Copenhagen 20-08-05: conference on the Five

Intervention of Katrien Demuynck

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for your invitation to this interesting meeting. This is a very important moment.
As you al know the Court of appeal of Atlanta made public the verdict in the appeal of the five Cubans, political prisoners in the US, on the 9th of august, overruling the first trial in Miami and removing the sentences. That means that René, Gerardo, Antonio, Ramon and Fernando are on this moment considered innocent again. It is a huge and unexpected victory, that was reached thanks to the firmness of the five and their families, the dedication of the defence lawyers and the international solidarity that managed to make the truth known worldwide.

Maybe it is important to recapitulate the major facts in the case of the Five

• Cuba has been a victim of terrorist attacks organized by the Cuban-American mafia and the CIA since 1959. Almost 3500 Cubans lost their lives and 2000 remained handicapped because of these attacks.
• Cuba has never had the support of the FBI or the US government to fight the origins of that terror, it has been forced to send its own people to Miami to monitor these terrorist groups.
• In the nineties, five men, now internationally known as the Cuban Five were sent to Miami to monitor terrorist networks. Among them the network of Posada Carriles, who has been organizing terrorist attacks against tourist targets in Cuba.
• In the summer of 1998, for the first time a cooperation between FBI and Cuban intelligence services takes shape, in order to prevent announced attacks on passenger planes. The Cubans provide the FBI with evidence on 40 Miami terrorists and their networks.
• On 12 September 1998, instead of persecuting the terrorists, Hector Pesquera, head of the FBI of Miami, arrests the five men that were trying to prevent terrorism. They are immediately placed in solitary confinement, rendering family visits and a normal contact with their defence lawyers impossible. Five public defenders are appointed.
• By the end of 2000 the trial starts. It will last for seven months. During this trial several amendments of the US constitution were violated. The Five were charged of conspiracy to commit espionage, one of them - Gerardo - also of conspiracy to commit murder. High-ranking US military officials testify in favour of the Five. The public prosecutor himself even tries to eliminate the charge of conspiracy to commit murder, without success, because he really had no evidence on that charge.
• In June 2001, the five are declared guilty by a jury that is openly influenced by the Cuban-American mafia. The mafia celebrates the victory. The five are given excessive sentences, between 15 years and two life sentences plus 15 years. They are put in high security prisons, one at thousands of kilometres from the other. The five and their public defenders immediately decide to appeal.
• February 2003: the five are placed once again in solitary confinement. No reason is given. International solidarity gets them out of that solitary confinement after one month. It is the first turning point in this case.
  The five experience many restrictions in family visits. Two of them, René and Gerardo, can't receive any visit of their wives because the US refuses to give them entry visa. As a result, René can't see his youngest seven-year old daughter.
• April 2003: the defence lawyers submit their appeal to the Court of Atlanta. It is file of more than 600 pages. The main demand is a new trial outside Miami, because in Miami, a community dominated by the Cuban-American mafia, no just trial is possible for the Five.
• On March 10 2004 a public hearing takes place in Miami, with the presence of international lawyers.
• It takes till August 9 2005, 17 months after the hearing and more than two years after the submission of the appeal, to know the verdict of the judges of Atlanta that entirely follows the position of the defence lawyers. The trial is overruled and the sentences are removed.

And that's the point where we are now.
Now there are several possibilities. The public prosecutor can appeal the verdict of Atlanta. He can ask all eleven judges of the court of Atlanta to review the verdict. After that, he can ask for an appeal before the Supreme Court. He can also accept the verdict and go for a new trial outside of Miami. In that case the Department of Justice has to authorize the new trial.

It is very important now to increase the pressure on the US government.

As you might know Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly calls on us to launch a campaign for their immediate liberation. Defence lawyer Leonard Weinglass supported this idea during the World Festival of Youth and Students in Venezuela.
There are some very good reasons to do so:
The Five have been unjustly convicted. During the seven years since their arrest they have constantly suffered severe violations of their rights. The most flagrant violations have been their prolonged stay in solitary confinement, their imprisonment in maximum security prisons, and the constant problems with the family visits. Besides this there is an interesting point in the 93-page motivation of the Atlanta verdict. The judges refer extensively to the 40 years of terrorism against Cuba, organized from Miami, and to the presence of the Five to monitor and prevent this activity. This argument, that was used in the Miami trial by the defence to justify the presence and activities of the Five in Miami, was not accepted by the judge. By treating this item extensively, the judges of the appeal court of Atlanta follow in fact the defence of the Five, who always maintained that they never presented any danger for the national security of the US and that their presence in Miami was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks against Cuban targets. In fact, the only dignified answer to the verdict of Atlanta is the liberation of the Five.

Of course we should also go on with the demand of the visiting rights for Olga Salanueva, wife of René and Adriana Pérez, wife of Gerardo. There is not one valid reason not to grant them an entry visa. Much less now that the conviction of the five has been lifted. We have to pressure US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to urge them to let Olga and Adriana enter the United States immediately to visit their husbands!

