The case of The Five
In the 1990s, short for Federal Bureau of Investigation according to ABBREVIATIONFINDER, FBI prioritized counterintelligence work against a vast and alleged Cuban espionage in Miami. One of the reasons is the embarrassment suffered by the complaints of agents Orión, Fraile, Olga, Félix and Julito, about the increase in anti-Cuban terrorist activities from Miami, which involved the CANF, the Ex Club, the CID and other organizations extremists located in the Florida city, under the protection of the CIA and the FBI.
To fulfill the role of promoting a media campaign against alleged Cuban spies in Florida, CANF gangsters turned to Héctor Pesquera. Pesquera led to the capture of Red Avispa despite the reluctance of the then Attorney General, Janet Reno, to do so, knowing that there were no strong grounds to develop the espionage plot that Pesquera set up. Such was his stubbornness in persecuting the Cuban agents that he neglected the Islamic groups settled in Florida that, later, would be directly involved in the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, on September 11, 2001.
In June 1998, the Cuban authorities had delivered to a mission of important specialists from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) voluminous files and recordings, in audio and video cassettes, on the terrorist plans of the anti-Cuban groups based in Miami. They promised to respond to the evidence presented by Cuba. [16]
The first anti-Cuban action of the new head of the FBI in Miami was the capture of the members of the so-called Wasp Network, at 5 a.m. on September 12, 1998, an action that he communicated prior to his execution to his benefactors in the Florida city, Ileana Ros Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz Balart (son of the anti – Cuban terrorist Rafael Díaz-Balart), as well as presumably one of the CANF chiefs.
The Cuban antiterrorist fighters Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez, Fernando González Llort, Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, Ramón Labañino Salazarand René Gonzalez Sehwerert are known as The Five
Since then, four Cubans have been held unjust, humiliating and harsh in prison, which has included 17 months and 48 days of solitary confinement in punishment cells, without having committed indiscipline. Another of them is serving an unjust detention in the United States on supervised release, after serving a sentence in prison.
After 12 years of embarrassing events staged by the FBI, DIA officials such as Chris Simmons and other alleged experts in Cuban espionage, speculated on the so-called Wasp Network.
According to Simmons, for example, the Wasp Network had 27 agents, while FBI sources in Miami maintain that the number of its members was between 13 and 16 members. The truth is that 10 people were captured with a spectacular assembly of forces in the early morning of September 12, 1998. They were immediately taken to the FBI Headquarters in Miami, where they were pressured with a view to folding into the assembly of alleged activity of espionage prepared by Pesquera. Some time later they were transferred to the Federal Detention Center, located in Downtown Miami.
Psychological pressure, crude blackmail and all kinds of threats took effect on five of the detainees: Alejandro Alonso, Linda Hernández, Nilo Hernández Mederos, José Santos Cecilia and Amarylis Silverio García de Santos, who lent themselves to Pesquera’s game of trying to build a case of espionage at all costs, even having to fabricate all kinds of hoaxes and improbable accusations. The award for the betrayal committed by these people, not only for cooperating with the FBI and the Prosecutor’s Office, recognizing as valid many of the chimerical accusations, but also for favoring the false accusations against their colleagues, sanctions were reduced and being graced by the Program Witness Protection after serving their brief sentences.
Another group of those arrested, made up of René González Sehwerert, Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez, Manuel Viramontes (Gerardo Hernández Nordelo), Luis Medina (Ramón Labañino Salazar) and Rubén Campa (Fernando González Llort), with total integrity and dignity, refused to cooperate with the FBI and the false accusations they had to accept in exchange for a dishonorable deal.
Olga Salanueva, René’s wife, was also accused of belonging to the cell under the pseudonym of Ida, without being able to prove her real participation in it. The same happened with Adriana Pérez O’Connor, Gerardo’s wife, who was accused of being the Bonsai agent and of acting in Miami with a false identity. Such improbable arguments serve as a dubious basis to prevent them from visiting their husbands in prison for all these years.
Once the FBI and the government moved all the necessary springs to mount a media show destined to demonize the Cuban “spies”, with the full support of the intolerant Ileana Ros Lehtinen and the Díaz Balart brothers, as well as the main drug lords of Mafia and terrorist groups in Florida, on October 2, 1998 the case was filed before a Federal Jury, falsely accusing them of the crimes of “committing acts of espionage, conspiracy, conspiracy to commit acts of espionage and being a foreign agent”.
The Five were subjected to a rigged trial in a city full of animosity against them and on the basis of fabricated accusations and in violation of the Constitution of the United States.
