CUBA NEWS
March 8, 2004

CUBA NEWS
The Miami Herald

Spies will challenge their convictions

A week before lawyers appeal the convictions of five Cuban spies, allies take out a full-page New York Times ad seeking support for the imprisoned men.

By Gail Epstein Nieves and Elaine de Valle, gepstein@herald.com. Posted on Fri, Mar. 05, 2004.

Were five Cuban spies unfairly convicted in 2001 during a flawed trial in anti-Castro Miami? Or did justice prevail after the men benefited from a stalwart defense before impartial judge and jury?

Federal appeals judges will hear both sides of that argument Wednesday when lawyers for the five men return to court to challenge their convictions.

The five, admitted Cuban intelligence agents working on orders from Havana, were convicted of spying-related charges for infiltrating U.S. military facilities and anti-Castro groups.

Spymaster Gerardo Hernández also was convicted of murder conspiracy in connection with Cuba's 1996 shooting down of two Brothers to the Rescue planes -- an event that took the lives of four Brothers fliers.

The spies have been turned into national heroes in Cuba. They're also the subject of a vigorous Cuban government-sponsored campaign to sway popular opinion in their favor, both internationally and in the United States, U.S. diplomatic sources said.

Allies of the five placed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times on Wednesday urging Americans to join the call for their release. The ad was placed by the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, a San Francisco-based organization.

Gloria La Riva, the group's coordinator, did not return a reporter's phone call Thursday. But she told El Nuevo Herald last month that the organization has raised $50,000 from donors in various U.S. cities, Europe and Latin America.

MIAMI GROUPS

She said $10,000 had come from a coalition of anti-embargo, pro-normalization Miami groups -- including the Antonio Maceo Brigade, Alianza Martiana, the Association of Cuban Workers and Afro-Cuban Cultural Rescue.

Maggie Khuly -- whose brother, Armando Alejandre Jr., was one of the downed Brothers fliers -- said she fears the campaign is spreading misinformation.

''I'm concerned that people across the country and the globe are getting this one-sided view,'' she said.

But ultimately, she added, "I do believe that the U.S. justice system is not going to be swayed by the propaganda of the Cuban government.''

Next week, lawyers will take their best shot before a panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But they'll have to talk fast.

Each side -- the prosecution and all five defendants combined -- gets 15 minutes to make its case. They also filed voluminous briefs.

A lot of attention will be focused on Hernández's appeal.

ADVANCE WARNINGS

Evidence showed that his Cuban handlers sent him numerous advance warnings that a ''confrontation'' with Brothers' planes was planned and instructed him to keep fellow spies who had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue off the group's planes on particular days.

Paul McKenna, Hernández's lawyer, argues that the government failed to prove his client knew his bosses were prepared to take such drastic action.

''Hernández knew -- as did the U.S. government, U.S. citizens and the United Nations -- of the strong possibility Cuba would interdict and confront future Brothers to the Rescue flights into Cuban airspace,'' McKenna's appeal brief says.

'What the evidence failed to show was that Hernández knew of, or joined in, a conspiracy under which Cuba's reaction to Brothers' provocations would be to commit a first-degree murder,'' said the brief.

Lawmakers say Cuba spied

Uruguay's Chamber of Deputies condemns Cuba, saying one of its member's phones and e-mails were monitored.

From Herald Wire Services. Posted on Fri, Mar. 05, 2004.

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay - The Chamber of Deputies of Uruguay has denounced what it called the tapping of its telephones by the Cuban intelligence services.

In a resolution passed by a 41-36 vote late Wednesday, the lawmakers expressed "the most severe condemnation of any act committed within the national territory or from another territory toward Uruguay aimed at violating the jurisdiction of the Legislative Branch and its members.''

The vote came after Nationalist Party deputy Jaime Trobo, told the chamber that on Feb. 25, Cuban National Assembly member Lazaro Barredo, while visiting Montevideo, had said that Cuba's security services had investigated the origin and destination of several telephone calls and e-mails made by Trobo from the Chamber of Deputies in Montevideo. Barredo referred to about 15 calls from Trobo to Cuba, Miami, Puerto Rico and Spain, which, Barredo said, were made to coordinate acts against the Cuban revolution, the Spanish EFE news agency reported.

Trobo is a member of the Commission on Human Rights of the Latin American Parliament, which has been expected to take up the issue of human-rights violations in Cuba.

Barredo was in Montevideo to attend a conference of the leftist coalition Broad Front-Progressive Encounter, which has been Uruguay's majority party since November 1989.

The resolution approved said the eavesdropping was ''committed by the intelligence services of a foreign state, the Republic of Cuba, regarding telephone conversations made from the Legislative Palace,'' where the deputies meet.

