CUBA
NEWS
The
Miami Herald
Dissident offers new democracy proposal
From Herald Wire Services.
Posted on Sun, Dec. 14, 2003.
HAVANA -- Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá
is calling for a national dialogue, providing
a detailed document he says could be used
as a guide for a democratic transition.
The document, obtained by The Associated
Press on Saturday, states that it should
not be seen as a replacement for the Varela
Project, another effort Payá has
headed seeking rights such as freedom of
speech and assembly for Cuban citizens.
It also suggests that the document is not
a final proposal, but merely a draft that
can be used for talks on changes in Cuba's
centralized political and economic systems.
According to the document, among the possibilities
to be discussed would be the creation of
a "National Council of Government Transition.''
The document calls for changes throughout
Cuba's socialist system -- from its health
and education programs to the armed forces
and the state-run mass media. It was unclear
who would be asked to participate in the
national dialogue.
Payá could not be reached for comment
on the proposal.
Cuban dissidents feared lost at sea
Five days after a raft of dissidents
fled Cuba, there's been no trace of them,
sparking concern on both sides of the Florida
Straits.
By Tere Figueras. tfigueras@herald.com.
Posted on Sat, Dec. 13, 2003.
A group of seven Cuban dissidents who fled
the island in a makeshift raft Monday have
not been heard from since and are feared
lost at sea, according to the Cuban Liberty
Council.
''They left in a homemade raft,'' said
Luis Zuñiga, president of the Miami-based
Cuban Liberty Council. ``The seas are high,
so you can only imagine.''
Among those missing: Bárbaro Antonio
Vela Crego, the president of the January
6 Civic Movement, or Movimiento Civico 6
de Enero, who faced 20 years in prison for
his opposition to the Castro regime, said
Zuñiga.
He and six other dissidents slipped away
from the city of Alamar, east of Havana
Bay. Their vessel was powered only by pieces
of cloth patched together to form a sail
and had no engine, Vela's wife told the
Cuban Liberty Council.
The Coast Guard had no information on the
group and said no migrants had been repatriated
to Cuba this week, said Petty Officer Carleen
Drummond, an agency spokeswoman.
Vela was frequently harassed for his activities,
including work with Oscar Elias Biscet,
a nonviolent opposition members sentenced
in April to 25 years in prison, Zuñiga
said.
''He was told they were coming to arrest
him, and that he would spend 20 years in
jail,'' Zuñiga said. ``The day after
he left, the police came to his house looking
for him.''
In addition to his wife, the dissident
left behind a 20-year-old daughter ''and
other family that depended on him for support.
That is a quandary many in the opposition
face,'' Zuñiga said.
Other movement members fleeing with Vela:
Juan Tamayo Muñoz, Claudio García
Porcades, Julio Armando López Calma
and Juan Carlos Nuñez Guerra. Two
other dissidents, Michael González
González and Eugenio Lavastida Alonso,
were also on the raft, according to the
Cuban Liberty Council.
Vela signed a 2001 ''Appeal from Havana''
on behalf of his group, the National Council
of Civil Resistance. His signature was alongside
that of Oswaldo Payá, leader of the
Varela Project for human rights and democracy
in Cuba.
Hijack verdict a personal one for courtroom
Lawyers defending six Cuban men convicted
of air piracy identify with their clients
because of their own families' passage into
exile.
By Cara Buckley, cbuckley@herald.com.
Posted on Sat, Dec. 13, 2003.
KEY WEST - Defense lawyers fought back
tears. Family members strained to understand
snippets of a foreign process played out
in a foreign tongue. And one little girl,
dressed in her Sunday best and squirming
on a hard courtroom bench, wondered why
she was not allowed to run into her father's
arms.
For the people who knew and loved the six
Cuban men tried and convicted Thursday for
hijacking a DC-3 aircraft to Key West, the
eight-day trial resonated infinitely deeper
than the antiseptic theater of legal motions,
objections and denials that formed the trial's
building blocks.
For three-quarters of the defense team,
representing six young Cubans desperate
to flee their homeland was deeply personal,
and wounding.
