New Sentence for One of Cuban Five
A federal judge in Miami on Tuesday handed down a new sentence for one of the so-called Cuban Five, a group of Cuban intelligence agents accused of spying in the United States.
U.S. Federal District Court Judge Joan Lenard imposed a 21 year, 10 month sentence on Antonio Guerrero, who had been serving a life sentence.
According to the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, Judge Lenard “refused to agree to the terms” of a “negotiated agreement” for a 20 year sentence that attorneys for both sides had apparently agreed to in private.
“Independent of the court process and the decisions that are issued by the court, we maintain our steadfast demand for the immediate freedom of the Cuban Five,” the committee and several other parties said in a statement. “The judicial case prosecuted against our Five brothers has nothing to do with justice. This is, and always has been, a political case.”
The Five, Gurrero, Ramon Labinino, Rene Gonzalez, Fernando Gonzalez, and Gerardo Hernandez, have admitted that they are Cuban agents but denied spying on the United States or gathering and transmitting classified military secrets, and denied involvement in a 1996 shoot-down of two planes that resulted in the deaths of four men.
On Feb. 24, 1996, the Cuban Air Force shot down two of three planes flying away from Cuba in international airspace. The incident resulted in the deaths of two pilots and two passengers belonging to Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue, an anti-Castro group that worked to rescue those fleeing the island in rafts and which dropped pro-democracy pamphlets on Cuba.
The committee’s statement reads in part:
Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, every administration of the U.S. government has maintained a policy of permanent aggression against the Cuban people. A fundamental part of this policy of aggression has been the use of violence against the Cuban people. For decades the U.S. administrations have been directly or indirectly involved–through terrorist organizations of the Cuban American extreme right wing in the United States–in countless terrorist attacks against the Cuban people, causing the deaths of 3,478 Cuban men, women and children, and injuring 2,099 Cubans. The peace, security and well-being of the Cuban people have been tragically affected.
In the interest of defending its people–as any other responsible government would do–the government of Cuba assigned to the Five the task of infiltrating the terrorist organizations of the Cuban American extreme right wing. Everyone in this city knows full well that the terrorist organizations have carried out campaigns of death and terror against the Cuban people for decades. Stopping terrorism was the mission of the Cuban Five.
In 2001, a Miami court sentenced the Five to four life sentences and a combined 75 years in prison for, among other charges, conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit espionage against the United States.
While the men have been hailed as heroes for their actions in Cuba and elsewhere, anti-Castro and exile groups, especially in the United States, argue the punishment is justified.
A three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit overturned all five convictions in 2005 on the grounds there should have been a change of venue from Miami, where the trial received negative coverage and prevented the men from receiving a fair trial, to another location.
The full Eleventh Circuit reversed the 2005 decision a year later rejecting the claim the trial should have been moved from Miami.
The case again came before a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit in 2007. In June 2008, the panel vacated three sentences – two of which were for life – and sent them back to a federal court in Miami for resentencing based on the panel’s opinion that none of the five men gathered classified military information while in the United States.
The panel vacated the life sentences for Guerrero and Rene Gonzalez, concurring with their argument that their sentences were improperly configured because they did not gather or transmit classified information.
The panel vacated Fernando Gonzalez’s 19 year sentence, ruling his sentence was too harsh because he was not a supervisor of the group that Cuban intelligence dubbed “The Wasp Network.”
There is no hearing date yet to resentence Ramon Labanino or Fernando Gonzalez.