''Any action that seeks to impede the free exercise of the activities of legislators and the free utilization of the means at their disposal'' constitutes a violation of the lawmakers' jurisdiction, the document said.

Seventy-seven of the 99 legislators were in the chamber for the vote, the newspaper El Pais reported. All the nay votes were cast by the leftist Broad Front bloc; the yeas by the National, Colorado and Independent parties.

Havana and Montevideo broke diplomatic relations on April 24, 2002, after Uruguay sponsored a motion at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Cuba criticizing Cuba's human-rights abuses.

President Fidel Castro then called Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle a ''bootlicker'' and a ''lackey'' of the U.S.

Anti-Castro exile sings from the heart

Unlike many of her peers, singer/songwriter Marisela Verena is an exile with an anti-Castro message

By Juan Carlos Perez Rodriguez. juanchi@bellsouth.net. Posted on Sun, Mar. 07, 2004.

For more than 30 years, Marisela Verena has steered her career along less-traveled roads, always willing to endure bumpy journeys in order to set her own direction.

She was, in the early 1970s, a fledgling singer-songwriter intent on carving out a space for herself as an artist with a nueva trova/nueva canción style and approach, at a time when many in that Latin American folk/protest genre felt contempt for Cuban exiles like herself who were unsympathetic to Fidel Castro's regime.

For years she lived in her beloved Puerto Rico, even though other places would have been better for her career.

In the early 1990s, after having built a solid career, she exiled herself from the concert stage and the recording studio for a long five years, writing for others, such as Celia Cruz and Gilberto Santa Rosa.

Throughout her career, she has eschewed flashy singing, cultivating an unadorned style to accentuate the lyrics.

''I'm satisfied because I have been able to do what I love. My career is a calling, not a profession. As a profession, this can be a bad deal,'' says the 54-year-old. "But I have a full and complete sense of personal satisfaction.''

''It's often hard to find record labels for her work, because her songs aren't mainstream commercial,'' says Miami-based entertainment businessman Pepe Horta, who was the executive producer of her 2003 album Somos los que andamos (We Are the Ones Who Move).

''My support is based on the quality of her work, not on her record sales. In that sense, I'm as suicidal as she is,'' he says, chuckling.

Of course, sometimes the commercial and the artistic feed off each other: Somos los que andamos, which includes four new songs, including the hit Nosotros los cubanos, (a send-up of Cuban hubris that nonetheless ends on a patriotic note) has been cracking the Top 60 in the Billboard Top Latin Albums chart this year. She will include songs from that album in her 90-minute performance at 4:15 p.m. today in the Sun Day on the Mile music (see Smart Box).

The daughter of an attorney active in the Cuban Liberal Party (and who thus supported neither Fulgencio Batista nor Fidel Castro), Verena left Cuba in 1962 at age 11 as part of the Pedro Pan movement.

As a young adult, she read tomes on the revolution, pro and con, reaching the conclusion at around age 20 that the Castro regime was atrocious.

The bug to become a professional singer-songwriter bit Verena when she was a university student in Miami, and, feeling the city offered little chance for her career, she moved to Puerto Rico in the early 1970s.

There she honed her craft in bohemian clubs with her own compositions and songs from nueva canción stars like Joan Manuel Serrat and Violeta Parra. Mainstream pop turned her off, and she felt an affinity with poetic, socially meaningful songs.

Making ends meet as a nueva trova/nueva canción artist was hard enough in the early '70s, even for those who fit the genre's ideological requisite of unconditional support of the Cuban Revolution. The genre wasn't a favorite of the mainstream recording industry.

But Verena faced an even steeper hill. ''Certain elements vetoed me automatically for being a Cuban exile,'' she recalls. 'They stamped a sign on my forehead that said 'despicable gusana' [exile worm] without giving me a chance.''

EXCLUDED

In Puerto Rico, Venezuela and other places, this discrimination kept her out of university festivals, excluded her from clubs and even put her at risk, such as when the Old San Juan La Tea got bomb threats for booking Verena in the early 1970s.

Undeterred, Verena built a career in Puerto Rico, expanding her reach from nightclubs to radio and television, and eventually moving to Spain in 1975, where the CBS label signed her.

Six years later she returned to Puerto Rico. ''Spain held more promise professionally, but Puerto Rico was more important because of the many friends I reconnected with.'' There, during the '80s and '90s, she released several successful albums. She began recording about Cuba in 1989, penning songs such as Son de las cuatro décadas (Song of the Four Decades) and Memorandum para un tirano (Memo to a Tyrant).

For the past two years Verena has been spending most of her time in Miami, the place for Latin music now, she says. However, she feels a lack of support from the record industry. ''Their concept of the commercial is one degree below moronic. It's degrading to the fans, who are tremendously underestimated,'' she says. "I've never been what's known out there as commercial.''

