I am a late-comer to the case of the Cuban
Five. I stumbled on the story a few years ago while researching a
novel—a love story—set partly in Cuba.
During a trip to Havana in the spring of 2009, I struck up a
friendship with a guide who was showing me the city I wouldn’t see as a
tourist. Partly to make conversation and partly because I was curious, I
asked him what he thought of the prospects for improved relations
between Havana and Washington now that Barak Obama was in the White
House.
He didn’t hesitate. “Forget Obama,” he said. “Nothing will change until the case of the Five is resolved.”
The Cuban Five? I’d barely heard of them.
So he gave me a history lesson—about how a group of Cuban
intelligence agents had uncovered a plot to be blow up an airplane;
about how author Gabriel Garcia Marquez had carried a secret message
from Fidel Castro to Bill Clinton with details of the plot; about how a
delegation from the FBI had gone to Havana to meet with their
counterparts in Cuban State Security to discuss it; and how, less than
three months later, the FBI had arrested not the Miami-based terrorists
who were planning to blow up the plane but the Cuban intelligence agents
who were trying to stop them.
You can look it up, he said.
I did. I found a Fidel Castro speech on the Internet that outlined
the Cuban version of events. Castro even read into the record the entire
4,000-word text of a previously secret report Garcia Marquez had
written to Castro following his meeting with White House officials in
Washington.
I was hooked. I put the novel on hold and began researching
the nonfiction story of the Cuban Five.
***
I came at it as a “story” rather than a “cause,” and I think that’s
important. Too often there is a sense of rote in our rhetoric about the
Five. They are the “five heroes” who were “unjustly accused,” “unfairly
tried and convicted” and then “punitively punished” simply for being
“anti-terrorist fighters.”
It’s all true, of course, but it doesn’t help convince those who
aren’t already convinced. Many Americans, I don’t have to tell you, are
prepared to believe the worst about Cuba, and especially about Cuban
government agents.
My goal was to tell the story—and it is a fascinating story—as a nonfiction narrative.
It begins in 1990 when a civilian Cuban pilot named René González
“stole” a plane in Havana and flew it to Key West where he “defected.”
González, in fact, was the first of the five Cuban intelligence agents
sent to set up shop in Florida.
He arrived soon after a debate about the fate of Orlando Bosch had
raged in the Miami media. Bosch—a well known anti-Cuban terrorist
considered one of the masterminds behind a 1976 explosion aboard a
Cubana Airlines plane that killed 73 people—had applied for residency in
the U.S.. The justice department (though not necessarily the White
House) opposed his application; Miami’s exile community supported Bosch.
Guess who won?
I wanted to incorporate into the unfolding narrative details about
what the various Miami exile groups were actually plotting (a lot), what
the U.S. government was doing to stop them (precious little) and what
the Cuban intelligence agents were learning about what the exiles were
really up to (plenty).
As part of my research, I read the 20,000-plus pages of transcript
from the trial of the Five, examined the binders-full of even more
thousands of pages of decoded documents and correspondence between the
Cuban agents and their bosses back in Havana.
I began a still-ongoing, still un-won battle with the FBI for
documents relating to what I believe is a critically important meeting
between the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998. After
two years of appeals, I have only finally gotten the FBI to admit there
are documents. But I’m still waiting to see them.
I also, of course, interviewed key figures in Havana, Miami and Washington—none of them more intriguing than Percy Alvarado.
Though not one of the Five, Alvarado too was a Cuban intelligence
agent who operated in Miami around the same time as the Five. He claims
he infiltrated the powerful Cuban American National Foundation. Key
members of the Foundation recruited him to plant bombs in Cuba, he says.
And Luis Posada himself—an acknowledged anti-Castro terrorist—trained
him how to assemble the bombs he was supposed to sneak into Cuba.
Now let’s be clear. Everyone in this business lies. It is the nature
of the clandestine world, and you should never take it on faith that
anyone—American or Cuban—is telling the whole truth. That said, I was
struck by the fact that what Alvarado publicly alleged in 1999 was later
corroborated—inadvertently—by a senior official of CANF who just
happened to be suing his former comrades in arms.
I also interviewed, by mail and email, members of the Five. I found them to be impressive, courageous figures.
***
I want to talk today about some of what I learned in that process. It
wasn’t always what I expected. Or what I’d been told to expect.
