The poll results would confirm Norberto Fuentes’s opinions about the prevailing atmosphere in Miami. It was only in March 2000—one and a half years after the five Cubans were imprisoned—that the results of the survey measuring the degree of animosity in the city’s population towards the Cuban Revolution and the five prisoners arrived on Judge Lenard’s desk. Coordinated by the American demographer Gary Moran, professor at Florida International University, the poll showed that half of Miami’s Cuban population was in favor of a military attack by the United States to bring down the Cuban government, while 74 percent supported the armed actions waged against Cuba by Florida’s anti-Castroist organizations. Repeated among the Cuban Americans of Broward County, forty kilometers from Miami, the survey came up with some very different responses. In this part of Florida, two-thirds of the interviewees replied they were against any violent action against Cuba, either by the American government or by the exiles in Florida. Fort Lauderdale, the county seat for Broward County, was precisely where the defense lawyers had moved to transfer the trial. The statistics were delivered to the court accompanied by an opinion issued by the Cuban-American anthroplogist Lisandro Pérez, a professor at Florida International University, exiled in Florida since 1970. “Even if the jury were composed entirely of non-Cubans,” the academic stated, “the possibility of selecting twelve citizens of Miami-Dade County who can be impartial in a case involving acknowledged agents of the Cuban government is virtually zero.”
The study was promptly rejected by the prosecution. Disregarding both the research and expert opinions, the government prosecutors asked the court to reject the motion for a change of venue. Miami “is an extremely heterogeneous, diverse and politically non-monolithic metropolitan area,” argued the counterplea. “This is not a backwater, but a city immune from the influences that could preclude a fair trial.” These arguments seem to have been sufficient for the judge, who on July 27 dismissed the motion for the change of venue. It was the second defeat for the defense before the trial had even begun. Months earlier Lenard had denied a petition by the lawyers requesting bail arbitration so that the accused could remain at liberty during the judicial process. New petitions and objections on both sides delayed the start of the proceedings, which finally got under way during the second week of November, more than two years after the arrests.
The first five days of the court’s work were taken up with the monotonous selection of the twelve members of the jury who would decide the fate of the Cuban agents. Of the list of seventy-two names put forward by the District Court, thirty asked to be excused on grounds of health, for family or professional reasons, or for being less than impartial. Of these last, two had done business with José Basulto, leader of the Brothers to the Rescue, one was acquainted with the family of the pilot Mario de la Peña, killed in the attack by Cuban MiGs, and two were friends of Silvia Iriondo, the anti-Castroist militant who was on the plane with Basulto when the Cessnas were shot down. Another two were excused because they knew the journalist Hank Tester, from the NBC television network, summoned as a witness for the prosecution. Tester had taken part in countless flights carried out by the Democracy Movement, some of which were piloted by the now accused René González. Of the forty-two remaining candidates, seventeen were vetoed by the defense and thirteen by the prosecution, leaving at last the twelve jurors—six men and six women, seven of whom were caucasian and five of Hispanic origin. Once the selection process was complete, Lenard decreed a two-week recess, after which the trial would commence.
The thermometer marked 64°F, a glacial temperature by Miami standards, when the doors to the court were opened on the morning of November 27, 2000. In spite of the cold, groups of demonstrators had been gathering in front of the building since early morning, carrying banners and posters with slogans for and against the accused. Separated from each other by uniformed marshals were the two opposing groups: on one side the anti-Castroist militants and the families of the four pilots killed in 1996, who wore mourning attire; on the other, in smaller numbers but equally vociferous, the activists of the Alianza Martiana led by the excited Max Lesnik. Prohibited from taking pictures inside the courtroom, photographers and cameramen were interviewing demonstrators and any high-profile personalities.
