News
Vigil for the Five - 19 October 2010
02/09/2010
Free the Miami Five – justice for them and their families
US Embassy Candlelit VigilTuesday 19 October 2010, 6pm-7.30pm
US Embassy, Grosvenor Square, London (Bond St tube)
with special guests from Cuba
Irma González Salanueva - daughter of Miami 5 prisoner René González
Tom Goldstein – Supreme Court lawyer for the Five
plus speakers from the trade union and labour movement and celebrity supporters including: Tony Woodley (Unite), Tony Benn, Angela Smith (Chair of APPG on Cuba), Bob Crow (RMT), Christine Blower (NUT) and others
Bring candles to this peaceful vigil for the Five and their families to mark the 12th year of their unjust imprisonment.
Please mobilising for this vigil today. If you can help distribute electronic and paper publicity to your friends and collegues please contact communications@cuba-solidarity.org.uk or call 020 8800 0155
www.cuba-solidarity.org.uk
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The Miami 5 - Jailed for fighting terrorism
The Miami Five have been unjustly imprisoned in US jails since 1998 for trying to stop terrorist attacks against Cuba. The United Nations, Amnesty International and numerous legal, religious and human rights organisations have questioned the fairness of their trial and long sentences, and condemned the US government’s persistent refusal to grant visas to allow two of their wives to visit.
What did they do?
For more than 40 years, right wing Cuban exile groups based in Miami have killed almost 3,500 people in terrorist attacks against Cuba,
To save lives, Cuba sent five men to Miami to infiltrate and monitor the groups. At the request of the US government, this information was passed to the FBI in 1998.
But instead of arresting the terrorists, the FBI used the information to identify and arrest the Five anti-terrorists on September 12, 1998 in Miami and charged them with spying and conspiracy. Two of the prisoners wives, Olga Salanueva and Adriana Pérez, have been refused visas ten times and have not seen their husbands for 10 and 12 years.
FREE THE FIVE - Join the vigil on Tuesday 19 October at the US Embassy
The Alan Gross case: Could 12 dozen = 5?*
31/08/2010
by Saul Landau
Someone, perhaps the protagonist himself, made a mistake -- perhaps an “oversight,” as Washington bureaucrats label their errors. Alan Gross, on a mission for his company (DAI) working for USAID (United States Agency for International Development) solicited a tourist visa to travel to Cuba for the purpose of “promoting democracy,” a euphemism for undermining governments that challenge Washington dictates.
Imagine the 60-year old American posing as a tourist while distributing laptops, cell phones and forbidden satellite phones to Cubans! Gross should have known he would draw the attention of Cuban state security. Or did he think he could innocuously drop-off expensive appliances at private homes, like a Santa Claus who prolonged his gift-giving night? Gross claimed he intended only to help the Cuban Jewish community upgrade its communication technology. Do most religious Jews believe God will talk to them only via satellite phone?
The atheistic Cuban government, of course, would have denied him permission to accomplish this task; so big deal, he lied and wrote “tourist” on his visa application. Not really a lie. He did hope to visit the Tropicana and spend a day at the beach in between satellite phone deliveries.
Gross knew Cuba does not allow satellite phones. A sign at the airport announces this. Satellite phones prevent tapping and could be used for sending coded messages on several frequencies. Their signals will usually bypass local telecom systems. Oh, these phones can also call in coordinates for air strikes. On the web, Motorola advertises its satellite phones at bargain prices: between $1,795 and $5,273 – not counting service.
In addition, the Cuban state phone company holds a monopoly and doesn’t allow competition. But if Gross wanted Jews to communicate to relatives abroad why not distribute phone cards in hard currency or Cuban-made cell phones with a prepaid long distance options?
How did he acquire his merchandise? Could Cuban customs, which x-rays all incoming baggage, have missed these hi-tech phones in his suitcase? Not likely. Did Gross pick them up at the U.S. Interests Section? [NB - the US Interests Section is the lower-level equivalent of a consulate or embassy and its staff are considered diplomats. Diplomatic luggage and mail, by international agreements, is not searched. klw]
In any case, Gross, working for DAI, a company contracted to the U.S. government, Cuba’s primary enemy, falsified his immigration form and failed to register with Cuba as an agent of the U.S. government. In other words, Cuba had him cold on immigration fraud and failing to register. Did he really think he wouldn’t get caught? Did no one in his company or at AID warn him? A Gringo going around Cuba handing out satellite phones to Jews? And there are not that many in Cuba.
