The Cuban Five:
Forbidden Heroes
Justice in Wonderland
By RICARDO
ALARCÓN de QUESADA
“Sentence first-verdict afterwards”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
This is the
second part in Ricardo Alarcón's series on the Cuban Five.
Having
been defeated on the issue of venue the outcome of the Cuban Five's
trial was predetermined. It will go strictly in accordance with the
Queen’s prophecy.
The
American media played a very important two-pronged role. Outside Miami
it was, and it continues to be, how Attorney Leonard Weinglass so aptly
described contrasting sharply with their role within Dade County, both
offering an impressive show of discipline.
The
local media not only intensively covered the case, but intervened
actively in it, as if they were part of the prosecution. The Five were
condemned by the media even before they were indicted.
Very
early in the morning on Saturday September 12th 1998, each media outlet
in Miami was talking breathlessly about the capture of some “terrible”
Cuban agents “bent to destroy the United States” (the phrase that
prosecutors love so much and will repeat time and again during the
entire process). “Spies among us” was the headline that morning.
At the same time, by the way, the Miami FBI chief was meeting with
Lincoln Díaz-Balart and Ileana Ross Lehtinen, representatives of the old
Batista gang in federal Congress.
An
unprecedented propaganda campaign was launched against five individuals
who could not defend themselves, due to the fact that they were
completely isolated from the outside world, day and night, for a year
and a half, in what is accurately described in prison jargon as the “hole”.
A media
circus has surrounded the Five since they were detained all the way
until now. But only in Miami. Elsewhere in the United States the ordeal
of the Five has only gotten silence. The rest of the country does not
know much about this case and is kept in the dark, as if everybody
accepted that Miami--that “very diverse, extremely heterogeneous
community” as described by the D.A.--belongs to another planet.
That
might have been a reasonable proposition, if it were not for some rather
embarrassing facts recently discovered. Some of the media people
involved in the Miami campaign--“journalists” and others--were paid by
the US government, were in its payroll as employees of the radio and TV
anti-Cuban propaganda machine that has cost many hundreds of millions of
US tax payer’s dollars.
Without
knowing it, Americans were forced to be very generous, indeed. There is
a long list of “journalists” from Miami who covered the entire
trial of the Five and, at the same time, were receiving juicy federal
checks (for more on the “work” of these journalist see:
www.freethefive.org).
The
Court of Appeals decision in 2005 provides also a good summary of the
propaganda campaign before and during the trial. That was one of the
reasons leading the panel “to vacate the convictions and order a new
trial”. Miami was not a place to have even the appearance of justice. As
the judges said “the evidence submitted in support of the motions for
change of venue was massive”. (Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit,
No. 01-17176, 03-11087)
Let’s
clarify something. Here we are not talking about journalists in the
sense Americans outside Miami may be thinking of. We are referring to
Miami “journalists," something quite different.
Their
role was not to report the news, but to create a climate guaranteeing
conviction. They even called for public demonstrations outside the
office of the defense counsel and harassed prospective jurors during the
pretrial phase. The Court itself expressed concern about the “tremendous
amount of requests for the voir questions in advance of their been asked,
apparently destined to inform their listeners, including members of the
venire, of the questions prior to the time they are posed to them by the
Court”.
We are
talking about a bunch of individuals who harassed the jurors, following
them, with cameras, through the streets, filming their car licenses and
showing them on TV, tracking them inside the Court building, down to the
jury room’s door, during the entire seven months trial proceedings, all
the way to the last day.
Judge
Leonard more than once protested and begged the government to stop such
a deplorable masquerade. She did that at the very beginning of the trial,
on several occasions thereafter and until the very end. To no avail. (Official
transcripts of the trial, p. 22, 23, 111, 112, 625, 14644-14646).
The
government was not interested in having a fair trial. During the jury
selection process, the prosecution was very keen to exclude the majority
of African American prospective jurors. It also excluded the three
individuals who didn’t manifest strong anti-Castro sentiments.
By that
time Elian González has been rescued but he was very much in the minds
of the jurors. As one of them said during voir dire: “I would
be concerned about the reaction that might take place … I don’t want
rioting and stuff like that to happen like what happened in the Elian
case”. Or in the words of another: “I would be a nervous wreck if you
wanted to know the truth … I would have actual fear for my own safety if
I didn’t come back with a verdict that was in agreement with the Cuban
community”.
In that
ambience of fear begun the longest trial at the moment in American
history. And the one that the big media “chose” to ignore.
Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada is president of the Cuban National
Assembly. |
