Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  As we fumed companionably about this latest Bush aberration one of my friends remarked, ‘We surely have an ally in the State Department! Some guy who tells him what to say to bring dissidents back on side.’

  We also fumed about Washington’s recent refusal to permit an MEP delegation to visit the Miami Five, a decision described by Willy Meyer MEP as ‘a violation of basic principles of justice’ and excused on the grounds that the Europeans did not know the Five before their imprisonment. These men’s ordeal had been often discussed during my Cuban journeys but I postponed outlining their case to this final chapter, hoping that by then they might have been released. Gerardo, Ramón, Antonio, Fernando, René – those names, accompanied by photographs large or small, are seen everywhere, from the foyers of luxury hotels to the gable ends of rural sheds, from garlanded wayside monuments to barrio façades and tienda check-out desks. Moreover, every Cuban seems familiar with the Five’s family backgrounds and in 2007 a best-selling book of their collected letters and poems was published in Havana.

  Between 1990 and 2007 numerous US citizens funded and organised, from US territory, fifty-six major acts of violence against Cuba. These included shelling new tourist hotels from off-shore ‘fishing-boats’, planting a bomb in José Martí airport and attacking Viazul buses. When Cuban protests to the US and the UN were consistently ignored, Havana’s Ministry of the Interior deployed the Five to infiltrate the relevant gangs in Miami, as a safeguard against future attacks. Leonard Weinglass, the Five’s lead attorney, had repeatedly made clear that ‘By US law, no US citizen can take up arms against another country. And the classic definition of terrorism is: attacks directed against civilians to change policy’. Every country is entitled to use anti-terrorist agents to protect the homeland and the Five were breaking US federal laws only by failing to register as foreign agents (impractical, in the circumstances) and using false names – comparatively minor offences.

  A MinInt statement explains:

  In the face of increased terrorist activities during the ’90s, in an endeavour to work jointly against this scourge, we provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation with detailed information about violent plots being hatched in Miami, together with video and audio tapes, and in-depth personal information related to the organisers of these criminal activities. Our Report did not state, although it was obvious, that the only way of obtaining this information was via infiltration of these terrorist groups. The political response of the US government was not long in coming. Only three months after our meeting, on 12 September 1998, during an FBI operation carried out at dawn, Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo, Ramón Labañino Salazar, Antonio Guerrero Rodriguez, Fernando González Llort and René González Sehwerert were arrested in their homes.

  Four days later the Five were accused of ‘conspiracy to commit espionage’. A second conspiracy charge involved only Gerardo, who had successfully infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue. Allegedly he had conspired with Cuban air force officers to shoot down two Cessna aircraft belonging to this group, killing four Cuban-Americans. Brothers to the Rescue had been founded in 1991 by José Basulto, a Bay of Pigs veteran, to help the minority of balseros (rafters) who capsised while illegally crossing the Florida Straits in defiance of the US Attorney-General’s instructions. These Cessnas often entered airspace to scatter seditious leaflets and in July 1995 Granma published a warning:

  Any vessel coming from abroad, which forcefully invades our sovereign waters, could be sunk; and any plane shot down … The responsibility for whatever happens will fall, exclusively, on those who encourage, plan, execute, or tolerate these acts of piracy.

  Richard Gott records:

  The Miami pilots ignored the warning … When they again entered Cuban air space in February 1996 the Cuban air force took action. Two out of three Cessnas were shot down after several warnings had been issued … American opinion was affronted by this drastic action, and the incident caused such commotion that President Clinton felt obliged to sign the Helms-Burton bill into law. This was an historic and fateful step … Any possibility that Clinton, or some future President, might order the lifting of economic sanctions now evaporated, to the irritation of America’s trading partners, notably in the European Union, and of the farmers and manufacturers within the US who hoped for eventual access to the Cuban market. The EU took vigorous steps to oppose the legislation, perceiving it as a clear violation of international law …

  The Five’s case spawned many more violations of both US and international law. They did not resist arrest, were unarmed, had never been involved in damage to property or disturbances of any kind and were well regarded by their neighbours and workmates. Yet they were not allowed to apply for bail and spent seventeen months while awaiting trial in solitary confinement in cells reserved for ‘dangerous prisoners’ in maximum security jails hundreds of miles apart.

