Cuban Five seek Supreme Court review

The struggle to free the Cuban Five entered a new stage Jan. 30 when the defense team filed a formal request—a petition for a writ of certiorari—asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decisions of lower courts that have caused these five Cuban antiterrorist heroes to be imprisoned in the United States since 1998.

The 50-page legal petition highlights international support for the Five and the widespread recognition that extreme injustice and bias led to their prosecution and imprisonment.

During the next few months the Supreme Court will decide whether or not to hear the arguments in the case. Only a few cases are selected for review each year.

The solidarity movement in the U.S. will need to expand public events, visibility and publicity on this important struggle. The Cuban Five are well known around the world, but the U.S. media has only begun to make their case as widely known in the U.S.

Major unions in the U.S. recognize the injustice, including Longshore and Warehouse Local 10 and the Service Employees, opening the door for reaching workers.

CNN covered the Jan. 30 filing, saying: “As the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the U.N. Human Rights Commission concluded, the ‘climate of bias and prejudice against the accused’ was so extreme that the proceedings failed to meet the ‘objectivity and impartiality that is required in order to conform to the standards of a fair trial’ and ‘confer[red] an arbitrary character on the deprivation of liberty.’

“Dozens of organizations and individuals around the world—including, for example, numerous Nobel Laureates, national parliaments, and parliamentary committees on human rights—harshly criticized the proceedings. ... No criminal trial in modern American history has been condemned in such a fashion.”

Central to the appeal is the constitutionally protected right to a fair trial by an impartial jury, especially in the electronic age. The three major points in the petition on behalf of the Five are: that a request was denied to move the trial from Miami, a center of anti-Cuba activity, to Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; that the prosecution was not required to explain race-neutral reasons for using 63.6 percent of its peremptory challenges to eliminate jurors from the Black community, which comprises only 23 percent of Miami’s population; and finally, that Gerardo Hernández was convicted of “conspiracy to commit murder” despite the absence of any actual evidence to support such a grave charge, for which the district court sentenced him to life in prison. The prosecution’s use of a large percentage of peremptory challenges points to purposely eliminating Black jurors solely based on their race.

Although the court briefs do not directly address this issue, the heart of this case lies in the 50-year-long war waged by the U.S. to recolonize Cuba and Cuba’s right to self-defense against imperialist domination. Sometimes this war is overt, like the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion and the cruel trade and travel blockade, but it has also been covert—involving germ warfare, hotel bombings and many attempted assassinations of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. This U.S.-bankrolled war has cost the lives of more than 3,000 Cubans, as well as other nationals.

Notorious agents of the CIA’s “dirty wars” in Latin America like Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch walk freely today in Miami. This is why the Cuban Five—Gerardo Hernández, René González, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino and Fernando González—came to Florida to quietly monitor the paramilitary forces plotting violence against Cuba.

Three of the Five had volunteered to fight racist apartheid in South Africa as part of Cuba’s international brigades to Angola during the 1970s and 1980s. They are human examples of the Cuban Revolution itself, incarcerated right here inside the crumbling imperialist citadel. For 10 years they have been separated in five different U.S. federal prisons. Visitation by family members is made difficult or denied outright by the U.S. government. Nevertheless, as is widely said in Cuba, “¡Volveran!” They shall return!