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Opinion

Commentary: 'Cuban Five' had fair trial in Miami

The Miami Herald

June 18, 2009 01:02 PM

By choosing not to hear an appeal in the so-called Cuban Five case, the U.S. Supreme Court sent an important message: Cuban spies received a fair trial in Miami-Dade County.

It's laughable that Ricardo Alarcón, who heads the Cuban National Assembly, would maintain that the justices didn't hear the case because "the Obama administration asked them not to."

A history lesson for Mr. Alarcón: In the United States there are checks and balances guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and the judiciary is independent. In one-party Cuba, with a rubber-stamp judiciary, that's simply not the case.

American judges can make mistakes – and there have been abuses – but they are not political instruments of the White House. And most certainly not this president. Most of the justices on the court were appointed by Republican presidents – not by Mr. Obama's Democratic Party.

The five convicted spies, arrested in 1998 as part of the Wasp Network, are serving sentences from 15 years to life for acting as illegal agents of the Cuban government. The communist regime says the spies were only getting information about anti-Castro groups in South Florida.

That's not all they were doing. Had the cases been solely about gathering information without registering with the U.S. government as a foreign agent the sentences would have been shorter. No, the Castro government and its apologists prefer to ignore the evidence, including wiretaps, presented at trial.

To read the complete editorial, visit The Miami Herald.

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