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Cubans Jailed in U.S. as Spies Are Hailed at Home as Heroes
Images of the five accused Cuban spies are seen everywhere in Havana. This massive poster says, "They will return."
(By Manuel Roig-franzia -- The Washington Post)
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After the spies were arrested in September 1998, Basulto said he learned that Ruben Campa was an alias borrowed from a dead Texas boy and that his recruit's real name was Rene Gonzalez. Gonzalez and nine others were arrested and accused of running "La Red Avispa" -- the Wasp Network -- which prosecutors said was spying on U.S. military bases and Cuban exile groups.
Indictments were eventually handed up against four others, bringing the total to 14 and making the prosecution one of the largest multiple-defendant spying cases in U.S. history. Also, three months after the initial arrests, three Cuban diplomats at the United Nations were expelled for alleged involvement with the Miami spy network.
Five of those accused pleaded guilty. Four others have remained fugitives, but Gonzalez and the others in the Cuban Five -- Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labañino and Fernando Gonzalez (no relation to Rene Gonzalez) -- have fought the charges.
The years before the arrests had been particularly tense.
In 1997, there was a series of terrorist bombings in Havana hotels. One Italian tourist was killed. The Cuban government suspected Miami exile groups of being involved in the attacks in an attempt to undermine Cuba's burgeoning tourist industry. At the time, the Cuban government saw Basulto, a CIA-trained operative, as a threat. In 1961, he had fired a cannon from a boat off Havana and hit a hotel.
Alarcon said that in the summer of 1998, Cuban intelligence officials delivered a packet of documents outlining their concerns to FBI agents at a meeting in Havana. Not long afterward, the Wasp Network arrests were announced in Miami. Alarcon was apoplectic.
"They shot the messenger," Alarcon recalled thinking at the time, arguing that the U.S. had double-crossed Cuba.
Guy Lewis, a former U.S. attorney who oversaw the Cuban Five prosecution, said in an interview that one of the agents worked as a mechanic at Naval Air Station Key West and another counted planes from his apartment near MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, where overseas military operations were coordinated.
"It's clear," Lewis said, "that Cuba's intelligence service maintains a contingency of very well-trained, organized and financed agents."
Trial in Miami
While the Cuban Five awaited trial, Miami's exiles were in an uproar about Elian Gonzalez, a 6-year-old boy found off Florida's coast after the boat that carried him from Cuba capsized, killing his mother and 10 other refugees.
Seven months after Gonzalez was returned to his father in Cuba, jury selection began in Miami for the Cuban Five trial over the objections of defense attorneys who argued that a fair trial would be impossible so soon after the Gonzalez case had inflamed a city full of anti-Castro exiles.
Jurors listened to testimony for six months about encrypted messages sent to Cuba and code names. The defense argued that the accused should be freed because they collected no classified data and did not get into off-limits areas of military bases. Prosecutors countered that it was their failure to register as foreign agents and their intent to collect sensitive information that warranted convictions.