  On the first day of their trial in a Miami court the Five readily identified themselves as agents of the Cuban state and Professor Lisandro Perez, Director of the Cuba Research Institute in the International University of Florida, observed, ‘The possibility of selecting twelve citizens from Miami Dade county that would be impartial in a case like this that includes recognised Cuban government agents is practically zero’. Illustrating this point, the then South Florida District Attorney, Guy Lewis, insisted in a Miami Herald article (18 August 2000) that the Five ‘had vowed to destroy the US’.

  To prove the crime of espionage the law requires the acquisition of ‘national defence information’. As expert witness, the Five’s defence presented three high-ranking retired US officials, one of whom, Major-General Edward Atkinson, former Director of the CIA’s military intelligence, closely examined over twenty thousand pages of correspondence between the accused and MinInt. He found no instruction for the Five to seek classified information or take any action that would be harmful to the US.

  Another witness for the defence, Debbie McMullen, investigator in the Office of the Public Defender, testified to ‘finding boats in the Miami River being prepared to take explosives to Cuba and the proposal of the accused Gerardo Hernández to pass on that information to the FBI via an anonymous telephone call’.

  At the end of an almost seven-month trial, during which the jury heard seventy-four witnesses, they deliberated only briefly and submitted not one query before unanimously finding the Five guilty on all counts. This included finding Gerardo guilty of first-degree murder which intensified the procedure’s aura of unreality; the prosecution, reckoning that that case ‘presents an insurmountable hurdle for the US’, had long since applied to withdraw the infamous Charge Three. Six months later (why so long?) Judge Joan A. Leonard imposed three life sentences – which in the US means life – and gave the others nineteen and fifteen years.

  Five years later (long years, for the Five in their maximum security jails) the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta at last handed down its verdict – a ninety-three-page document. That panel of three judges reversed the Miami courts’ convictions, already declared illegal by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions of the Human Rights Commission of the UN. Speaking for the Cuban government, Ricardo Alarcon said, ‘While what took place in Miami was a charade that shames the American legal system Atlanta produced an example of professional ethics and rigour that goes beyond the bounds of the normal appeals process, to demonstrate the innocence of the five accused and expose the colossal injustice to which they fell victim.’

  Although the Five had now been pronounced free men, against whom no legal sanction remained, they were not released. Soon Ricardo Alarcon was protesting bitterly, ‘They are five kidnap victims of an administration that rides roughshod over the law everywhere. Not just in Abu Grahib and Guantanamo – within US territory as well.’

  A few weeks later, on 30 August 2005, more than one thousand five hundred internationally respected philosophers, writers, artists and musicians, including six Nobel laureates, wrote an open letter to the then US Attorney General, Alberto
Gonzalez. It ended:

  For the past seven years, these five young men have been held incommunicado in isolated cells for long periods of time and two of them have been denied the right to receive family visits … Considering the nullification of their sentences, nothing justifies their incarceration. This arbitrary situation which is extremely painful for them and their families cannot be allowed to continue. We, who have signed below, are demanding their immediate liberation.

  Neither the three Atlanta judges nor all those distinguished sympathisers could influence the Five’s enemies. A year later, on 9 August 2006, a majority of the full Atlanta Appeals Court of twelve judges ruled against the 2005 revocation, reinstated the Miami sentences, denied the Five a new trial and ordered the case back to the original three-judge panel for ‘a consideration of nine outstanding issues’.

  For how many more years must the Five remain ‘kidnap victims’?