At nine o’clock sharp, the occupants of the packed courtroom on the twelfth floor of the district court stood up for Judge Joan Lenard. All seventy seats in the public area were taken, twenty of them by journalists. Dressed in a black robe, the judge spent the first forty minutes explaining what the trial calendar would be. Court sessions would be daily, from Monday to Friday, beginning at nine in the morning, with a fifteen-minute coffee break, and at one o’clock they would adjourn for lunch. Sessions would begin again at three in the afternoon and finish at six. It was just before ten o’clock when Lenard declared open the first session of the judicial proceedings known as “The United States of America versus Rubén Campa and others,” or Criminal Case 98-CR-721-Lenard. The twelve jurors were called in and sat down in the two rows of seats perpendicular to the judge’s desk and to the auditorium. Next came the ten prisoners. The presence of the five Cubans who had made a plea bargain fulfilled a mere legal formality. Transformed from defendants into “witness collaborators,” they had already been given minimum sentences, with no need for the jury’s opinion. With the time spent in prison deducted, months later they would be pardoned and released, entering the American Justice Department’s witness protection program.
As in their first appearance two years and two months earlier, the accused were wearing orange denim clothes and cotton sneakers. On the judge’s order the marshals removed the handcuffs and chains that bound their hands and feet. And also as in 1998, only two of the accused saw family members among the public: Maggie Becker, Tony Guerrero’s partner, and Roberto González, René’s younger brother, were there. Thanks to his American citizenship and status as a lawyer, Roberto had moved from his home in Havana to Miami, and managed to register himself as an assistant not only to Phil Horowitz, René’s defense counsel, but to all the other attorneys as well. Ten years later, in the Cuban capital, Roberto would remember the tight spots he’d been in when he started work in the United States. “Apart from encountering a legal system with which I was completely unfamiliar, I could hardly speak English,” the lawyer would recall, puffing on a strong Popular cigarette. “As time went by, however, it became just as easy to read legal texts as a menu in a restaurant.” Even so, the first task he and his American colleagues faced was to peruse the almost 10,000 pages of the indictment. The confidential nature of most of these papers led Lenard to prohibit any prosecution document being taken out of the court, which obliged the defense attorneys to work in a small room in the basement of the building—a “lugubrious” place according to Paul McKenna, Gerardo Hernández’s lawyer—and always under the watchful eye of the marshals.
Soon after proceedings got under way, and even before the indictment was presented, the audience witnessed a demonstration of the climate of intolerance revealed in Gary Moran’s research. With the consent of the judge, Paul McKenna, an American who had never been to Cuba, was forced by one of the prosecutors to declare formally that he was not a communist nor did he work secretly for Fidel Castro’s government. With that cleared up, the floor was taken by the prosecutor David Buckner to present the charges against the five Cubans who had refused the offer of a plea bargain. Buckner’s intervention took up all the remaining time of the morning session, was resumed after the lunch recess and finished only at the end of the day. Still referring to Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino and Fernando González by their code names, the prosecutor held forth on the activities of each one of the accused, highlighting that the work of the FBI had “prevented the accused just in time from obtaining secret information.” In the daily letter he would write and send to Olga by post—duly censored by the prison authorities—René recognized that Buckner had not done “a bad job,” but criticized the fact that the indictment “overstated the activities of the five and glorified the work of the FBI”; he accused the prosecution of referring to the Brothers and to the Democracy Movement as if they were “Mother Teresa of Calcutta charities.” Buckner saved the most serious novelty for the end of his exposition, when he added a fresh indictment to those that had been announced by the judge three days after the arrests. Gerardo Hernández was now formally accused of “conspiracy to commit murder” in connection with the four downed pilots. According to Buckner, papers seized by the FBI in the Cubans’ houses proved that it was Hernández who had transmitted the information to Cuba about the Brothers’ flights that made the shooting down of the Cessnas possible.
Except for a brief recess for the end-of-year vacation, the trial went on without interruption for seven months. Throughout this time the prosecution’s strategy focused on three objectives: to demonstrate that the anti-Castroist groups infiltrated by the Wasp Network were organizations of a pacifist and humanitarian nature; to prove that the Cuban agents had tried to obtain classified information by penetrating American military installations, like the naval base at Boca Chica, where Tony Guerrero was employed; and to incriminate Gerardo Hernández for the death of the four pilots. In response the defense argued that many of the exile organizations were fronts for terrorist activities against Cuba, and that the Cuban agents had never laid hands or eyes on any paper considered confidential, restricted or secret. As for the accusation against Gerardo Hernández, Paul McKenna exhibited documents captured by the FBI to prove that on February 24, 1996, when the attacks took place, the head of the Wasp Network was not even in Miami. On that day Giro was personally finalizing Operation Starlet, accompanying Juan Pablo Roque to Fort Lauderdale and Tampa so that the pilot could fly to Cancún and on to Cuba. The lawyer also pointed out that Hernández could hardly be accused of secretly sending information to Havana that was known the day before to journalists and to at least two top officials of the American government—the director of the FAA, Cecilia Capestany, and the special advisor for Cuba, Richard Nuccio. Furthermore, McKenna went on, it had been the FBI agent Oscar Montoto himself who had advised René not to fly on February 24, “because Cuba was determined to shoot down any plane that invaded its airspace.”