The versions I’d read from some Cuban Five supporters, for instance,
made it appear as if the FBI had learned the identities of the Five
because of the information Cuban State Security turned over to them at
those meetings in June 1998.
That’s not true. The FBI had been following the Cubans since at least 1996.
Which raises an intriguing question. Why did the FBI arrest them when they did?
I’ll come back to that.
The Cubans have also been at pains to argue that their agents were
only in Florida to monitor the activities of exile terrorists groups.
Again, not entirely true.
One of the agents, Antonio Guerrero had an almost exclusively
military mission. That inconvenient truth—rarely acknowledged by Cuban
authorities—has provided anti-Castro mainstream journalists and
commentators the opportunity to make it appear as if the Cubans’ primary
mission was to “infiltrate” American military bases or steal U.S.
secrets.
It wasn’t. The military aspect of their duties was minor—and there is
an important context to it. Guerrero’s primary function was to serve as
the canary in the coal mine, an early warning system of a possible U.S.
invasion of Cuba.
The U.S. has satellites to keep an eye on its enemies—a variation on
spying we accept as legitimate. The Cubans can’t afford satellites. They
have human observers instead. Like Tony Guerrero.
His job was to pay attention to the comings and goings of military
aircraft at the Boca Chica Naval Station. Was there a sudden build up of
planes on the runways? What kinds? An unusual number of brass-hat
visitors to the base?
The Cubans had legitimate reasons to fear an invasion—and not just
because that’s what the influential Miami exile leadership prayed for
each night. The Cubans knew what had already happened in Haiti, in
Panama.
***
What did the Cuban agents actually do in Florida?
Most of the time they kept a close watch on exile groups they
believed were plotting attacks on their homeland. They knew that those
militant exile groups were rarely arrested, even more rarely tried and
almost never convicted.
To keep the exiles from succeeding, the agents had to be inventive.
Consider just one example from July of 1998, two months before they were arrested.
Gerardo Hernandez, the controller of the Miami agents, received an
urgent coded message from Havana that there was a vaguely identified
“boat bomb” filled with weapons and explosives docked in the Miami
River. The vessel was destined to be used as a weapon against Cuba.
Hernandez and his team of agents soon tracked down the vessel at a marina near a populated area.
What to do about it?
They certainly didn’t want to allow the vessel to sail, of course,
but Hernandez realized the options Havana had suggested—blowing up the
vessel, or sinking it—were all too risky, and might endanger innocent
civilians.
Instead, Hernandez messaged his bosses, cleverly suggesting someone
call the FBI anonymously and tip them off about the boat’s cargo.
A week later, a story appeared in the Miami
Herald. The
headline: ANTI TERRORISM RAID COMES UP EMPTY. The story detailed how
members of Miami’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, acting on an anonymous
tip, had raided vessels in a Miami River marina. They were looking for
explosives and guns destined for a “third country.” But the raid was a
“bust,” according to an FBI spokesman. They didn’t find anything.
How hard were they looking? The FBI agent in charge was a guy named George Kisynzki. Two weeks earlier, in the pages of the
New York Times, Luis Posada himself had described the agent as a “very good friend.”
What was going on? “Law enforcement veterans saw the search as an FBI hint… to cancel any conspiracies,” the Miami
Herald reported. “That’s a common practice in South Florida… known as ‘admonishing’ or ‘demobilizing’ an operation.”
We later learned more about this particular incident. The boat’s
owner was a man named Enrique Bassas. Bassas, a wealthy Miami
businessman, had been one of the co-founders of a sixties-era terrorist
umbrella group called CORU, which had been responsible for blowing up
that Cuban plane in 1976. More recently, Cuban intelligence had
identified Bassas as one of the financiers of a new mercenary,
anti-Castro army being organized in Miami.
Perhaps most significantly, the month before the raid, Bassas had
been in Guatemala City meeting with Luis Posada. They were, according to
a later report, trying to figure out how to sneak weapons and
explosives into the Dominican Republic.
The Dominican Republic? That just happened to be where Fidel Castro was scheduled to speak the following month.
The Miami
Herald later reported on this botched
assassination plot and came up with its own—close to the
money—explanation for what had gone wrong. Cuban intelligence agents,
explained the Herald, “presumed by most law enforcement and exile
experts to have penetrated many exile organizations, tipped the FBI to
protect Castro’s life during the visit to the Dominican Republic.”