  Even when the sea is boisterous groups of youths dive off the Malecón wall through dense spray – an apparently hazardous frolic but those lads know their shoreline. I paused to watch one group, including three girls who didn’t dive, as they laughed and shouted while being tossed about in the heaving, seething water. Emerging unscathed on to those sharp volcanic rocks, when the waves are so bullying, demands a special skill. In our overprotective world most youngsters have no chance to develop such skills in a natural setting.

  By midday on 1 November the sea was wilder than ever I’d seen it, a gusty force nine gale flinging the spray forty feet high. The Malecón was deserted, except for two young men standing on the wall, supporting each other, being showered. I first saw them at a little distance and as I drew closer another soaring fountain of spray enveloped them – then they were no longer visible, on wall or pavement. Immediately their disappearance was noticed by a policeman outside the Hotel Nacional on its high bluff directly above.

  Within five minutes two ambulances had arrived, closely followed by a van marked ‘Bombaderos’ from which jumped four Navy divers in full kit. As they plunged into the tumultuous Atlantic a fire brigade arrived and hoisted two long ladders over the wall. Then a tiny lifeboat emerged from the port, looking futile as it rode the waves.

  Meanwhile a small crowd had gathered, excited in a subdued way as such crowds tend to be. But the mood changed to shared anxiety when two parents joined us, a mother and a father of those reckless young men. Anxiety became grief as an hour became two hours. Eventually we saw that gallant little lifeboat returning to the distant port. Both bodies had been found, so injured by those jagged rocks that no attempt to swim would have been possible. An ambulance drove the parents to the lifeboat’s berth.

  All that afternoon the sun shone strongly between tropical downpours and once I sheltered on the café-terrace of the venerable Hotel Inglaterra, overlooking Parque Central. To celebrate this first visit to a Havana tourist hotel I decided to sample its cuisine and from a limited menu chose a ham and cheese sandwich. Forty minutes later an adolescent waiter placed a dinner plate in front of me; the ‘sandwich’ consisted of a stack of five slices of thick stale white bread separated by thin layers of ham and cheese (both items processed and imported) and rings of raw onion. Two ‘airline’ butter pats decorated the side of the plate. When I requested cutlery the youth looked peeved and returned after some time with a plastic fork wrapped in a square of loo paper. The young Austrian woman at the next table was not enjoying her anonymous jam imported from Spain. We agreed that these repellent foreign foods (part of inward investment deals) do a lot to maintain Cuba’s reputation as a gourmet’s hell. By then the sun was shining and in the park I could see an ancient man washing a sackful of plastic bottles in the fountain. Two days previously I had watched him collecting those bottles from amidst the litter thrown across the Malecón by the storm.

  Helena from Vienna, a regular visitor to Cuba, was upset by Havana’s increasingly obvious and persistent beggars. Victims of the bureaucracy, I suggested; having failed to cope with it they had become non-persons, probably through no fault of their own. For instance, that unfortunate widow in Santa Clara, who couldn’t get a change-of-residence-permit, might find herself destitute were she to move illegally to live with her daughter. But why, wondered Helena, were officials not rounding such people up and returning them to whatever bureaucratic box they had fallen out of? Blatant begging contradicts what visitors expect of Fidel’s Cuba. I reminded her that we were now living in Raul’s Cuba, a not-so-subtly different place as several of my friends had pointed out since my return to the capital.

  Overnight the wind dropped and Pedro sadistically informed me that my last three days would be ‘calm, humid and all sunshine’.

  Emerging from No. 403 at daybreak I saw at the far end of San Rafael a puzzling wall of white fog, luminous and thick. Soon I had identified it as an anti-mosquito chemical, being sprayed from two gigantic cylinders on the back of a rickety little truck, one of several that all morning moved at slow walking speed throughout Havana. This deadly vapour seemed to rasp at one’s nose, throat and lungs but the habaneros consider such temporary (we hope) discomfort much preferable to haemorrhagic dengue fever – otherwise known as break-bone fever, so agonising are its symptoms.

  This virus, usually transmitted by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, is mainly confined to the indigenous populations of south-east Asia. However, since 1997 the non-haemorrhagic virus (common in tropical and sub-tropical regions and rarely a killer) has been spreading in the Western hemisphere, especially in Brazil and Cuba.