Given the facts of prima facie evidence of his lying to Cuban immigration and distributing taboo products, you’d think from Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s recent remarks, that Cuba had unjustly arrested a gross of innocent Jewish Americans trying to help members of their suffering tribe. Who, by the way, already get plenty of communications help from Jewish agencies in several countries.
Clinton appealed to American Jews to rally behind Alan, who “has been held in a Cuban jail for the last seven months without being charged with any crime – because he did not commit any crime. He was in Cuba as a humanitarian and development worker and, in fact, was assisting the small Jewish community in Havana that feels very cut off from the world.” Clinton, speaking at a dinner honoring Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, [said she]raised the issue at the behest of his family: “I am really making an appeal to the active Jewish community here in our country to join this cause.” (Jerusalem Post, July 15) She probably didn’t have time in her remarks to mention one fact: Gross worked for a company contracted with an agency in her own State Department -- USAID. (July 13 speech to reception hosted for the Jewish Community)
In late February, I asked three people at Havana’s largest synagogue; none knew an American named Gross. Adela Dworin, vice president of the Hebrew Community House in Cuba, “denie[d] any knowledge of Gross and says that recognized international Jewish organizations have provided them with legal Internet connections,” according to CBS News. (http://www.cbsnews.com/8300-503543_162-503543.html?keyword=Portia+Siegelbaum#ixz\z0tfoB4onk)
Alan Gross had previously set up satellite communications systems to circumvent state-controlled channels in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like a bottom fish on the precarious food chain of subverting a foreign government, Gross got caught on a Cuban police hook. Cuba has not yet formally charged him although Cuban officials have said they “suspect him of espionage.”
Secretary Clinton, pleading for Gross’ freedom, ignored the case of five admitted Cuban agents serving long sentences in U.S. federal prisons. Like Gross, they also failed to register as foreign agents (maximum sentence 18 months); unlike him, they came to Miami to fight terrorism, not to undermine the U.S. government or political system.
The five Cuban agents admitted they didn’t register as foreign agents – their only crime. Yet, the Justice Department charged them, without evidence, of conspiring to commit espionage and other felonies. The intimidated Miami judge and jury predictably convicted and sentenced them. Gross traveled to Cuba to undermine the Cuban government.
Different motives, but hell isn’t it time for a swap? Gross for five? Judy Gross, his wife, could stand beside the wives of the five Cuban prisoners’ wives demanding: “free our husbands.”
Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow whose films are available from roundworldproduction.com.
Visiting Gerardo in prison
18/08/2010
by Danny Glover and Saul Landau
From the Ontario California airport some 60 miles east of downtown Los Angeles we drove north on Highway 15, the road to Las Vegas. Cars with expectant amateur gamblers and loaded big rigs climb and descend the mountains where the Angeles and San Bernadino National Forests meet.
To the east lies the high desert, some 4,000 feet above sea level. Amidst junipers, Joshua trees and sagebrush we turn off from the man-made freeway to the jester’s creation of a shopping mall in Hesperia where we pick up Chavela, Gerardo Hernandez’ older sister.
We pass fast food joints with chain names, nail and hair salons, tattoo parlors, gas stations and mini-marts (a drive-by of American culture) going west and then north on 395 to the six-year-old U.S. Federal Penitentiary Complex, a 630,000 square foot high-security prison (it cost $101.4 million to build); designed to cage 960 male inmates.
In the institutional grey Visitors’ Lobby a guard hands us forms with numbers on top, nods at a book to sign and eye-signals to a pile of pens. We write, hand him back the forms and sit in the gray waiting room with other visitors – all black and Latino.
We wait for twenty minutes. A guard calls our number. We empty our pockets except for money. We pass through a sensitive airport-type screening machine, pick up our belts and eyeglasses that have gone through X-ray, and extend our inner forearms for stamping by another uniformed guard. Two black women and an elderly Latino couple get the same treatment. We exchange nervous smiles. Visitors in a strange land!