But she has been what's known out there as good. ''She has always been a first-class songwriter and a singer with a very distinct voice,'' says Juan Estévez, president of Miami-based Pimienta Records, the label that issued Somos los que andamos along with Universal Latino. "Her style is like trova mixed with Cuban son. Trova has never been very commercial, but that's her style and she does it very well.''

NO SHOWOFF

Still, Verena abstains from showing off her pipes. ''I can sing well and hold a note. But I've always been more concerned with what I'm saying. It doesn't matter that much to me if the voice breaks or tears,'' she says.

"Every time I have ever performed before an audience, that is success for me. The market side of things is a whole different story.''

Cuban singer denied visa

Last December, Varela traveled to Venezuela with Cuban superstar Silvio Rodriguez, a Castro supporter, to perform in support of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, making his fans wonder if he had sold out.

By Juan Carlos Perez Rodriguez. Special to The Herald. Posted on Sat, Mar. 06, 2004

Controversial Cuban singer/songwriter Carlos Varela has been denied a U.S. visa to enter the country to perform Wednesday at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts.

The trip would have been Varela's second visit to Miami in the past six years.

Varela's is the latest in a series of visa denials for Cuban artists who periodically perform in the United States. In the most recent cases, the State Department told The Herald it had reversed its earlier people-to-people policy, in which artists' visas were granted, because it did not want money going into Fidel Castro's coffers.

''I'm deeply saddened and outraged,'' said Beth Boone, artistic and executive director of the Miami Light Project, a nonprofit cultural institution that was assisting concert promoter Cubart. She added that Cubart was expecting to fill the 1,700-seat Gusman.

Cubart was notified of the government's decision at mid-day Friday by the attorney trying to secure visas for Varela and his band. The government didn't give a reason for its visa decision, Boone said.

It wasn't possible to immediately obtain a comment from Varela, but Boone said he was "extremely upset and frustrated.''

Varela earned fans inside and outside of Cuba in the 1980s and '90s with lyrics that were thinly veiled criticisms of the Castro regime. His most recent work has been less militant and more personal.

Last December, Varela traveled to Venezuela with Cuban superstar Silvio Rodriguez, a Castro supporter, to perform in support of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, making his fans wonder if he had sold out.

Though he wouldn't comment to The Herald on the Venezuela trip or on any direct political issues, Varela told The Herald in an e-mail earlier this week: "I'm not an instrument of anyone or any government.

''There are writers who prefer being close to power,'' Varela insisted, "but that is not my case.''

Prior to Friday's visa rejection, Varela had expressed a desire to perform for his Cuban fans in Miami. "It could be a very emotion-filled concert. I'll sing to the dry and wet hearts of the exile community.''

Herald staff contributed to this report.

Her Cuban heritage leaps off the pages

By Sue Corbett, scorbett@herald.com. Posted on Sat, Mar. 06, 2004.

Mayra Dole's mother told her that, right after she was born, she made ''drumming gestures'' with her hands. So it probably surprised no one that Dole turned out to be one of those kids who beats every surface to hear the sound it makes, or that she later played the Senegalese djembe drum in a band.

But given the fact that she never finished high school or had any formal education, it was less expected when Dole embarked on a career as a writer, melding her love of words with her instinct for rhythm into her first published book -- Drum, Chavi, Drum!, (Children's Book Press, $16.95, ages 5 to 8) a bilingual story set in Miami during the Calle Ocho festival.

The star of the story is Chavi, a Cuban-American girl who, like Dole, sees every surface for its percussive potential. She pounds out rhythms on the hood of a car, on a bedside table, on the lids of paint cans. Chavi even sends her mother to work by kissing her nose and tapping her cheeks with a gentle tippy-tap-chicky-chack.

Playing the drums is the way Chavi releases her sadness about the death of her father, and her guilt over how hard her mother must work to care for them. What she wants more than anything is to make her mother proud by playing the tumbadoras in a Calle Ocho parade. Imagine Chavi's indignation when her music teacher chooses Carlitos to play, simply because he is a boy.

Writing is the way Dole connects with her heritage. Born in Marianao, Cuba, and reared in Hialeah, Dole has woven the texture of Cuban Miami into Chavi's story. The neighbor ladies give manicures in their homes. The men play dominoes in the park. The illustrations by Tonel depict Miami's famous street party in all its vibrant glory.

Dole recalls the Calle Ocho festival as a favorite event of her childhood, having arrived in Miami as a toddler in 1959. Her father, a Batista supporter, fled Cuba in disguise to avoid arrest.

''When Fidel's people came looking for my dad, my mother dressed him as a priest and hid him under a pew inside a church,'' until he could escape, Dole said. "My brother and I stayed with my grandparents and aunt until three months later when we were flown to Hialeah. The five of us [my aunt included] lived in a one-room efficiency.''

