protect is own airspace, something which we now know the United States would do in a second if an aircraft approached the United States which was about to overfly the United States without permission or without giving advance notice.

Well, how did it get from the shoot-down of two aircraft to a charge of conspiracy to commit murder against Gerardo Hernandez? He was one of the Five, and he was involved in the infiltration of that group called Brothers to the Rescue. And he had received before the shoot-down occurred a message from Cuba that he should not allow any of the agents who were with him to fly on that weekend.

But that doesn’t constitute evidence of conspiracy to commit murder. He was just notified not to fly….

Judge rejects venue change

Gerardo Hernandez is serving two life sentences for that. Now how did it happen that a jury could convict on the basis of virtually no evidence on these major charges?

The answer lies in the venue, in Miami. This case was doomed the moment the sitting judge said that the case must remain in Miami. As you know, whenever there is proof, sufficient proof, that a venue is tainted by hostility or prejudice or is inflamed against a defendant or a charge, the case is moved to another venue which could be fair, more fair, and impartial.

It happens all the time. It happened in the case of the Oklahoma bombing when the trial there was moved from Oklahoma City to Denver. That was moved 1200 miles....

But what did the Cuban Five ask for? Were they asking for 1200 miles, to move the case up to New York City, or to Washington, or to Atlanta, or some urban area where 650,000 Cuban exiles who are waiting to go back home are not living, 400,000 of whom are registered voters, who, parenthetically, gave the election to President Bush in 2000? Did they ask for anything like that?

No. They asked that the case be moved 30 miles to Fort Lauderdale, which is 40 minutes away, right up I-95. No problem at all for the government. The cases say that when a judge is presented with a change of venue, the judge has to balance the inconvenience of moving the case for the prosecution against the rights of the defendants. And here there was virtually no inconvenience to the prosecution….

Well, what evidence did they have? They conducted a survey of that community in Miami, and they presented the evidence of the survey by Professor Moraine, of the University of Florida, to the court. What did the evidence show? Seventy percent of the people questioned had already made up their minds!

That’s pretty shocking! But even worse, the next question was, “Would you change your mind if the evidence indicated that they were innocent?” Ninety percent said no!…

The judge took seven days of questioning 168 people to try to find 12. And the 12 that they ended up with is an indication of what the rest were like. Because the foreman of the jury—and it’s under oath and in the trial record—he said, “My view is that Fidel Castro is a communist tyrant, and I will be pleased the day he’s removed.”

The number two juror said, “Well, I have a son who is a Marine officer, he’s been in the Marine Corps 21 years, and I have a daughter who works for the FBI. She’s an FBI agent. And she’s been in the FBI for 10 years. She’s still with the FBI.”

The number three juror was someone who lived with a man, whom she married, who was from the Peter Pan group that fled Cuba right after the revolution.

So that was her own atmosphere.

The number four juror worked for the attorney general’s office of Florida in the criminal division. So that was the way it went through 12 people. Of the 168 who were questioned ... three said they had a rather balanced view of Cuba. As they put it, “some good, some bad.” Out! They went out immediately in the government’s challenge to them. ... As you read this record, it is absolutely ludicrous that this case could take place in Miami.

Yet it did. So the defense was really hamstrung right from the beginning.

Cuba gave many warnings about overflights

The [defense] called 31 witnesses, the government had called 40, there were very long proceedings, but the defense called a retired admiral, Eugene Carroll. And he testified to the jury—and his testimony was incredible—about the shoot-down. He said that there were 25 overflights of Cuba in the prior 20 months leading up to the shoot-down….

The Cuban protested each and every one of the overflights, and that was put into the trial record. And the U.S. did nothing. So then the Cubans did a very Cuban thing, very typical from my reading of the record. They called down Admiral Carroll to come to Cuba, and they wanted a face-to-face meeting with this retired admiral, and the head of the Cuban Air Force met with him.

And the head of the Cuban Air Force informed Admiral Carroll that Cuba would no longer permit these overflights without a military response. Cuban pilots were trained, and if the actions continued, there would be a shoot-down of aircraft. He asked Admiral Carroll to return to Washington and to inform the United States that this was the current intention of Cuba.

Admiral Carroll told the jury that he did that. He came back to Washington, convened a meeting at the Pentagon—the State Department was invited—and he told them what the head of the Cuban Air Force had told him. And they indicated to Admiral Carroll that they were powerless to stop this.

That these were civilian groups that were overflying. But these are not your typical civic organizations. One person who’s in charge is called the chief of intelligence. Another is called the commander of operations….

Then the next witness was even higher in rank. They called Richard Nucio, who was the advisor to President Clinton’s office in the White House, as he said to the jury when he testified, “It was my responsibility to formulate Cuban policy of the United States government in the White House.”