''It could have been my son,'' Israel Encinosa,
the lawyer for Alvenis Arias Izquierdo,
said Wednesday, eyes reddened, moments after
delivering his closing argument to the jury.
Encinosa was one of three defense lawyers
whose families had fled Cuba when they were
children, finding passage aboard the Freedom
Flights in the late 1960s.
One of the lawyers, Ana Jhones, who represented
defendant Miakel Guerra Morales, was an
infant when her family took the flight into
exile. Encinosa was 10 years old. He visited
Cuba with three defense lawyers in August
in a failed bid to gather evidence for the
trial. It was his first time back in almost
40 years.
Reemberto Diaz, the cynic of the defense
team, nearly wept after delivering an impassioned
closing argument on behalf of his client,
Yainer Olivares Samon. ''Today is the most
important day of his life,'' he told jurors.
"This was a freedom flight. Please
give us freedom.''
Later, on a sun-dappled sidewalk blocks
from the courthouse, Jhones and Encinosa
stood in quiet reflection. ''When I saw
Remby [Diaz] cry, I almost lost it,'' Jhones
said.
The parents of a fourth lawyer, Mario Cano,
who represented Eduardo Mejia Morales, arrived
from Cuba in 1950 aboard a DC-3, the same
type of plane the six men diverted to Key
West.
The defendants, now convicted, were ''shocked''
after being arrested for redirecting the
domestic flight, using kitchen knives and
duct tape to bind the crew, from Cuba to
Key West on March 19, Jhones said.
For the 12 jurors, the defense argument
that the hijacking was a ''freedom flight''
done with the crew's complicity proved no
match for the mountain of evidence amassed
by prosecutors, including confessions from
three defendants. The minimum sentence for
their air piracy conviction is 20 years.
Four of the hijackers' wives, who knew
nothing of the plan, and two of their children
accompanied the men on the flight, and are
now starting new lives in Florida.
Mejia's wife, Emma Lopez, and Guerra's
wife, Yusleidis Marquez, spent most of the
trial huddled together on a courtroom bench,
dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs and
popping Tic-Tacs.
Lopez, 29, and daughter Dalia, 7, live
with a member of her husband's family in
Miami. Lopez is the only one in her family
living in Florida, and hasn't found work.
'ALWAYS TOMORROW'
Lopez took Dalia out of school to attend
the trial Tuesday. She shielded her from
the sight of Mejia and the other defendants
shuffling into court, handcuffed together,
and told her that Daddy was dressed up because
he was taking a course.
Mejia's eyes drank his daughter in.
'She asks when Papi is coming back, and
says, 'Mami, you always say tomorrow,' ''
said Lopez hours before the verdict was
reached. Afterward, she wept at the prospect
of telling Dalia that her father wasn't
coming back.
Marquez, 24, first lived with her brother-in-law
in Miami, then moved to a friend's home
in Tampa and is taking a day-care course.
Bumny Arebalos, the wife of the hijacking's
ringleader, Alexis Norniella Morales, is
living with his extended family in Miami,
caring for their 5-year-old daughter.
Samon's wife, Zaida Miranda, 24, lives
in Miami too.
For Angel Morales, older brother to both
Norniella, who worked as a veterinarian
in Cuba, and Guerra, who performed atop
a bicycle in a musical troupe, the eight-day
trial marked an agonizing passage of time.
Angel Morales, 33, gained entry to the
United States three years ago after winning
a visa by lottery. He lives in Miami and
works as an electrician.
The sudden departure of his brothers with
their wives and one child on the diverted
plane last March left his mother, Cristina,
crazed with worry, alone in Nueva Gerona
on Cuba's Isle of Youth.
HOPE DWINDLES
''I'm afraid to talk to her, I can't,''
Morales said Monday, four days before the
verdict was reached. "Every day that
passes, my hope gets smaller and smaller.''
Morales raged against the verdict outside
the courthouse Thursday afternoon, as Lopez,
Marquez and Miranda clutched each other,
wailing. After the cameras and reporters
drifted away, they disappeared from Key
West's leafy streets.