Half of the quota of twenty-one witnesses to which the defense had a right was taken up with American government officials, in a list that went all the way from big shots like Nuccio down to Timothy Keric, Tony Guerrero’s workmate at the Boca Chica base. The list also included Cecilia Capestany, agents from the FBI’s anti-terror squad who for years had monitored the radical Alpha 66 and Omega-7 groups, and Dalila Borrego, the employee who had suggested that Guerrero apply for a job at Boca Chica. Also called as witnesses for the defense were two generals, an admiral and a colonel from the US Armed Forces. Rodolfo Frómeta and José Basulto were also on the list. The Brothers to the Rescue leader had been called as a “hostile witness”—a term in American law for a person who is obliged to testify while being opposed to whoever proposed his name. Summoned as a witness and cited by the defense as “a member of the CANF’s clandestine military apparatus,” the notorious Ángel Alemán, the lobster fisherman, refused to appear in court, invoking the Fifth Amendment of the American Constitution, which states that “no person can be legally compelled to answer any question in any governmental proceeding if that answer could lead to that person’s prosecution.” The last three witnesses lined up by the defense were Cuban government employees: Fidel Arza, from the Institute of Civil Aeronautics, Percy Alvarado, a retired intelligence officer who in the 1980s had infiltrated the Cuban American National Foundation, and Colonel Roberto Caballero from the Ministry of the Interior, who had overseen the mercenary Raúl Ernesto Cruz León’s interrogations in prison. So that they could be heard, Judge Lenard had to authorize the journey to Havana of nine members of the defense and prosecution, accompanied by interpreters and sound technicians to record the testimonies in situ.
On the list of prosecution witnesses presented by attorneys Caroline Heck Miller, David Buckner, Guy Lewis and John Kastrenakes were nine FBI agents who had taken part in the operation to dismantle the Wasp Network, three leaders of anti-Castroist organizations, the Cuban intelligence agent Joseph Santos, who had made a deal with the prosecution, the naval officer Bjorn Johansen and Captain Linda Hutton of the American Navy, who commanded the naval station at Boca Chica during the period that Tony Guerrero worked there. The testimony of at least two of these witnesses resulted in a setback for the prosecution. The repentant Joseph Santos, extremely nervous, became so confused answering the defense’s questions that the prosecution chose to excuse him for a few minutes after the start of questioning. And then Linda Hutton threw a wet blanket over the spying accusations against Tony Guerrero. After saying that throughout her administration the installations at the base remained open for public visits, the captain affirmed that Guerrero had never had access to information that might compromise “the defense, national security and the interests of the United States.”
Johansen’s testimony raised a subject that would provoke heated debates in court: the difference of opinion between the governments of the United States and Cuba, and by extension, between the prosecution and the defense, about the exact location of where the two Brothers planes had been shot down. As far as the Americans were concerned, the Cessnas were over international waters; the Cubans insisted that the two planes were within the twelve-mile limit of Cuban territorial waters and airspace, and had thus committed an intrusion. Although the difference between one claim and the other was a matter of meters, the argument went on for weeks. One of the prosecution’s strong cards in support of the downing in international waters thesis was the September 1999 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS. Signed by the body’s chairman, Robert Goldman, and by its vice-chairman the Brazilian Hélio Bicudo, the document found that the aircraft had been shot down in international airspace and therefore held Cuba responsible for the death of the pilots Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales, Mario de la Peña and Armando Alejandre. The basis of the OAS’s argument was a report by the ICAO, the United Nations agency that regulates air traffic standards, according to which the shooting down had happened outside Cuban air space. And the ICAO, in turn, had reached this conclusion based on the logbook of the young Bjorn Johansen, a deck officer on the liner Majesty of the Seas, the one the MiG pilots themselves had noticed below them in the Straits of Florida on the afternoon of February 24, 1996.
