[NYTr] Cuban 5: Chicago - Home town boy makes good

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[sent by Jane Franklin.  The Court of Appeals hearing is tomorrow,
August 20, 2007. -NYTr]

Chicago Tribune - Aug 19, 2007
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-cuba5_martinezaug19,1,660431.story

Chicago-born spy remains hero in Cuba  As Rene 

Gonzalez and four others appeal their 2001 U.S. convictions this week,
kin  and countrymen rally behind 'terrorism fighters'

By Michael Martinez
HAVANA

One of Cuba's most celebrated spies was born in a flat along Chicago's
bustling Ashland Avenue in 1956.

Back then, Rene Gonzalez, now in a Florida prison cell, was just like
any  other kid on the North Side, enjoying outings at the lake, Lincoln
Park Zoo  and the bygone Riverview amusement park, his mother recalled
in an interview  last week in Havana.

But after his parents returned home to Cuba in 1961 to join Fidel
Castro's  young communist nation, Gonzalez grew up to become a Cuban
agent. He  eventually worked in an intelligence ring called the Wasp
Network, which  U.S. authorities accused of entering the U.S. and
spying on an American  naval base in Key West and militant anti-Castro
groups in Miami -- with  deadly results.

On Monday, Gonzalez and four imprisoned comrades will challenge their
2001  spying convictions in a federal appeals court in Atlanta. They
will argue  that a prosecutor's arguments to the jury constituted
misconduct, that their  convictions were based on insufficient evidence
and that their sentences  exceeded federal guidelines.

In Cuba, the incarceration of the "Cuban 5" or "Los Cinco" --
Gonzalez,  Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labanino, Antonio Guerrero and
Fernando Gonzalez  (no relation to Rene) -- is the focus of an enormous
campaign to portray the  agents as national heroes suffering injustice
on U.S. soil. They are serving  sentences ranging from 15 years to life.

In the state-controlled Cuban media, they are called "terrorism
fighters,"  not spies.

"They will return," say billboards adorned with photos of each one,
including Rene Gonzalez, looking like a casual professor with a
salt-and-pepper goatee.

"They were fighting for the [Cuban] revolution," contended Irma
Schwerert,  Gonzalez's 69-year-old mother. "Undoubtedly, they are
political prisoners."

The five agents are lionized here for infiltrating Cuban-American
groups in  South Florida that Cuban officials say were intent on
terrorizing the island  in the 1990s, when tourism was reintroduced to
replace lost subsidies from  the collapsed Soviet Union. Several Cuban
tourism centers were bombed during  that decade. The Cuban government
lodged a protest with the U.S. over what  it said were exiles financing
the bombings.

"The crowd in Miami saw an opportunity to destroy the tourism industry
and  bring Cuba to its knees," said Leonard Weinglass, a New York
attorney  representing one of the five agents. "These five came in the
early-to-the-mid-'90s from Cuba when the United States didn't respond
to the  [Cuban] protest."

One of the five agents held a civilian job at the Boca Chica Naval Air
Station in Key West, but the defendants contended they did not gather
secret  U.S. defense information, only public data, Weinglass said.
Prosecutors  dispute that claim.

All five were convicted of conspiring as unregistered Cuban agents to
spy on  the U.S., and three were convicted of conspiracy to commit
espionage. The  spy group had included five more members, but they
pleaded guilty in  exchange for cooperation and were given reduced
sentences.

Prosecutors accused Rene Gonzalez of faking defection back to the U.S.
in  1990, reclaiming his U.S. citizenship, and then working as a pilot
for two  exile groups, including one called Brothers to the Rescue. He
is serving a  15-year sentence in a Marianna, Fla., prison.

Another of the agents, Hernandez, was convicted of murder conspiracy
relating to the deaths of four members of Brothers to the Rescue after
two  of the group's U.S.-registered civilian planes were shot down by
the Cuban  military in 1996.

The spy case highlights the enmity between Castro and Cuban-Americans
in  Miami, as well as the hostility between Havana and Washington that
extends  back to the unsuccessful U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion
using Cuban  exiles in 1961.

Cuban officials charge that the prosecution and sentencing of the five
men  in a federal court in Miami was influenced by that community's
antipathy  against Castro. Cuban officials also have condemned the
United States for  what they deem as hypocrisy in fighting terrorism.

"These were persons who were in the United States monitoring Cuban
terrorist  groups in Florida," Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's
National Assembly,  said in an interview last week.

Alarcon described the sentences as "excessive" when compared with those
of  other convicted spies in the U.S. He cited a Chicago-area case in
which an  alleged spy for Saddam Hussein, Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi of
Oak Lawn, was  sentenced to 46 months in 2004 for failing to register
as a foreign agent  and committing conspiracy and perjury.

In court documents, U.S. prosecutors said the convictions against the
Cuban  agents should stand.

"What the United States proved, overwhelmingly, is that the appellants
agreed and sought to communicate, deliver and transmit non-public
national  defense information to Cuba, with reason to believe it would
be used to the  injury of the United States or to the advantage of
Cuba," R. Alexander  Acosta, the Miami-based U.S. attorney for South
Florida, wrote last  December.

Back in Havana, Schwerert and other relatives of the agents often are
feted  at state functions. In interviews, they have denounced the
sentences as  unjust and politically motivated.

Schwerert, a retired union official, said her family used to live on
the  1300 block of North Ashland Avenue, then a Polish neighborhood,
and  eventually moved to northwest Indiana for better-paying jobs.

She still has a sister and a half-dozen other relatives in Chicago;
her  mother, with whom she initially lived on the same Ashland block,
now lives  in Sarasota, Fla. Schwerert and her husband were among a
small number of  immigrants who returned to Cuba after Castro's 1959
takeover, she said.

Schwerert, who recalled sending money from Chicago to support the
Castro-led  revolution, now proudly notes that her son was born on the
same date as the  Cuban leader, Aug. 13. Gonzalez, who attended
kindergarten in Indiana, was 5  years old when the family left that
area for Cuba, but his mother said he  still can remember Chicago's
parks and cold winters.

"He was very friendly as a boy," said Schwerert, who has two other
sons  besides her imprisoned eldest. "He learned the language very
quickly."

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