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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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The jury -- which included no Cuban Americans -- convicted all five. Hernandez was sentenced to life in prison on a murder conspiracy charge for tipping off Rene Gonzalez and another Cuban spy not to fly with Brothers to the Rescue on the day the Cuban military shot down two of the group's planes in 1996, killing four of its members.
The state-run daily in Havana, Granma, responded with a front-page editorial headlined: "A Heroic Behavior in the Entrails of the Monster."
'Hypocrites'
One recent afternoon, in a neighborhood behind the chipped and faded Jose Marti sports complex in central Havana, Antonio Lagé stepped over children playing beneath an apartment bulletin board that, like so many in Havana, carries a photo of the Cuban Five. "Hypocrites, that's what Bush and the Americans are -- hypocrites," he said. "They talk about fighting terrorism, but they keep these heroes in prison for trying to stop the terrorists in Miami."
Leonard Weinglass, a renowned U.S. defense lawyer, has taken up Hernandez's appeal after a career that includes representing members of the Chicago Seven antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1968, and former Black Panther and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Weinglass persuaded the appeals court panel that the accused spies could not get a fair trial in Miami. Now his strategy is to concede that there was a technical violation of the law but argue that the actions of his client were necessary to protect lives.
"If they are under attack, does a country have the right to send agents to another country to get information?" Weinglass said, while sipping a mojito on the patio of the storied Hotel Nacional de Cuba. "That is a major intelligence question."
Weinglass and the wives and mothers of several imprisoned agents picked up more allies during a speech to a California legal group in Havana, among them 16-year Democratic congressman Esteban E. Torres.
"It's a real miscarriage of justice," Torres said. "It tells us something about our government and the judiciary and the intelligence service: Anything that they can do to get Fidel, they'll do."
Though Castro has never been connected to the case, U.S. intelligence experts say they believe the Cuban leader personally oversees high-priority spying missions.
"And he's good," said Latell, author of the book "After Fidel." "He's really, really good."
Alarcon said more agents would be sent to the United States, even though Cuba experts contend the threat from exiles -- whether perceived or real -- is diminishing.
Alarcon points out that John D. Negroponte, President Bush's director of national intelligence, recently said the United States had more than 100,000 intelligence personnel.
Cuba does not have that many intelligence personnel, Alarcon said, but it has more agents than the five celebrated officers now in prison. The real number, he said, "is somewhere in between."