Testifying for the prosecution, Johansen recognized that his certainty regarding the location of the incident, which according to him took place in international waters, originated from visual observation and not from the electronic registration of the exact position of the Majesty of the Seas. Cornered by McKenna, he revealed that only on the following day had he transferred the details to the logbook from a piece of paper where he’d noted them down. He also said that between the shooting down of the Cessnas and his registering of the event in the logbook, he had been interrogated by FBI agents. Protected by objections from the prosecution which the judge accepted, the sailor and the ship’s owners refused to present to the jury either the logbook or the piece of paper he had scribbled on when the planes were shot down.
In a moment of apparent carelessness by the defense, one question was not asked: who owned the ship? A superficial check in newspaper archives and in CANF’s files would have provided the lawyers—especially McKenna, Gerardo’s defender—with a crucial piece of information. Of Norwegian origin and resident in Miami, Bjorn Johansen was an employee of Royal Caribbean Cruises, the group that owned Majesty of the Seas. And in February 1996 the number two in the company hierarchy was the American Peter G. Whelpton, an enemy of the Cuban Revolution who had never made a secret of his views. Far from it. In his official resumé, the executive vice president of Royal Caribbean (until 1999) presented himself as “an advisor to the Cuban American National Foundation’s Board of Governors” and “a Member of the Foundation’s Blue Ribbon Committee for the Reconstruction of Cuba.” In a series of articles published by the New York Times in 1995, the president of the CANF, Francisco “Pepe” Hernández, had revealed to journalist Larry Rohter that Royal Caribbean was one of forty companies that had helped finance the creation of the CANF—each company had contributed $25,000. Bjorn Johansen’s boss went further. “We want to help the Cuban community in their efforts to overthrow Castro,” affirmed the entrepreneur to Rohter, making clear his preference for CANF as the strongest group, “with whom we will be able to move forward when the time comes.” Whelpton’s implication with anti-Castroism, however, was inexplicably never investigated or brought up by the defense lawyers of the Five.
What lay behind the mobilization of the Cuban community and the pressures exerted on the court, with ample support from the local press, was an undisguised hunger for revenge, due to a family drama that had climaxed months earlier. On the morning of November 25, 1999, two fishermen had rescued a five-year-old boy clinging to an inner tube in the waters off Fort Lauderdale’s Pompano Beach. The boy, whose name was Elián González, had left Cuba three days earlier in a dinghy accompanied by his mother, Elisabeth, and twelve others. Halfway across, the fragile vessel sank, leaving three survivors hanging onto the only two inflatables brought by the group. A young couple was on one of the buoys, and on the other was Elián, whose mother had drowned along with the remaining fugitives. Elián was handed over by the American authorities to a paternal great-uncle, Lázaro González, who had gone into exile years earlier and lived in Little Havana.
The case would have been just another statistic in the long history of Cuban migration—were it not for the fact that Juan Miguel, Elián’s father back in Havana, at once asked the Cuban government to request the United States for his son’s return. On January 5, 2000, the attorney general, Janet Reno, ordered the boy’s repatriation. In defiance of the federal order, and incited by Miami’s anti-Castroist organizations, Lázaro González decided that “he would not return Elián to the tyrant Fidel Castro.” As of that moment the small wooden house where he had taken in his grand-nephew was guarded day and night by militant pickets and barricades, fearful that the government would remove the boy by force, which is what ultimately happened. On April 22, by order of Attorney General Reno, SWAT policemen armed with rifles took Elián into custody under the lights of flashbulbs and TV cameras. Juan Miguel had already arrived in Miami to reclaim his son, but Lázaro González, supported by lawyers hired by exile organizations, had succeeded in getting the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta to revoke the repatriation order. Pitched battles were fought in the streets of Little Havana between anti-Castroist groups opposed to the removal and groups linked to Max Lesnik’s Alianza Martiana, in favor of the boy’s return to Cuba. With widespread international media coverage, the tension provoked by the case led the Justice Department to place father and son under the protection of the armed forces, installing them in a house inside Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, while the wrangling continued in the courts. On June 28 the Supreme Court upheld the government’s decision and later that same day Elián and his father were greeted at Havana Airport by the Cuban president in person. The general feeling in Miami was that the exiles’ battle had been lost due to an uncommon alliance between Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton.