Dole took some high school and college courses, but says she is largely ''self-educated.'' She's especially gratified to be writing bilingual books, never having had access to much literature written in Spanish while she was growing up.

''When I was working on my first book I was insecure about my Spanish translation and so I gave it to an academic who helped me translate it into formal Spanish.'' But Dole felt the result robbed the story of its Cuban heart, it's ''juiciness,'' she calls it, so she changed it back, with her publisher's permission.

Part of the problem was that insecurity with written Spanish. "If I had been exposed to Spanish/English [bilingual] books in school, writing fluently in Spanish would be as easy as writing in English.''

Her next book, Birthday in the Barrio, is also written in both English and Spanish. Due out this fall, the story is set on Miami Beach, and follows Chavi and her best friend, Rosario, as they plan a quince for Rosario's sister.

She hopes her bilingual stories will help kids stay in touch with their own culture, and introduce the fun and vitality of Cuban culture to those who aren't familiar with it.

"I want to show children that learning different cultures is a blast.''

50 years later, terrorist attack remembered

Decades after members were sprayed by bullets, lawmakers are discussing how to reorganize Congress in the event of a catastrophic attack.

By Jim Abrams, Associated Press. Posted on Sun, Mar. 07, 2004.

WASHINGTON - There's a penny-size bullet hole in the desk used by Republicans when they speak on the floor of the House, a memento of the worst terrorist attack ever on Congress.

On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the visitors' gallery above the chamber. They sprayed some 30 shots around the hall and wounded five lawmakers, one seriously.

Amazingly, no one was killed even though some 240 members were on the floor at the time of the shooting, 50 years ago last Monday. Bullets penetrating the Republican desk barely missed Majority Leader Charles Halleck of Indiana, who was hit by flying splinters.

It was a stunning act of violence in a body that, despite its openness to the public, had been relatively free of violence in its first century and a half.

There had been isolated incidents of lawmakers assaulting each other. President Andrew Jackson narrowly escaped an assassin outside the Capitol Rotunda in 1835. In 1915, a Harvard professor protesting U.S. policy toward Germany destroyed two Senate rooms with a bomb. A Vietnam War protester set off a bomb in a Senate restroom in 1971.

The first metal detectors at the Capitol did not appear until 1976. It was not until 1998, when a man with a history of mental illness shot and killed two Capitol Police officers, that the need to deal with security threats took on a real sense of urgency.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001, when many believe that the real destination of the fourth hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was the Capitol. Since then, the police force has grown substantially, streets around the Capitol are barricaded and visitors are closely monitored.

For the first time, lawmakers are considering legislation on how to reorganize Congress in the event of a catastrophic attack that would kill or incapacitate hundreds of lawmakers.

The 1954 attack was ''extraordinarily unexpected,'' said Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., who at the time was 16 years old and a House page.

Kanjorski recalled that he thought someone was shooting off firecrackers until one of the shots hit a marble column and he was sprayed with a sandy material. Kanjorski hit the floor. When the shooting ended, he and other pages, included the late Bill Emerson, a future Republican congressman from Missouri, were among the first to respond.

Kanjorski helped carry three wounded lawmakers off the floor and rode in the ambulance with Rep. Alvin Bentley, R-Mich., who was hit in the chest.

TOURNIQUET TIE

One lawmaker used his tie as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding of a colleague shot in the leg. Navy veteran James Van Zandt, a Pennsylvania Republican, ran upstairs and helped capture one of the four assailants.

The attackers were led by Lolita Lebron, a 34-year-old nationalist angered by Puerto Rico's new commonwealth status with the United States. Shouting ''Vive Puerto Rico Libre,'' she unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and joined her comrades in firing off shots with automatic pistols.

In a profile of Lebron, The Washington Post Magazine said she is now a deeply religious person but remains unrepentant about the 1954 attack. One of two surviving members of her group, she still enjoys prominence among Puerto Rican nationalists.

President Carter freed the Puerto Ricans in 1979 after they had served 25 years in prison. Although the Carter White House denied any connection, their release coincided with Fidel Castro's release of several Americans being held in Cuba.

BULLETPROOF GLASS

Kanjorski said that after the attack, the House considered erecting bulletproof glass around the visitors' gallery overlooking the chamber. A believer in openness, he said he is glad that did not happen.

He said he believes Lebron and her group set back the cause of Puerto Rican independence by their act of violence. He contrasted Lebron to Rosa Parks, asking what the black civil rights leader would have accomplished if she had thrown a grenade instead of refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955.

Kanjorski also recalls witnessing the aftermath of the shootings of the two police officers in 1998. ''It appeared to me like 50 years ago,'' he said. ''The same chaotic situation, the same shock.'' The only difference, he said, was the design of the ambulances.


 

 


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