''I feel for these men and their relatives,''
one juror, Roger Bayly, wrote in an e-mail.
"But I took an oath to uphold the
law. I tried to find them not guilty as
I suspect there are extenuating circumstances
in the case. I searched for the smallest
shadow of reasonable doubt and I really
wish there would have been something, but
the law is clear, and they said what they
said. I feel I did the right thing.''
6 Cubans guilty of hijacking
In federal court in Key West, a jury
finds that six young Cuban men seized a
domestic Cuban flight and diverted it to
the United States. All are found guilty
of air piracy.
By Cara Buckley, cbuckley@herald.com.
Posted on Fri, Dec. 12, 2003.
KEY WEST -- Six young Cuban men were found
guilty of air piracy in Key West Thursday,
after jurors rejected their claim that the
act was a ''freedom flight'' masterminded
by airport crew.
The conviction carries a minimum prison
sentence of 20 years.
As the judgment was read, the faces of
the defendants -- Alexis Norniella Morales;
his brother, Miakel Guerra Morales; his
cousin Eduardo Mejia Morales; and their
friends Neudis Infantes Hernandez, Alvenis
Arias Izquierdo and Yainer Olivares Samon
-- registered shock. Some wept into their
hands.
In the courtroom's gallery, three of their
wives, who were on the hijacked flight,
began to sob.
''It was beyond our control,'' said Jeffrey
Williams, one of the 12 jurors. "I
really sympathize with those people, but
I couldn't do anything about it.''
Thursday's verdict, the fruit of six hours
of jury deliberation, ended a grueling nine-day
trial in which the court heard starkly different
accounts of what transpired March 19:
Prosecutors insisted that the diversion
that night of a domestic Cuban DC-3 plane
to Key West was a meticulously plotted,
''old fashioned hijacking'' carried out
with butcher knives, duct tape and string.
But the defense called the act a ''freedom
flight'' masterminded by an airport security
guard with the complicity of the copilot,
Gustavo Salas. Five butcher knives tossed
on to the airfield in Key West were props
in a ''show,'' the defense argued, and the
defendants believed that the flight's 37
passengers and crew, except for their wives,
were ''on board'' with the plan.
WITNESSES FROM CUBA
The Cuban government produced four crew
members for the trial, including the pilot,
Daniel Blas Corria Sánchez, who testified
that Norniella, the alleged ringleader,
pressed a knife to his throat after the
hijackers broke down the cockpit door. The
flight's steward and technician said their
lives were threatened after they were bound
at knifepoint.
After the verdicts were read, the defendants,
shackled in handcuffs, were driven from
the courthouse in a white police van. Defense
lawyer Mario Cano said each defendant would
appeal.
''All the clients are extremely heartbroken
and disappointed, but they still have faith
in the judicial system that the appellate
process will see them through,'' said Cano,
who represented Mejia.
Reactions from family members were more
pitched.
Outside the courthouse, beneath graceful
bougainvillea and palm trees, Mejia's wife,
Emma Lopez, dissolved into angry tears.
''Nobody realizes the abuses that we live
with in Cuba,'' she wailed as television
cameras zoomed in.
Prosecutors said the jury's verdict sent
''a clear message'' that the United States
would not tolerate hijackings. After a second
hijacking, Cuban President Fidel Castro
charged that the United States is too lenient
on hijackers and treats them as heroes.
However, that hijacker, Adermis Wilson
Gonzalez, was sentenced to 20 years in prison
by a federal court in Miami in September.
''Although we are sympathetic to people
wanting to come to the United States, we
will not tolerate violence or the threat
of violence in order to do it,'' said Assistant
U.S. Attorney Harry C. Wallace on Thursday.
"We will vigorously prosecute those
people who endanger people on flights in
order to come to the U.S.''
Both sides pieced together wildly divergent
accounts of what happened before and during
the 75-minute flight, which was scheduled
to go to Havana but ended up in Key West
under the escort of two U.S. F-15 fighter
jets.
