The Cuban Five, also known as the Miami Five, are five Cuban intelligence officers (Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González) who were arrested in September 1998 and later convicted in Miami of conspiracy to commit espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, acting as an agent of a foreign government, and other illegal activities in the United States. The Five were in the United States to observe and infiltrate the Cuban-American groups Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue. They were part of () composed of at least 27 Cuban spies.
The Cuban government acknowledged that the five were intelligence agents in 2001, after denying it for three years. It said they were spying on Miami's Cuban exile community, not the US government. Cuba says that the men were sent to South Florida in the wake of several terrorist bombings in Havana organized by anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative.
The Five appealed their convictions, and concerns about the fairness of their trial received international attention. A three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta overturned their convictions in 2005, citing the "prejudices" of Miami's anti-Castro Cubans, but the full court later denied the five's bid for a new trial and reinstated the original convictions. In June 2009 the US Supreme Court declined to review the case. In Cuba, the Five are viewed as national heroes and portrayed as having sacrificed their liberty in the defense of their country.
René González was released from prison on October 7, 2011, having completed thirteen years of his sentence, with three years of probation in the US remaining. He was allowed to return to Cuba for his father's funeral on April 22, 2013, and a federal judge allowed him to stay there provided that he renounce his United States citizenship. Fernando González was released on February 27, 2014. The remaining members were released on December 17, 2014, in a prisoner swap with Cuba for an American intelligence officer, identified by a senior American as Rolando Sarraff Trujillo. The exchange of prisoners coincided with Cuba's release of American contractor Alan Phillip Gross, although the governments characterized the release of Gross as being unrelated to the prisoner exchange. Some observers saw these events as a first step in the easing of political relations between the United States and Cuba, known as the Cuban Thaw.
Background
In 1960s and 1970s, there were several attacks against Cuban civilians by U.S.-based exile groups such as Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), Alpha 66, and Omega 7. In a 2001 report by Cuba's Permanent Mission to the United Nations, the Cuban government cataloged 3,478 deaths as a result of "terrorism", "aggression", "acts of piracy and other actions". The events cited span the course of four decades and pertain to attacks such as the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 by men trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA-supported Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Escambray Rebellion between the government and anti-communist rebels in the Escambray Mountains (see also Operation Mongoose). As a result, the Cuban government had long sought to combat these groups. Their efforts include the use of spies sent to operate in the U.S. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other U.S. organizations had been monitoring the activities of Cuban spy suspects for more than 30 years.
History
Activities
The "Cuban Five" were Cuban intelligence officers who were part of "La Red Avispa", or Wasp Network, which the FBI dismantled with 10 arrests in 1998.
The court found that they had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based organization that flew small aircraft over the Florida straits in efforts to rescue rafters fleeing Cuba, and had on some flights intentionally violated Cuban airspace and dropped leaflets. On February 24, 1996, two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were shot down by Cuban military jets in international airspace while flying away from Cuban airspace, killing four U.S. citizens aboard.
The U.S. government also accused the remaining four of lying about their identities and sending 2,000 pages of unclassified information obtained from U.S. military bases to Cuba. The network received clandestine communications from Cuba via the Cuban Atención numbers station.