When the trial of the Wasp Network men began, the Elián case still rankled for the radical groups of the Cuban diaspora. This time, however, the attorney general was on their side. Janet Reno, in charge of the FBI and the Immigration Service—the two main bodies involved in the boy’s repatriation and in the imprisonment and indictment of the five Cubans—had an interest in the Cuban agents’ conviction that went beyond the call of official duty. Born in Miami, she was planning to run as the Democratic Party candidate for governor of Florida in 2002. To be blamed twice for thwarting the will of the Cuban community was certainly not the best way to win an election in that state. These factors were noted with apprehension across the Straits. Dismayed at the course the trial seemed to be taking, and faced with the prospect of Gerardo Hernández’s conviction for murder, the Cuban government decided in 2001 to reinforce the defense of the Five. So that Havana could be party to the case, however, it was necessary for Giro, Ramón and Fernando to reveal to the court their real identities, a secret that in any case was no longer justified.
A heavyweight celebrity attorney, Leonard Weinglass, was chosen for this task. The owner of an expensive and renowned New York law firm, the sixty-seven-year-old “Lenny” Weinglass had become famous as a defense attorney in some of the most controversial cases in the United States. Among his clients were the actress Jane Fonda, prosecuted by the Nixon government for making a solidarity trip to North Vietnam; the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who released the top-secret Pentagon Papers; the activist Angela Davis; the leaders of the Symbionese Liberation Army, responsible for the kidnapping of the millionairess Patricia Hearst; and the Black Panthers, the revolutionary party founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The youngest of all his clients had been nineteen-year-old Amy Carter, daughter of the former president, prosecuted in 1987 for denouncing CIA recruitment of students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before replying to Cuba’s invitation, Weinglass went to Miami to read through the entire proceedings, and decided that he would participate in defending the Five. He informed Havana that he would work pro bono, as indeed he had done in the majority of the cases cited.
The trial carried on over the following months, alternating periods of tedious stagnation, when even the defendants would doze off, with fierce verbal jousting between the prosecution and the defense, forcing Judge Lenard on repeated occasions to order short adjournments while she summoned the attorneys to the bench for consultation out of earshot of the jury and the public. When the defense described the simplicity in which the Wasp Network agents lived, even the anti-Castroist newspapers were surprised. “The life of Fidel Castro’s agents in Miami had definitely nothing to do with the glamorous world of James Bond,” wrote a reporter in the Sun-Sentinel. “None of them was like those superspies we see in the movies. Far from cocktail parties and luxury cars, they led very simple lives, on tight budgets.”
The two tensest moments of the trial, around the shooting down of the Brothers planes, were not provoked by witness testimony but by two cockpit recordings. The first was presented by the federal prosecutor, Caroline Heck Miller, and reproduced the dialogue between the control tower in Cuba and the jet fighters. Transmitted over loudspeakers, the voices of the pilots rejoicing over the destruction of the two planes in foul language echoed round the courtroom. The public and the jury’s horrified expressions were the most visible signs that the prosecution had scored a major point. The riposte would be delivered days later by Paul McKenna, Hernández’s lawyer, when he played a recording of only a few seconds but that also caused a major stir in court. It was José Basulto’s voice, letting out a resounding burst of laughter the moment he saw the plane manned by Armando Alejandre Jr. and Mario de la Peña being pulverized by the MiG’s missiles. The laughter was followed by a shout. “Fuck, let’s get out of here!” exclaimed Basulto to his three companions, as he swung the plane around towards Florida. The recording was one more piece of evidence with which McKenna aimed to show the leader of the Brothers as the true culprit for the death of the four pilots. The lawyer alleged that, intent on provoking a military incident between Cuba and the United States, Basulto had not hesitated to entice four young men on a suicide flight, saving his own skin the minute the Cuban MiGs attacked the Cessnas.
