Eminent Argentine attorney Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, University of Buenos Aires Professor Emeritus, has sent a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama demanding justice for the five Cuban anti-terrorists political prisoners held in that country.
The Cuban Five, also known as the Miami Five (Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González) are five Cuban intelligence officers convicted in Miami of conspiracy to commit espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, and other illegal activities in the United States. However, Cuba states that the five men were intelligence agents, but says they were spying on Miami’s Cuban exile community, not the U.S. government and contends that the men were sent to South Florida in the wake of several terrorist bombings in Havana.
The Ph.D. in Judicial and Social Sciences, Doctor Honoris Causa at several Latin American universities, asked Obama to commute the sentences using his constitutional authority, in order to put an end to an exasperating, prolonged situation.
Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero, René González and Gerardo Hernández have been held since 1998 and were sentenced in 2001 to prison terms ranging from 15 years to two life terms plus 15 years, for monitoring anti-Cuban terrorist groups located in South Florida.
In the message, Zaffaroni asserts that, beyond any evaluation of the legal proceedings or the sentences, it is clear that the process and the measures are, at the very least, questionable and lacking in transparency.
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