September 24, 2020 67
The Battle Over the Cuban Five
José Manuel Prieto
North of Havana:
The Untold Story of Dirty Politics,
Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial
of the Cuban Five
by Martin Garbus.
New Press, 255 pp., $26.99
On September 12, 1998, ten alleged
Cuban spies from the group known as
La Red Avispa (the Wasp Network)
were arrested in South Florida by the
FBI during an early-morning raid. They
were charged with conspiracy to commit
crimes against the United States, con-
spiracy to commit espionage, and act-
ing as unregistered agents of a foreign
government. Half of the accused coop-
erated with the district attorney’s office
and received reduced sentences. The
others—Gerardo Hernández, Ramón
Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando
González, and René González, who
came to be known as the Cuban Five—
denied the accusations. The saga of
their imprisonment, trial, and release is
the subject of North of Havana by Mar-
tin Garbus, the renowned civil rights
attorney who joined the case in 2012,
after the death of the Cuban Five’s law-
yer, Garbus’s longtime friend Leonard
Weinglass.
Fidel Castro, Cuba’s Communist
president, had sent the Wasp Network
to the US in the early 1990s for two
purposes: to monitor US Southern
Command in order to warn Cuba if the
US were planning an aerial invasion
of the island, and to infiltrate the exile
community in Miami, which was led by
anti-Communists who had fled Cuba
after Castro came to power in 1959.
This Miami community had a history
of bellicosity against the Cuban gov-
ernment, including participating in the
US-backed invasion of the Bay of Pigs
in 1961.
In the early 1990s, after the fall of
the Soviet Union, which had supported
the Communist regime in its first three
decades, Cuba experienced its great-
est economic crisis, the so-called Spe-
cial Period. Some Cuban exiles saw
an opportunity to hasten the regime’s
collapse, attempting to inspire a revo-
lution through infiltrations, bombings,
and other subversive activities on the
island. Castro, Garbus writes, felt he
“was under threat from right-wing
Cuban exiles.” Cuban intelligence
shared “much of what they learned
with American intelligence agents” in
the hope that conspirators “could be
identified—and then, if the Americans
would intervene—arrested, tried, and
jailed.” In view of the tense diplomatic
relations between the US and Cuba,
as well as the US’s previous support
of Cuban anti-Communists, there is
little reason to believe the FBI would
have diligently followed up on threats
against the Castro government.
During the Special Period, Cubans
began leaving the island in ever greater
numbers on balsas, or homemade rafts,
with hopes of reaching the United
States, where they would be guaran-
teed a legal path to residency thanks
to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. In
1991 José Basulto—a participant in the
Bay of Pigs invasion who, two decades
after the failed coup, declared himself a
supporter of Gandhi-style pacificism—
founded a group called Brothers to the
Rescue (Hermanos al Rescate). The
Brothers flew small Cessna planes over
the open sea to locate Cuban refugees.
When the Brothers spotted a balsa,
they would report it to US authorities,
who would then pick up the refugees
and bring them to the mainland. Juan
Pablo Roque and René González, two
of the Wasp Network’s agents, success-
fully infiltrated the Brothers and flew
planes for them.
At the height of the balseros crisis, in
1994, more than 37,0 0 0 people were ap -
prehended by the coast guard or border
patrol. That year, Cuba and the Clinton
administration negotiated a deal that
limited the number of visas given to
Cuban émigrés to 20,000 per year. Cu-
bans who left the island on balsas now
risked being turned back. The number
of balseros decreased, and Basulto
changed his organization’s mission:
the Brothers began dropping anti-
Castro leaflets and copies of the Uni-
versal Declaration of Human Rights
over Havana. Havana reported those
flights to US authorities, who did little
to stop them. Basulto further provoked
the Cuban government after a flight in
1995 during which he had to refuel in
Havana. He later boasted that he had
infiltrated Cuban air space, declaring
on Radio Martí, the anti-Castro broad-
casting network, “I showed the Cubanpeople I can easily go through Cuban
air defenses and I ask for their courage
now to overthrow their dictator.”
