Why they’re revered as anti-terrorist heroes

The State Department lists Cuba as a state that “sponsors terror.” But five Cubans are in U.S. jails serving long prison terms because they tried to prevent terrorist attacks against their country.

And at the same time a judge in Texas is preparing to release an admitted terrorist from detention who has a long record of bombings and assassination attempts against Cuba.

The FBI arrested a group of Cubans in Miami in the fall of 1998 on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage. Five refused plea bargains. They are Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, René Gonzáles, Anto nio Guerrero and Gerardo Hernández—the Cuban Five.

According to the head of the Cuban Parliament, Ricardo Alarcón, the FBI arrests were in response to a memorandum that his government had presented to the U.S. that July providing documentation about terrorist activities by right-wingers operating out of southern Florida. Instead of stopping the terrorists, the FBI arrested Cubans it thought had been monitoring the right-wing groups and providing information about them to Havana.

New revelations of Miami-based terror attacks on Cuba back up the socialist government’s accusations.

Jose Antonio Llama, a former member of the 28-person directorate of the extreme right-wing Cuban American National Foundation (CANF)—which has long been an instrument of U.S. hostility towards socialist Cuba—has admitted that he invested more than $1.4 million of his own wealth to purchase an arsenal of weapons. (El Nuevo Herald of Miami, June 22)

He bankrolled a plan to attack Havana’s Revolution Square during a public gathering and also to assassinate President Fidel Castro during the 1997 Ibero-American Summit on Isla Margarita, Venezuela.

Llama stated that 20 CANF leaders met in the early 1990s to devise the plot and plan recruitment of armed mercenaries. CANF obtained seven boats, a Midnight Express speedboat, 10 ultra-light remote-controlled aircraft, a cargo helicopter and a virtually unlimited supply of explosives.

“We were impatient about the survival of the Castro regime after the demise of the Soviet Union and the socialist system,” Antonio Llama told El Nuevo Herald. “We wanted to speed up democratization in Cuba using any means to achieve it.” Democratization is a euphemism for capitalist restoration.

Ricardo Alarcón said the Cuban Five had helped foil these planned terrorist attacks by giving Havana a heads-up warning. “They had been trying to locate those planes, weapons and explosives to stop a terrorist attack,” he said.

Luis Posada Carriles was arrested and convicted in Panama for his role in an attemp ted assassination of Castro there. He was later pardoned by Panamanian pre si dent Mireya Moscoso, part of the old political establishment that got back in power after the U.S.—with George H.W. Bush at the helm—invaded the country in 1989.

Now Posada Carriles is in an immigration detention center in Texas because he entered the U.S. illegally after leaving Panama. But he may soon be free, if the Justice Department accepts the ruling of a Texas judge.

Lifting the rock on a covert war

The Cuban Five are victims of Wash ing ton’s relentless campaign to bring about regime change in the socialist Caribbean island.

From the day of their arrest the five were buried alive in prison punishment cells, the infamous “holes.” They remained in solitary confinement for 17 months, barred from contact with lawyers and loved ones who could help them prepare their defense before the trial opened on Nov. 27, 2000.

While they awaited trial, fascist exile forces in the Cuban exile community in Miami were creating a political uproar by holding six-year-old Elián González hostage. The child’s mother, Elisabeth Brotons, had perished in the Florida Straits trying to reach the U.S. with her son. She and others are the tragic consequences of Washington’s “Cuban Adjustment Act”—which creates red tape inhibiting legal entry but gives green cards to Cubans who risk their lives at sea.

Mass demonstrations in Cuba, protests in the U.S. and around the world, and growing mass sympathy in this country for Elián’s plight forced the Clinton administration to return the now-motherless child to his father in Cuba.

The Cuban right wing grew more impatient. And soon, the U.S. Attorney Gen eral’s office was spending some $20 million to convict the Five.

The Cuban Five trial threatened to lift the rock hiding the CIA’s training, funding and sheltering of mercenary “contra” armies on U.S. soil whose purpose was, and is, the dismantling of socialist construction in Cuba.