There's also an interesting procedure that can be used toward the High Commissioner of Human Rights of the United Nations. It is called procedure 1503, and it gives the right to any citizen or organization to communicate human rights violations to the High Commissioner. The first 2000 letters and messages denouncing the unfairness in the trial of the five had already a positive result. On the 14th of July, it was made public that the UN working Group on Arbitrary Detentions of the Human Rights Commission had communicated an opinion (n° 19/2005) to the US on the case of the five. In this opinion the Working Group states that the 17 months of solitary confinement immediately after the arrest and the fact that almost all of the evidence remains classified as secret, extremely weakened the defence. It also states that in Miami, given the circumstances and the nature of the charges, a just trial is impossible. In conclusion, it finds that the trial violates article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, with respect to a fair trial and a fair defence. Consequently, it concludes that the deprivation of liberty of the five has an arbitrary character and that the United States has to take the necessary measures to repair that situation.
Of course the US doesn't follow this opinion (saying that the working group is influenced by Cuba…), but the interesting thing about it is that as a consequence of this statement of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, this item will be dealt with by the UN Human Rights Commission itself in March 2006.
So we all should use the procedure 1503 to denounce the unjust trial and to denounce the violation of the visiting rights of the five.
You can easily find this on the website of the UN Human Rights Commission. You can write letters or send an e-mail message. You won't receive any answer, but that's normal. Your name and address also remain secret. The only thing they take into account is the violation itself and the number of complaints about it.

A year ago I had the chance to visit Gerardo Hernández. We took the decision of trying to visit Gerardo after consulting him and the US Committee to Free the Five. With this visit, we wanted to give an impetus to the campaign to free the Five. Gerardo was very interested to make the attempt succeed. At first it seemed rather impossible. Due to the fact that Gerardo is imprisoned in a high security prison there are a lot of restrictions.
Gerardo, with two life sentences, has the right to only 10 visitors. These people have to be listed and approved. At that moment he had already 9 family members and friends on his list. Secondly, the visits can only take place during week-ends. And thirdly, the prisoners can have their visits only during a limited number of hours per month. Finally, the one requesting a visit has to prove a relationship with the prisoner that dates back to before the conviction.
After consulting Gerardo, we decided to ask for an extraordinary visit, so that we would not appear on the visitors list. We motivated our visit to the director of the prison by saying that we were friends of Gerardo's wife, who were incidentally traveling to the US and wanted to take advantage of our stay in the US to see him.
We never got an answer. We sent the forms to request the visit several times. We may have made a hundred phone calls to the prison… At last they replied the day before we would travel, saying that the prisoner himself would contact us. As Gerardo disposes only of a limited list of telephone numbers , and as our number was of course not on that list, it would be impossible for him to inform us.
When we arrived in San Francisco, Alicia Jrapko of the US Committee to Free the Five was waiting for us. Five minutes later she received a phone call… from Gerardo. He wanted to be sure that we had arrived, because the visit was approved!
The next day, in the early morning, we left for Lompoc, a 5 hours' drive from San Francisco. The visits are from 9 am till 3 pm. There are a lot of security measures to get in. You can't take absolutely nothing inside, except for quarters of dollar to buy some soft drinks, chips or sandwiches from a machine.
Finally, at about 10 o'clock, they brought Gerardo. It was very special. He was extremely happy. He hugged us saying: "we succeeded, we succeeded". For him it was a kind of victory against the arbitrariness he is forced to live in. He received us in the same natural way as if we would have been meeting at his house, as if we were old friends, in spite of the hostile environment. He told us about the difficult prison conditions. He is living among hardened criminals, people who have committed terrible crimes, and people who have committed crimes and are serving their sentence in a low security or medium security prison. Everything is arbitrary. At any moment they can change the rules, lock them up or prohibit visits. The food is bad. They have to work for an extremely low remuneration. But they need that money to make phone calls or buy stamps, or buy a glass of milk… He also told us of his firm belief - even during those first 17 months of isolation - that Fidel and the Cuban people stand behind them. He told us how the example of Che Guevara keeps him going. He also told us that the many letters he receives mean very much to him, they make him feel strong and confident. And those letters also call the attention of the guards, who notice that way that the 5 are no ordinary criminals. They are different. For me, Gerardo and his 4 comrades show that the Cuban revolution has really succeeded to create the New Man, that Che Guevara was thinking of.
It was a very difficult moment when we had to leave Gerardo as they would take him back to his cell. I felt sad, thinking of when we would possibly see him again. And I was returning to a free world, leaving the high security prison behind me. I didn't know how to say goodbye. But Gerardo smiled and said simply: "see you in Havana, guys", and he showed his fist.

The international movement has been working for the freedom of the Five for 4 years now. It has managed to organize worldwide actions like, protest rallies on 12 September, the anniversary of their arrest, the worldwide actions in March 2003, the sending of lawyers to be present at the hearing in March 2004, the fundraising for the ad in the New York Times. Above all, we have succeeded to make the injustice and the double standards of the US on terrorism known worldwide. Time has come to take the last obstacles away and win their freedom now.

I believe that a better world is possible. I'm sure it is, for Cuba gives us the example. That's why it is very important to show our solidarity with the Cuban revolution.
The five are a symbol of the revolutionary spirit, the courage and the resistance of the Cuban people. Today the first struggle of Cuba is for the return of the Five. Let's work to make that happen.

Katrien Demuynck
European Coordination of the Free the five Campaign
Free-the-five@cubanismo.net
Haachtsesteenweg 53
B- 1210 Brussels