There are a lot of episodes like that in the trial records. It’s also
clear from those records the Cuban agents weren’t interested in using
violence to achieve their objective of preventing exile attacks on their
homeland.
Which is more than can be said for the exiles.
***
But what then are we to make of the most damaging charge—conspiracy to commit murder—against Gerardo Hernandez?
That charge relates to the February 1996 shootdown of two unarmed
Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in the Straits of Florida that killed
four civilians.
There’s no doubt that charge—filed seven months after the
arrests—affected the cases of all five defendants and unduly influenced
the harsh sentences they all received. Including, of course, Hernandez
himself, who is currently serving two life sentences plus 15 years in
prison for his supposed role in the shootdown.
And the allegation continues to resonate today. Whenever the question
of pardoning the Five, or swapping them for the American Alan Gross is
raised, the inevitable answer is that the U.S. could never consider such
a deal because the Five were responsible for the deaths of four
innocent men.
I spent a lot of time focusing on that allegation. I read the
transcript. I studied the court documents. I read the International
Civil Aviation report on the incident.
The reality is that there is not a shred of compelling evidence to
suggest Gerardo Hernandez knew about the plan to shoot down the planes,
or that he had any control over, or role in what happened.
Indeed the evidence paints a very different picture of what Hernandez really knew.
Cuban State Security is famed for its compartmentalization. I tell
another story in the book about two agents who’d infiltrated the same
exile group and the efforts Havana undertook to make sure neither man
knew the other was actually working for the same side.
The back-and-forth memos between Havana and its field officers in the
lead-up to the shootdown make it clear everything was on a need-to-know
basis—and Gerardo Hernandez didn’t need to know what the Cuban military
was considering.
There are, of course, plenty of other unresolved issues about the shootdown.
Were the Brothers’ planes in international waters as the Americans
claim, or in Cuban airspace as Havana argues? The best answer to that
question could come from U.S. satellite images taken by any one of more
than a half-dozen satellites the American government and its agencies
had tracking events that day, but Washington so far refuses to release
them.
More importantly, was shooting down the planes a reasonable response to the Brothers’ provocation?
Those provocations had been going on for seven intense months prior
to the shootdown. The Cubans had complained. Washington had tried—and
failed—to prevent the continuing overflights. And the Cubans had sent
several clear messages to Washington that it would take action if there
were any more illegal incursions into their territory.
To make matters worse, the Cubans knew—thanks to their agents—that
Brothers to the Rescue were test firing air-to-ground weapons they could
conceivably decide to use against Cuba. They were more than a nuisance;
they were a threat.
That said, I don’t believe the shootdown was the most reasonable
response. There were alternatives, including forcing the planes down and
putting the pilots on trial.
But my view doesn’t change the only important reality: Gerardo
Hernandez was not involved in shooting down the planes and he should
never have been charged.
***
Which leads to yet another question: should the Five themselves have ever been charged with anything?
Well, they did commit crimes. They failed to register as foreign
agents, and three of them carried false identity documents. Those are
minor, commonplace crimes in the world of intelligence; American agents
operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Moscow and elsewhere commit
them everyday.
But there is no evidence the Cuban agents stole military secrets or
threatened American security. That’s why they were never charged with
actual espionage—just “conspiracy to commit espionage.” A thought crime
versus an actual crime.
***
The other point that’s worth making is that the FBI knew exactly who
the Cuban agents were and what they were doing in Florida. They’d been
following them for at least two years. They’d broken into their
apartments, stolen their computer disks, decoded them. They knew what
they did each day, even about their love lives.
Let me give you just one example of how closely the FBI followed the
Cuban agents. In April 1998, one of the Five traveled to New York to
meet—supposedly secretly—with an intelligence officer from the Cuban
Mission there. The FBI knew about the rendezvous—at a Wendy’s on the
Hempstead Turnpike—far enough in advance that they were not able to have
seven video cameras and countless still cameras recording the meeting
but they were also able to plant of their own 35 agents at the fast food
restaurant that day. It must have been a surprisingly good day for the
operators of that Wendy’s!
So let’s consider the situation from the point of view of the FBI.
You have complete access to a Cuban intelligence network and, better,
the Cubans don’t know you do. You know that they’re not doing anything
to threaten U.S. security; in fact, much of what they’re
doing—monitoring compliance with the U.S. Neutrality Act—is your job.
So why arrest them?