On the morning of February 24,
1996, the anniversary of José Martí’s
1895 revolution against the Spanish
colonial power, three small planes be-
longing to Brothers to the Rescue took
off from the Miami-Opa Locka air-
port. The Cuban authorities were in-
formed by American air traffic control
of their flight route. During the flight,
Basulto also informed Havana that his
plane and the others were crossing the
24th parallel and approaching Cuban
air space, and he received a warning
from the Cuban air traffic controller.
That afternoon, a pair of Cuban
MiG-29s shot down two of the Broth-
ers’ planes, piloted by the forty-five-
year-old Armando Alejandre, the
twenty-four-year-old Mario Manuel de
la Peña, the twenty-nine-year-old Car-
los Alberto Costa, and the thirty-year-
old Pablo Morales, all four of whom
were killed. All except Morales were
US citizens. According to Basulto, the
attack took place above international
waters (his claim was later supported
by the International Civil Aviation Or-
ganization), but the Cuban government
stated that the planes were well within
its territory. Basulto managed to es-
cape and return to Florida.Less than one month after the inci-
dent, Clinton, who was embarrassed
by his earlier efforts at détente with
Cuba, signed the Helms-Burton Act,
also known as the Cuban Liberty and
Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act,
which intensified the US’s trade em-
bargo on goods from the island and
signaled a clear deterioration of the
already tense relations between the
countries.The revelation of the Wasp Network
profoundly shook Miami’s Cuban com-
munity. The FBI had known about the
group’s existence since 1995 and had
secretly searched Hernández’s apart-
ment, copying more than two hundred
of his computer disks. But the US at-
torney for southern Florida didn’t
bring any charges against the spies
until 1998, when the Miami FBI came
under the control of Hector Pesquera,
a Puerto Rican special agent who was
sympathetic to anti-Castro exiles. In
May 1999, eight months after his arrest
on espionage and conspiracy charges,
Hernández was charged with conspir-
acy to commit first-degree murder by
providing the Cuban government de-
tails about Basulto’s 1996 flight.
When the trial of the five Cuban spies
began in late 2000, it aroused little in-
terest in the US press outside Miami
and was soon eclipsed by the bitter dis-
pute surrounding the balserito Elián
González, the six-year-old boy who
was taken out of waters off the Florida
coast on November 25, 1999, and whose
relatives in Miami claimed custody of
him. Elián was eventually returned to
his father in Cuba, causing profound
unrest in Miami. Garbus argues that
the turmoil was stoked by the power-
ful Cuban American National Founda-
tion and Jorge Mas Canosa, the most
influential politician of the Cuban exile
community. The furor over the Elián
González case weighed heavily in the
fate of the Cuban spies. Miami’s Cuban
population clearly wanted some kind of
revenge against Castro after Elián was
sent back.
Although Cuba and the defense
attorneys argued that the Wasp Net-
work was only instructed to gather in-
telligence on Cuban exiles, not on US
military activity, the FBI had proof
that they had also monitored military
bases in southern Florida, supporting
the charge that the network was spying
on the US itself. This much was clear
from the evidence. The trial was con-
troversial, however, for two separate
reasons: the additional charge against
Hernández relating to the deaths of the
four pilots and, more importantly, the
challenge of, as Garbus writes, “select-
ing an impartial jury in Miami.”
“There was a level of misconduct in-
volving pretrial publicity in this case
that I had never seen before,” Garbus
writes. In his opinion, news outlets
such as the Spanish-language Nuevo
Herald, under pressure from Mas and
Miami’s anti-Castro right, made a fair
trial impossible. (“During the 194-day
trial,” Garbus notes, one newspaper—
El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish counter-
part to the Miami Herald—published
806 articles advocating conviction.”)
The defense attorneys tried six timesA group of refugees, known as balseros, leaving Cuba by raft, September 1994Antonio Ribeiro /Getty Images