He passes our IDs through a drawer connected to another sealed room on the opposite side of a thick plastic window. A guard there checks the documents and pushes buttons to open a heavy metal door. The group enters an outdoor passage. Blinding, late-morning sun and desert heat shocks our bodies after the air-conditioned chambers. We wait. A guard confers through a small slit in the door of the building housing the inmates – gun towers on each side; masses of rolled barbed wire covering the tops of concrete walls.
We wait, get hot, then enter another air-cooled chamber; finally, a door opens into the visitor room. A guard assigns us a tiny plastic table surrounded by 3 three cheap plastic chairs, on one side (for us) and one on the other for Gerardo. African American and Latino children exchange places on their fathers’ laps as daddies in khaki prison overalls chat with their wives.
Chavela spots him 20 minutes later, waving and bouncing across the room smiling. Chavela, almost crying, says, “He’s lost weight.” He seems the same weight as when (Saul Landau) saw him in the Spring. Gerardo hugs and kisses his sister, embraces Saul and then Danny, thanking him for his efforts to spring him from the hole, where he spent 13 days in late July and early August.
Gerardo informs us that two FBI agents investigating an incident unrelated to this case had questioned him in prison. Right after, prison authorities tossed Gerardo into the hole, although there existed no evidence, logic or common sense that could possibly have implicated him into the alleged unrelated incident. The temperatures inside the hole rose to the high nineties. “I had to use my drinking water to keep me cool, pouring it on head,” Gerardo told us. “It didn’t help my high blood pressure. I couldn’t even take my medicine. But, I think, thanks to the thousands of phone calls and letters from people everywhere, they let me out.”
Chavela kept bringing junk food to the table – the only kind available from the vending machines. We nibbled compulsively while Gerardo told about living in a sweatbox for almost two weeks. “No air circulated in there,” he laughed, as if to say “no big deal.”
We talked about Cuba. He kept up on the news, reading, watching TV -- and from visitors who informed him. He felt encouraged by steps President Raul Castro had taken to deal with the crisis. He had watched, on the prison television, parts of Fidel’s speech and the questions and answers at the Cuban National Assembly Meeting. “I saw Adriana [his wife],” who sat in the audience. His smile faded.
“You know what’s painful. She’s 40 and I’m 45. We don’t have that much time to have a family together. The United States won’t even give her a visa to visit me. She’s behaved with such courage and dignity throughout this ordeal.”
Gerardo Hernandez, one of the Cuban 5, is serving two life sentences for conspiracy to commit espionage and aiding and abetting murder. Prosecutors presented no evidence of espionage at the Miami trial. The aiding and abetting charge presumed evidence, not shown, that Gerardo sent flight details to Cuba of the Brothers to the Rescue planes shot down by Cuban MIGs in February 1996 -- which he did not. The charge also assumed that he knew of secret Cuban government orders to shoot them down, also not true.
The 5 men monitored and reported on Cuban exile terrorists in Miami who had plotted bombings and assassinations in Cuba. Cuba then shared this information with the FBI. Larry Wilkerson (retired army Colonel and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff) compared the 5’s chance of getting a fair trial in Miami to an accused “Israeli’s chance of justice in Teheran.”
We sipped cloyingly sweet, bottled, iced tea. Chavela brought more potato chips.
Gerardo, reanimated the mood by recalling an incident when in the 1980s, as a Lieutenant in Cabinda, Angola, he had escorted top Cuban officers to a dinner-party with visiting Soviet brass. “I told my Colonel I had memorized a short Mayakovsky poem in Russian (from his school classes) and could recite it to the Soviet officers.”
He recited the poem to us in Russian. We applauded. He smiled. “They were roasting a pig and had bottles of booze, a party.”
“I recited the poem. The Soviet Colonel hugged me, kissed me on both cheeks -- very emotional. I had to repeat my performance for the other officers. Finally, the Cuban Colonel told me I’d milked the scene long enough and I left.”
Two hours passed quickly. We waited for the guards to let us out. Gerardo stood at attention against a wall near the cellblock door next to another prisoner. We gave him a fist salute. He returned it. His sister blew a kiss. He grinned reassuringly – as if to remind us. “Stay strong.”
Danny Glover is an activist and an actor. Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow.
Original story from Progreso Weekly