[NYTr] CBS News: Cuban 5 - "Heroes Await Their Fate"

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[And who do they begin with? Jose Basulto, of course, from Brothers to
the Rescue -- as if the 1996 shoot-down of the planes that violated
Cuban airspace, in blatant violation of international law and the USA's
alleged policy under the Clinton Administration, had anything to do
with the Cuban 5. It only does in the USA's fevered imagination -- and
the trumped-up charges of "conspiracy to commit murder" under which two
of the five are serving life sentences!  They are also called "the
spies" here repeatedly, although they were convicted not of espionage
but, again, of conspiracy to commit espionage. -NYTr]

CBS Video - Sep 3, 2007
"Cuban 'Spies' Await Ruling"
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3229372n


CBS News - Sep 3, 2007
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/03/eveningnews/printable3229234.shtml


"Five Heroes" from Cuba Await Their Fate

MIAMI, Sept. 3, 2007(CBS) The memories are 11 years old, but still make
Jose Basulto red with anger.

The Cuban exile was flying a private plane toward Cuba in February 1996
when he saw a flash and smoke, reports CBS News correspondent Kelly
Cobiella.

Cuban fighter pilots shot down two other private planes flying
alongside Basulto, killing four of his friends.

They had been on a mission with Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile
group, which had been flying missions into Cuban airspace to drop
anti-Castro leaflets over Havana. Basulto didn't know it at the time,
but his group had been infiltrated by Cuban spies.

"They are all murderers!" Jose says

In 1998, the U.S. government charged and convicted the spies - for
infiltrating the Cuban exile groups, and attempting to steal U.S.
military secrets.

The spies are appealing their conviction on the basis it was impossible
to get a fair trial in Miami, where hating Fidel Castro is practically
a pastime - and sometimes has escalated into real violence against
Cuba. The Cuban government says these men were only protecting their
country against exiles who posed a threat.

Militant Cuban exile groups were openly training in south Florida in
the 1990's. Cuban exiles had been linked to a string of hotel bombings
in Cuba.

In Cuba, the spies are known as the "Five Heroes," wrongfully
imprisoned. Meanwhile, the man Havana considers responsible for the
worst of terrorism in Cuba, Luis Posada Carriles, is a free man living
legally in Miami. Posada is accused of bombing a Cuban airliner in
1976, killing 73 passengers. To Cubans, he's a symbol of U.S. hypocrisy
in the war on terror.

"This is a festering injustice," says Leonard Weinglass, who represents
one of the five, Antonio Guerrero, in the appeal to have the
convictions overturned.

"I think we absolutely can win this trial in any venue in the United
States outside of Miami," Weinglass says.

"We didn't attack anybody. We didn't use violence. We didn't use war,"
says Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly. "We
just used what is referred now in America as 'human intelligence.'"

The exile community calls the cuban five killers. The cuban government
says the U.S. would not hesitate to shoot down any plane that invaded
america's airspace.

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