in Cuba, Wayne S. Smith, who headed the U.S. Interests Section.

It would be good to emphasize this important area from the statement:

Lack of Evidence

In addition to the biased atmosphere in which the trial was held, prosecutors could present no evidence that the five had engaged in espionage or any other crime, other than being the unregistered agents of a foreign power. And so, the prosecution simply went back to the time-worn ploy of charging them with “conspiracy” to commit illegal acts. Under existing prosecutorial practices, one is often charged with “conspiracy” to commit a given act when the government has no evidence that the act was committed by the accused. That was certainly the case here. Evidence or not, all were convicted in 2001 and given long prison sentences.

Worst of all was the case of Gerardo Hernandez, who was accused of “conspiracy” to commit murder and given two consecutive life sentences – this in connection with the shootdown of the two Brothers to the Rescue planes in February of 1996, with the loss of four lives. Hernandez worked in the Brothers to the Rescue office, and the assumption was that he had given the alarm that led to the shootdown. There was absolutely no evidence of that, nor was there a grain of evidence that he knew or could have known that the government of Cuba would use lethal force against the planes, when it had never done so before. In fact, the decision to shoot the planes down was made at the highest political level in Havana while MIG planes were closing on the intruding aircraft in Cuban airspace.

Further, to find him guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, the jury had to find beyond a reasonable doubt that he had participated in a conspiracy that had as its intention the shooting down of aircraft outside Cuban airspace. A shootdown in Cuban airspace would have been a lawful act – a defense of Cuban territory. And there was no evidence of any Cuban intention to shoot down planes in international airspace. On the contrary, Cuba consistently protested planes that penetrated its territory.

In a diplomatic note of January 15, 1996, it warned the U.S. government to put a stop to these violations of its airspace. Nothing was said about flights over international territory. Why would it have said anything about them? They were perfectly legal. And subsequently, Cuba insisted that the Brothers to the Rescue planes it shot down on February 24, 1996, had been in its airspace when destroyed.

That remains its position today. How then could Hernandez have been part of a conspiracy to down planes in international airspace, when he could not have known they would be shot down at all, and there is no conceivable reason that he would intend that such a thing happen in international airspace? It bears reiteration: There is no evidence of any conspiracy on the part of Hernandez, and it defies logic that there would or could have been.