For example, Orlando Bosch, who today walks free in Miami, has publicly boasted of his role in the mid-air bombing that killed 73 passengers on Cubana jetliner 455 on Oct. 6, 1976. He spent 11 years in a Venezuelan prison for those murders.

Cuban 5 defendant Fernando González was assigned to follow Bosch’s actions in 1994. However, in the trial of the Five, U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard denied a defense request to use information from the Justice Department about acts of terror by Bosch.

Instead, it was the Five who were portrayed by prosecutors, FBI officials and local authorities as dangerous spies attempting to “destroy the United States,” despite there being not one shred of evidence that they had committed any act of espionage against the U.S. government.

The Five were convicted on June 8, 2001, on charges that included “espionage conspiracy,” and slapped with sentences ranging from 15 years to two consecutive life terms.

CIA terrorists in the shadows

For almost half a century, since the tillers and toilers of Cuba in 1959 liberated their land, labor and resources using the fulcrum of revolution, U.S. sugar monopolists and organized crime bosses have conspired to return the small country to the capitalist market. They found willing pawns among exiled Cubans in Miami who fantasized about returning to their mansions on the island.

The CIA trained commandos—including Luis Posada Carriles and the late founder of the Cuban American National Foundation, Jorge Mas Canosa—to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, but they were beaten back by the armed local Cuban population.

Posada and Mas joined the U.S. military and were schooled at Ft. Benning. There, Posada recalled, “The CIA taught us everything, everything; they taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb; trained us in acts of sabotage.” (New York Times, July 1998)

Mas Canosa became a feared right-wing political leader in Miami who was feted at the White House by presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton. He funneled cash to Posada, who ran a terrorist training camp in Florida for the CIA.

Posada boasts that he worked for the U.S. Army in Vietnam, headed the Vene zue lan secret police, worked for Lt. Col. Oliver North and oversaw supply operations for the CIA contra army organized to defeat the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

He spent nine years in Venezuelan prisons for having masterminded the 1976 mid-air bombing of the Cuban airliner. Last spring a retired prison guard admitted to the Venezuelan television program En Confianza that the CIA had bribed him and other guards to allow Posada to escape. That was the year that George H.W. Bush, father of the current U.S. president, became head of the CIA.

Venezuela at that time was run by political parties compliant with Wash ington’s foreign policy and Rockefeller oil interests.

Posada admitted to having engineered a string of bombings of four newly renovated hotels in Havana in 1997—which killed an Italian tourist—at a time when Cuba was trying to build up its tourist industry with some European investment. Salvadoran terrorist Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, who was convicted of killing the Italian tourist, confessed that CANF paid him $3,000 for every bomb he planted. (New York Times, July 12, 1997)

The Cuban Five were trying to thwart these terror plots by infiltrating organizations that conspire and train to overthrow the Cuban government—like Alpha 66, Brothers to the Rescue, Comandos F4, Omega 7 and Brigada 2506.

Today Posada is being held in what amounts to protective custody in El Paso, Texas, awaiting possible release, while the Cuban Five have already spent eight years behind bars in five far-flung maximum security penitentiaries across the U.S.

The Five remain resolute, strong and brimming with solidarity. In a recent statement issued from behind prison walls, they demanded justice for the Palestinians, the Lebanese people and all those suffering from imperialist aggression, justice for the people of the U.S. who are suffering crimes committed by their own government, and justice for all immigrants and political prisoners—including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and the Puerto Rican political prisoners.

By revealing how terrorists operated against Cuba from the safe haven of U.S. soil, they wrote, “we demonstrated the double standards of the empire in its so-called ‘war on terrorism.’”

Now all progressive people in the U.S. need to demonstrate their solidarity in order to free los cinco, los muchachos, the Five Heroes—free the Cuban Five!

For more information on how you can help, visit: www.freethefive.org and www.iacenter.org.