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[the_future_modernes]

The Case of the Cuban Five: American Justice as a Political Weapon

The decision by a Miami court on Tuesday October 13 to reduce Antonio Guererro's life sentence to 22 years imprisonment is the latest chapter in the ongoing legal battle to free a group of men known as the Cuban Five. Largely anonymous in the United States yet celebrities in their native Cuba, their conviction symbolizes the fraught relationship that exists between the two countries. The re-sentencing is the result of a decision taken last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which stated that the court in Miami, where the original trial was held, may have erred when it imposed sentences on three of the five men. The hearing takes place at a time when many Cubans and Americans have high hopes for improved diplomacy between their nations.


The case of the Cuban Five is inextricably linked to the ongoing standoff between Havana and Washington. In the early 1990s, the Cuban government sent a group of men known as The Wasp Network to the United States to infiltrate anti-Castro organizations, which had been operating from Miami with apparent impunity since the 1960s. After these anti-Castro organizations orchestrated the bombings of Cuban hotels and the shooting down of a Cuban passenger aircraft near Barbados in 1976, the Cuban government decided to take covert actions, believing that the United States was not interested in helping prevent more attacks.

One of the groups targeted by The Wasp Network was Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR). The group was made up of Cuban exiles whose initial goal was rescuing Cuban rafters who were emigrating from the country, but whose focus changed after new U.S. immigration policy mandated that rescued rafters be sent back to Cuba, rather than taken to the United States. The group then began chartering planes to drop anti-Castro leaflets in Cuba, making repeated illegal incursions into Cuban airspace. Cuban authorities made numerous complaints to U.S. aviation authorities, but this failed to put a stop to the flights. On February 24, 1996, two BTTR planes were shot down by the Cuban Air Force, resulting in the death of the four pilots on board. The deaths provoked outrage in the United States, and led directly to the strengthening of the U.S. embargo on Cuba via the controversial Helms-Burton Act.But George Bush's government was secretly paying the Miami Herald to inflame opinion agianst them during the trial. And that was just the start of the irregularities.