STORY OF THE KNIVES
Competing explanations were given for how
five butcher knives were smuggled aboard
and wielded; about whether the plane carried
extra gas to fuel its flight to the United
States; about whether an ax was used; about
whether the cockpit door was body-slammed
by the hijackers or helped off its hinges
by a complicit crew; and about why maps
of South Florida were found in the cockpit,
which the prosecutors described as normal,
and the defense as a red flag.
Both sides were also handicapped going
into the trial.
Confessions from three defendants were
thrown out because the FBI failed to read
them their Miranda rights.
Defense lawyers were not able to interview
witnesses in Cuba, and the Cuban government
refused to produce nongovernment witnesses.
Nor could the defense mention Cuba's political
or economic conditions, a defense tactic
used in earlier hijacking trials that ended
in acquittals.
Up to the last moment, Judge James Lawrence
King denied each of the defense's requests
for a mistrial. Thursday morning, juror
No. 12 attempted to shake Wallace's hand,
a breach of protocol, the defense argued,
that should result in mistrial or the juror's
removal. But at 12:40 p.m., King denied
both motions. Five minutes later, King learned
that a verdict had been reached.
Each defendant was charged with four counts:
air piracy, interfering with a flight crew,
and conspiracy to commit both. Norniella,
Guerra and Infantes were found guilty on
all four counts; Mejia and Olivares were
found guilty of everything but interfering
with a flight crew; and Arias was found
guilty only of air piracy, the most serious
offense.
ACTIVISTS SADDENED
Cuban activists reacted to the verdict
with sadness.
''All we've done today is convict victims,''
said Joe Garcia, executive director of the
Cuban American National Foundation. "I
don't condone hijacking, but what kind of
hijacker brings his wife on board, his family
along? They weren't trying to destroy a
building, or slam into a military installation.
They were trying to escape.''
Sentencing is set for Feb. 26 in Miami.
Fates of dictators follow no pattern
Whether they die in power or are eventually
thrown in prison or killed, the fates of
the last century's dictators have proven
to be a mixed bag.
By Robert H. Reid, Associated
Press. Posted on Mon, Dec. 15, 2003
Some ended up in prison; others were butchered
at the hands of their own people. A lucky
few lived out their days in comfortable
exile or in positions of privilege in the
lands they ruled.
India's independence leader Mohandas K.
Gandhi said that dictators "for a time
. . . can seem invincible, but in the end
they always fall.''
That hasn't always proven true. Among others,
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, North Korea's
Kim Il-Sung, China's Mao Zedong, Francisco
Franco of Spain and Syria's Hafez Assad
all died in power. Fidel Castro is still
going strong in Cuba.
Albania's Enver Hoxha and Augusto Pinochet
of Chile arranged comfortable retirements
before leaving power.
The global record of bringing tyrants to
justice has been mixed. Only one -- former
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic --
has stood before an international tribunal
to answer for his regime.
Milosevic's trial is still under way at
an international war crimes tribunal in
The Hague, Netherlands. Liberia's Charles
Taylor has been indicted for war crimes
in neighboring Sierra Leone but has not
been arrested.
Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega is
serving a 40-year term in a federal prison
southwest of Miami for racketeering, drug
trafficking and money-laundering after U.S.
troops entered his country and arrested
him in 1989.
But history's master tyrant, Adolf Hitler,
escaped retribution by committing suicide
in Berlin before Soviet troops could capture
him in 1945. Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge
regime was responsible for the deaths of
up to 2 million Cambodians, died in the
jungle in 1998 as remnants of his vanquished
movement were preparing to hand him over
to an international court.
For nearly 25 years, Nicolae Ceausescu
wielded vast powers as the Communist boss
of Romania. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena,
were executed by a firing squad on Christmas
Day 1989 after revolutionaries toppled his
regime.
That seemed a merciful end compared with
that of Samuel Doe, the shy, soft-spoken
master sergeant who overthrew Liberian President
William Tobert in 1980.
Power and corruption soon got the best
of him, and after 10 years of dictatorial
rule, Doe was himself overthrown -- tortured,
mutilated and brutally slain.
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