The moment you arrest them, you lose access to this unfolding
intelligence gold mine. And, worse, you know these captured agents will
simply be replaced by another group of agents—and then you’ll have to
discover the new guys and start all over again.
So why arrest the Five when they did?
There are things we don’t know about that. But there are some things we do.
In May 1998, the FBI appointed a new Special Agent in Charge of its
Miami Field Office. His name was Hector Pesquera, the first Hispanic to
head up that very important, very political FBI field office in the
heartland of Cuban America.
We know Pesquera quickly made friends with key leaders in the Miami
Cuban exile community, including a convicted felon who’d been a former
police officer in Batista’s pre-Castro Cuba—not to forget a number of
high-profile exile leaders Cuban intelligence had identified as
terrorists.
It was just a month after Pesquera arrived on the scene, of course,
that the FBI delegation flew to Havana to meet with their Cuban
counterparts. That’s when the Cubans gave the FBI documents fingering
some of Pesquera’s new friends as terrorists.
The Cubans would later say they believed the agents who came to
Havana treated the information they turned over to them seriously, and
genuinely intended to follow up.
And yet, three months later, FBI swat teams swooped in and arrested the Five, ignoring the exile plotters entirely.
We know Pesquera made that decision. We know because he said so.
After he’d initially been appointed, Pesquera told a Spanish language
radio station following the arrests, “I was updated on everything there
was. We then began to concentrate on this investigation. As far as
intelligence[-gathering] is concerned, [I decided] it shouldn’t be there
anymore; it should change course and become a criminal investigation.”
We know his agents on the ground objected.
We also know—because Pesquera himself bragged about it—that he
lobbied all the way to the top of the FBI food chain in Washington for
authorization to make the arrests. He later told the Miami Herald the
case “never would have made it to court” if he hadn’t lobbied FBI
Director Louis Freeh directly. “To this day there are people in my
headquarters who are not completely sold.”
No kidding.
I’ve tried to interview Pesquera, who retired from the FBI in
2003—after authorizing the destruction of the FBI’s files on Luis
Posada—but he continues to give me the runaround.
Late last month, however, Pesquera popped up in the news again; he’s
just been appointed the chief of police in his native Puerto Rico.
The universe continues to unfold…
And the Cuban Five remain stuck in the United States, four still in prison, one in the prison of parole.
***
It will not be easy to right this injustice, not in a country where
in the past week the manager of a Miami baseball team was forced to make
a groveling apology for offering the mildest of praise for Fidel
Castro, and where the owner of a Miami restaurant faced anonymous
threats because her restaurant just happened to be located on the ground
floor of a building whose roof featured (however briefly) a billboard
calling for Freedom for the Five.
Those prejudices and fears will be difficult to overcome. But they
must be. And that’s why it’s especially important to make the case based
on the facts.
I hope my forthcoming book,
What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, will contribute to that conversation.
***
We hear a lot these days about Alan Gross, a U.S. government
contractor who is currently serving 15 years in a Cuban prison for
smuggling illegal communications equipment into Cuba.
His supporters, like those of the Five, are demanding his
release.
While the two cases are different in many important ways, the
key reality is that the Cuban government is unlikely to consider
releasing Alan Gross unless the U.S. government reciprocates by
releasing the Cuban Five. And the U.S. government won’t release the Five
without considerable public pressure.
That’s why those who are arguing Alan Gross’ case need to know about the Cuban Five.
They need to look beyond the rhetoric, both from supporters of the
Five but also—and more importantly—from an American government that
disingenuously insists the Five were somehow threatening U.S. security
and responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians.
I will close with a quote from Jane Franklin, a widely respected
expert on Cuban-American relations. She was responding to a recent
column in the Washington
Post in which Alan Gross’ wife, Judith, drew heartfelt but false parallels between her husband’s situation and that of the Five.
If she were Judith Gross, Franklin wrote, “I would study the cases of
the Cuban Five to find out exactly how they came to be arrested, tried
in Miami, convicted, and sent to separate prisons around the United
States. Having come to grips with the outrageous injustice of their
imprisonment, I would then commit my life to a campaign for releasing
the Cuban Five in exchange for my husband Alan Gross.”
This
essay is an abridged version of a talk by Stephen Kimber about his
forthcoming book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the
Cuban Five, on April 18, 2012 at the Center for International Policy in
Washington, D.C..
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the
University of King’s College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer,
editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel — Reparations —
and seven non-fiction books.