FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Who are the Cuban Five? Why did the FBI arrest them in 1998? Why are they still in prison in the United States? What makes them national heroes in their homeland? What does their case have to do with the war on terror? And why should their story matter to the rest […]

At the Book Court in Brooklyn, NY, Sept. 14, 2013. (Bill Hackwell photo) My New York publicist had arranged an interview for me with WLRN, South Florida’s popular National Public Radio affiliate, for this Tuesday (September 17) to talk about my new book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five. […]

Who are the Cuban Five? Why did the FBI arrest them? Why are they still in prison in the United States? What makes them national heroes in their homeland? What does their case have to do with the war on terror? And why should their story matter to Americans? Coversm Canadian journalist Stephen Kimber, the […]

The International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five has scheduled a week of activities in Washington from May 30 – June 5 to continue the campaign to win release of five Cuban intelligence agents still in jail in the United States for “conspiracy to commit” espionage back in the 1990s. Full disclosure: I’ll […]

At around 3:15 a.m. on the morning of April 27, 2012, someone firebombed a Coral Gables, Florida, travel agency that was in the business of organizing legal tourist travel to Cuba. It was an act of domestic terrorism. But it didn’t get the public — or FBI —attention the recent Boston attacks did, in part […]

One of the enduring questions about Cuba’s shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in 1996 is where the planes actually were when they were brought down? In international airspace as the U.S. claims and the International Civil Aviation Agency concluded? Or over Cuban territory as the Cubans continue to insist? The U.S. has […]

Dear President Obama, This is my first ever letter to an American president. That’s not just because I’m not an American citizen. I’m also a journalist, and journalists are not in the habit of writing letters to heads of governments. But having spent the past three years researching the case of the Cuban Five, I […]

“Shootdown,” an excerpt from Stephen Kimber’s forthcoming book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five is now available as an ebook from Amazon. http://amzn.to/HWl12l The excerpt unfolds the critically important episode of the shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft over the Straits of Florida in February 1996—from Brothers’ […]

Alan Gross is not exactly the humanitarian do-gooder the U.S. government would have you believe. And the Cuban Five are not exactly spies and murderers. Is there a pattern here?   Alan Gross and wife Judy. The campaign to free Alan Gross is ramping up. Gross is the American arrested in 2009 for smuggling telecommunications […]

On December 31, 2011, the Washington Post published an editorial demanding the return of Alan Gross, an American government contractor sentenced to 15 years in Cuban prison for illegally bringing telecommunications equipment into the country. In the editorial, the Post claimed Cuba saw Gross as a “potential bargaining chip” to win the release of the […]