86 posts by sk15admin

Andrés Gómez—a shambling, friendly, 63-year-old bear of a man—is the director of Areito Digital, an online magazine of “progressive Cuban immigrants,” the leader of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, a Miami-based pro-Cuba activist organization, and one of the best known moderate voices in Miami’s el exilio. I met with him while I was in Miami recently […]

We are sitting in the cramped, cluttered offices of Radio Miami, which look more like a 1960s commune than a modern radio station. Radio Miami—“radio para la difusión de ideas”—is located in a nondescript strip mall well beyond the stifling political and cultural confines of Little Havana. That, I have been told, is more a […]

I was in Montreal recently to interview Livio Di Celmo, the brother of Fabio, a 32-year-old Italian-Canadian who was killed in a September 4, 1997 bombing that was part of a larger terrorist campaign anti-Castro militants were then waging against Cuban tourism. The alleged mastermind of that campaign—as well as the 1976 bombing of a […]

Francisco Chavez Abarca Francisco Chavez Abarca—the Salvadoran man arrested at Caracas International Airport on Thursday (July 1, 2010) and accused of plotting to “provoke violence and destabilization” in the lead-up to Venezuela’s legislative elections in September—was one of the keys player in the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign orchestrated by anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles. […]

Ramón Labañino, one of three members of the Cuban Five whose prison sentences were reduced last fall, has been moved from a maximum security prison in Kentucky to a medium security institution in Jesup, Georgia. Ramón Labañino Labañino, 46, had been serving a sentence of “life plus 18 years” following his 2001 conviction for espionage […]

On June 15, 2010—five years to the day after it first asked the United States government to extradite anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles to face charges in Venezuela in connection with the deadly bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane in 1976—Venezuela’s National Assembly renewed its demand this week. The Cuban-born Posada, who returned to the […]

Gerardo Hernandez In a last-ditch, no-more-cards-to-play legal effort, lawyers for convicted Cuban Five spy Gerardo Hernandez this week (June 14, 2010) filed what is called a collateral appeal—or writ of habeus corpus—in Miami Federal Court claiming it has new evidence the court should have aware of before letting a jury decide the fate of the […]

The trial of Luis Posada Carriles will begin Jan. 11, 2011. Following a much-delayed scheduling hearing in El Paso, Texas, yesterday (June 2), U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone made it clear she does not want any more delays in the case. Luis Posada Carriles Although Posada is alleged to have been responsible for blowing up […]

Five American journalists who wrote inflammatory articles about the Cuban Five during their detention and trials received more than $70,000 in secret payments from the U.S. government between November 1999 to December 31, 2001. Details of the payments, which were uncovered as the result of a freedom of information request, were revealed during a Washington […]

Members of the "Cuban Five" The U.S. National Committee to Free The Cuban Five has called a press conference for June 2, 2010 in Washington to reveal what it says is “new evidence that the U.S. Government has covertly paid tens of thousands of dollars to Miami journalists working for major media outlets” to publish […]