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The
Untold Story of the Cuban Five (Part II)
By Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada —
President of the National Assembly of People’s Power
“Sentence first-verdict afterwards”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis
Carroll
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 them
being 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, pp.
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 began the longest trial to
date in American history. And the one that the big
media “chose” to ignore. |