He testified that he was concerned, and that his office had written a memorandum, which was put into evidence. The memorandum said that Cuba is losing patience with the ability, or the inability, of the United States to stop these overflights and that soon there’s going to be a tragedy. The memo, in a typical bureaucratic fashion, ended by saying, “We’d better have all of our ducks in a row, because people are going to get killed.” That was prophetic. Within a month, the two planes were shot down. And with this in the record, the jury still found that somehow Gerardo was involved in this when he never had anything to do with it.

As a matter of fact, how did Cuba know the planes were coming? Did Gerardo tip them off? That’s what you would think might have happened. No. The FAA in Miami tipped them off and told them the planes were coming. And as the planes were approaching, the Havana FAA control got on the line and said to the planes: “You are entering a militarized zone. Please turn back.” How do we know they said that? Because the lead plane, which survived, recorded conversations between the FAA in Cuba and the aircraft. And that was played to the jury.

So the Cubans did all they could to prevent this episode from happening. But like so many other things, it’s played out in the U.S. as proof of the fact that Cuba is an inhumane country that doesn’t care about human life, that takes life lightly and is very vicious in its relations with the United States, when in fact the opposite is true.

Why would Cuba shoot down two aircraft that were coming in? I want to read to you again from the record to a report that was sent back to Cuba by Rene Gonzalez, who had infiltrated the group Brothers to the Rescue.

This was what he reports: There was a plan conceived for the purpose of launching two planes loaded with explosives and remotely controlled from a helicopter to be directed against a public gathering in the Plaza of the Revolution during a speech by the commander-in-chief.

In other words, as tens of thousands of Cubans gathered in the Plaza of the Revolution, a plan was being worked out by this group to fly two planes loaded with explosives, controlled by remote control, into the plaza and to kill many people who were gathered for a speech like this….

The government said they knew the Five were not armed, they knew they had committed no acts of violence in the United States; there was no property damage in the United States. If anything, they served in some capacity in helping U.S. law enforcement. And yet three of the Five are doing life, one is doing a double life, one is doing 19 years, and one is doing 17 years.

Basis for an appeal

Now an interesting thing happened which gives us some hope for the appeal. A year after the case was over, and after the government had argued in this case that, look, Miami is a big metropolitan urban center with many different kinds of people. If there is prejudice here against the Cubans, I’m sure we could find 12 people who could be fair because there are so many people living in this city. And the judge bought that argument …and said yes, I agree, let’s try to see if we can find a jury.

But a year after the trial was over, the same U.S. attorney’s office who argued this in the case of the Five was called upon to defend the attorney general of the United States, who was being sued civilly for an employment discrimination case which arose out of the Elian Gonzalez episode. That United States attorney, who’d opposed the change of venue in this case, ran into court and said, “We can’t try this case in Miami because there’s so much prejudice against the attorney general of the United States because of the role the attorney general played in the Elian Gonzalez case.” All of a sudden Miami went in one year from a large metropolitan area to a small town. It had shrunk considerably. And venue was changed in that case. Where to? To Fort Lauderdale!

When we argued the case on appeal, we argued these points, and at one point, one of the judges, the senior judge, and a very good judge, interrupted the government attorney, who was making all kinds of claims, to say very simply, “What about that Ramirez case where you defended the attorney general?” And that pretty much broke it open….

As we were about to file our papers on appeal, the government, without notice, took the Five and put them into solitary confinement, into punishment isolation cells, and they were intended to be kept there a year, but because of the public outcry around the world—Amnesty International, the British Parliament, and finally the United States Congress wanted to investigate this—they were released after 30 days, and they’re all now back.

But that indicates to us that the case is treated politically, … it has been from day one and it still is, and that it’s public support that broke them out of isolation punishment cells, which are horrendous, much worse than the treatment I ever saw Mumia having to endure on Death Row. My client was brought to me in chains, shackled. He had been in a concrete box, no windows, a slot in the door where they gave him his food. It was so bad, lights on 24 hours a day, that they stripped him of all of his clothing because they were afraid of suicide. But it was the response of people worldwide and in this country that really gave them their return to maximum security, which was hardly a blessing, but it was much better than where they were being kept.

And so I’m glad to come to speak with you today and share this information with you. I have to say that I was in Cuba, meeting with some officials about the case, and when they heard the announcement of this meeting in a storefront in San Francisco, with a gathering of maybe 150 of us, it was electrifying in Cuba.

They were so pleased, so gratified and so encouraged by the fact that on a Sunday afternoon Americans would gather in San Francisco to hear and discuss the case, as well as discuss the conditions that Cuba faces today.

So I just wanted to pass that on to you. I saw it, I was there at the meeting when it was announced, I saw the reaction, and I think you’re all to be commended for being here. Thank you very much.

This article first appeared in the June 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.