At the end of May 2001, when the trial was close to its hundredth session, all the witnesses had been heard and tense expectation surrounded the impending decision of the jury. Media with no links to the Cuban community reflected the anxiety with which the public awaited the verdict. “Months of testimony, recesses and verbal confrontations tiresomely prolonged the trial without throwing any light on the central issue,” said a dispatch from Agence France-Presse, which ended with the question: “Finally, are these people dangerous spies who tried to penetrate American military installations, or merely infiltrators of Florida’s anti-Castroist organizations?” The defense still hoped that the jurors would go for the second alternative. “The prosecution failed to prove that the accused had even tried to gain access to United States secret documents,” Fernando González’s lawyer, Joaquín Méndez, would say years later. “And came up with no evidence of any involvement of Gerardo Hernández in the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes.”
After a week of closing statements by lawyers and prosecutors, on Friday, June 8, 2001, Judge Joan Lenard summoned the foreman of the jury to pronounce their verdict. A middle-aged biologist in a suit and tie approached the microphone, took from his pants pocket a piece of paper, and read out the words that would seal the fate of the Cuban agents:
“We, the jury, unanimously find the defendants guilty as charged on all counts.”
Lenard had to press the bell and strike the table several times with her gavel to demand silence from the relatives of the dead pilots and the militant anti-Castroists who were whooping and cheering the jury’s verdict. It would now be the judge’s task to determine the sentences that would be handed down, but the commotion the case aroused in Miami would resonate for some time yet. Before closing the session, Lenard decreed a recess of six months, at the end of which she would announce her decision.
Once back in the Federal Detention Center, across the sidewalk from the court, the five Cubans decided to appeal to American public opinion. In a three-page document made public by their lawyers and entitled “Message to the People of the United States,” the agents explained the reasons why they had infiltrated the anti-Castroist organizations in Florida, and rejected the accusations of espionage and murder. “We do not regret what we did to defend our country,” they concluded, “and we declare ourselves totally innocent.” Considered a disciplinary infraction, the proclamation would be severely punished. On June 26 the Five were taken back to “the hole,” which they would leave only in December when Lenard reconvened the court to deliver her sentence.
At nine o’clock on the morning of December 11, the judge declared the sentencing hearing open. The defense team clung to a slender hope of leniency. Three months earlier to the day, the United States had been the victim of Al-Qaeda suicide attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City. Despite Judge Lenard’s severity, the lawyers recognized that she had acted with dignity throughout the proceedings. They thought it possible that she might have come around to their view, that the work undertaken in Miami by the Wasp Network was exactly the same as that being done by American agents since October 7 in the mountains of Afghanistan: identifying terrorists and preventing further attacks.
Discussions between the prosecution and defense on legal formalities took up the entire morning, affording no opportunity for Lenard to announce her decision. Among the Cubans present who had managed to get US entry visas was Irmita, as well as the mothers of Gerardo Hernández, René González, Tony Guerrero and Fernando González. When the proceedings were reopened after lunch, the judge ordered Hernández, the first defendant, to stand up, and went on to read the sheet of paper that a bailiff had put before her eyes:
“The defendant Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, also known by the alias of Manuel Viramóntez, was found guilty by the members of the jury of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida of the crimes of conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to deceive the United States, the collection and transmission of defense data, the falsification and use of identity documents, fraud and improper use of visas and entry permits to the United States and conspiracy to act as a non-registered foreign agent. For all these offenses, this court sentences him to two life terms plus fifteen years in prison.”
At that, the elderly Carmen Nordelo, Giro’s mother, who had been standing to hear the sentence, had to be propped up so as not to collapse. Meanwhile the judge rang her bell to silence the groups on the other side of the auditorium, who were celebrating the conviction with shouts of “Long live free Cuba!” Closed for a few minutes, the proceedings were reopened for the announcement of Ramón Labañino’s sentence of life imprisonment plus eighteen years. The liturgy was repeated in the following weeks for the declaration of the penalties handed down to René González, condemned to fifteen years, to Fernando González, nineteen years, and to Tony Guerrero, condemned to life. The longest and one of the most controversial trials ever to take place in Miami came to an end. After four decades of a bloody war, the Cuban community exiled in Florida had succeeded in inflicting its first defeat on Fidel Castro.