  Haemorrhagic dengue first arrived in Cuba in 1981, appearing simultaneously in three regions about two hundred miles apart, to the epidemiologists’ bewilderment. None of the countries with which the international brigades were then involved is a source of this virus. It spread quickly; more than three hundred and forty-four thousand sufferers over-crowded the hospitals and the US Treasury, loyal as ever to the embargo, delayed export permits of the specific insecticide so urgently needed. Yet only one hundred and fifty-eight died, of whom one hundred and one were children. In 1984 the epidemiologists’ curiosity was satisfied when Eduardo Arocena, leader of the Cuban exile gang Omega 7, testified in New York’s Federal Court while being tried on another matter, that towards the end of 1980 a ship sailed from Florida to Cuba with:

  a mission to carry some germs to introduce them in Cuba to be used against the Soviets and against the Cuban economy, to begin what was called chemical war, which later on produced results which were not what we expected, because we thought it was going to be used against the Soviet forces, and it was used against our own people, and with that we did not agree.

  Evidently Arocena had some futuristic vision of genetically modified mosquitoes designed to bite Soviets only. Incidentally, Omega 7, based in Union City, New Jersey, was described by the FBI in 1980 as ‘the most dangerous terrorist organisation in the US’.

  New York’s Federal Court may have been surprised by Arocena’s confession but Science readers were not. According to that magazine, haemorrhagic dengue had been studied since 1967 at the US government centre in Fort Detrick, Maryland, being listed ‘among those diseases regarded as potential biological warfare agents’. And where better than Cuba to do a test run?

  In 1971 terrorists obtained from the CIA the African swine fever virus and within six weeks half a million Cuban pigs had to be slaughtered to prevent an island-wide epidemic. This was the Western hemisphere’s first African swine fever infection and the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN ranked it a ‘the most alarming event of the agricultural year’. Small wonder if some Cuban officials remain paranoid to this day about dissidents’ potential.

  To say ‘adios’ to good friends I spent three days criss-crossing humid Havana – prudently, by bicitaxi. (A melancholy mission: we were unlikely to meet again.) Those concentrated conversations – some starting at 8.00 a.m., some ending at 1.00 a.m. – made me acutely aware of witnessing history: Cuba on the cusp. My contacts, though numerically lim
ited, represented various social layers, from the sporadically employed victims of industrial collapse to the tourism-connected resurgent bourgeoisie to the securely employed but impoverished intelligentsia. Predictable hopes and fears were expressed, varying with an individual’s circumstances, but everyone was quietly proud of the smooth transfer of power in August 2006, seen as a reassuring measure of national stability.

  By then Raúl and his team had been in charge for fifteen months yet Fidel remained very much present, continuing to communicate through his Granma essays – still being read by many, pace certain outside observers. There was a general expectation that after the Assembly elections in February 2008 Cuba would have its second President Castro, as has happened. No one mentioned faction fighting within the government but a few hinted that unity could fracture as preparations were being made for the Sixth Party Congress in 2009. This might well be a healthy development, said my dissident friends. It would surely make more space for the sort of discussions of public grievances that Raúl had begun tentatively to encourage. Perhaps then my friends could publish the polemical journal for which socialist foreign friends had recently offered them funding.

  Unlike Juan in Camaguey, all those habaneros were uncritical of the reforms being promoted or mooted by their Acting President. Yet a few of the more outspoken doubted his dexterity – could he carry them through without conceding that pure Castroism simply wouldn’t work in the hostile global environment of the twenty-first century? He is reputed to be an adroit string-puller behind the scenes but leading a nation towards drastic modifications requires another sort of talent. It was generally agreed that in any event major reforms should happen gradually – and not only to avoid upsetting Fidel. As one young man pointed out, most Cubans have no memory of another way of being. Castroism has formed their world and however impatient some may be for change everyone will need time to adjust to socialism remoulded.