Hombre del Silencio: The Prison Diary of Ramon Labanino Part 12: My attorney Williams Norris; Resentence

THE LEGAL BATTLE

There is no other homeland for Cubans than the one we conquer with our own effort

José Martí, Key West, January 1894

My attorney Williams Norris

My lawyer William Norris came to visit me, and told me that if there was another trial, the same evidence could not be used.

We were arrested on September 12, 1998, and on the 14th we went to court. The first lawyer they gave me is not William Norris, it is another person, a Jew, whose name I will not mention for reasons of professional ethics.

The thing is that they appointed the Jewish guy to me and on the first day of court he came to visit me minutes before court. He told me that the meeting was an appearance only to plead guilty or not guilty. And he asked me what I wanted to do. I told him, “Not guilty”. He told me that if I wanted to collaborate with the government they would reduce my sentence, that I could go back on the street, everything I already knew. I told him no, that I wanted to go to court. That meeting was to introduce him, and to say that his defendant pleaded not guilty, to say his name, and that he was willing to defend me.

Then they made another appearance to settle the issue of the bail. That is, to decide if we deserved to have bail and what amount they would set for us, so that second time, when they summoned us, I already knew him, I had already exchanged with him several times. I told him about my case, and I saw him cut off, he was not a guy with spurs. He did not give me the impression of a person who had courage, and indeed, when we went to court again, the lawyer presented his defense and said: I am the lawyer of Mr. Luis Medina, I propose that he be released on bail, but that an FBI officer keep him under surveillance so that he does not leave the country. I felt offended. When I came back from court, I told him that I did not think that this was the right way to do it. To defend me, telling a judge to release me was right, but to keep me under surveillance revealed that he did not trust me.

In the end the judge said that none of us had bail, because we were people who could escape. I didn’t like the way he defended me, and I realized that the man was soft. So after that I had an exchange with him, and there I spoke to him strongly, I told him that we had a good case, that it could be won but that I needed a lawyer who had the courage to denounce the terrorists who were public persons in Miami, that I understood that if he did not want to go to that trouble, he could resign from representing me. That is what happened sometime later, when the prosecutors demanded that all our lawyers had to pass a security exam. It was after his resignation that I was assigned to William Norris by the Court, and he always stayed with me throughout the entire process.

We were still in the alcove, on the twelfth floor, and he came to see me through the glass. He looked at me with a normal face, because he is a very cultured person, and with an interesting way of speaking in parables. You have to pay a lot of attention to understand him well.

Anyway, he handled the language very well, and the first time we met he told me:

My dad worked for the U.S. Diplomatic Service, and he was an officer just like you, who worked for the CIA. And it turns out that one time when I was in an embassy in Africa, when I was a little kid, he took me to his office, and there he gave me a ball, and I grabbed a stamp that was on his desk, and I started putting dots all over the ball.

I wondered what he wanted to tell me with that story.

Then when we went to leave the Military Base we were stopped by a security guard, and he wanted to put us in jail, because I had a ball in my hands that said top secret.

By that I mean that I understand your work perfectly. I just know what top secret work is, and I know what can and cannot be said.

That was the opening he made, and I thanked him very much. I told him:

How interesting what you tell me! I am very glad that you have this knowledge about our work. I thank you and I promise you one thing, first, do not believe everything the press says, the press is distorting our case, do not believe it, we are not what they say. Read the evidence. That is what will speak for us.

And the detail is that I wrote the evidence with the information that the agents gave me, and I knew it by heart – “if they were going to put a bomb in a car, if they wanted to knock down a plane, if they wanted to overthrow Fidel, etc.”

I knew what the evidence was, no one could tell me, although later we could only see twenty percent of it, and we were not allowed to see more, because it was so overwhelming in our favor that the prosecutors tried to prevent us from seeing all of it. That twenty percent was enough to make the trial. The truth was our best defense. That is why I also told Norris: I promise you that I will never tell you a lie, if there is something I cannot tell you I will keep quiet, but I will never tell you a lie, and you must understand that I can tell you what I can tell you, and I cannot tell you what I cannot tell you, is that clear?

We became tremendous friends to this day, that man defended me, and he is a magnificent lawyer.

In the Court, this problem of the appointment of lawyers is, in fact, like a random game, which is not only drawn among the lawyers of the Court, but also among private lawyers.

If you don’t like the defendant, you can say that there is a conflict of interest. Because in René’s case there was also someone who did not want to defend him because of a conflict of interest, because he was defending Brothers to the Rescue, and in my case, it happened just as I told it. And it must be said that this man fought to the end. He put his foot down for me. When my wife went to the United States, he defended her personally, and he appears on the television cameras, because it happened that the first time that the wives and mothers come to the United States the press was all over them, and he grabbed my wife by the hand and told everyone: Don’t touch her, because whoever touches her I will put him in jail. He behaved very well. Tremendous lawyer and handsome. And when he heard about our case, he became more interested.

He went so far as to say in court, and this is in the records of the final day, when the lawyer was given the opportunity to speak, to defend us, he said: I want to tell the Court that it has been a privilege for me to defend him, because the United States would like to have men like Ramón in its military ranks.

He considered that we were heroes for Cuba, but we could also have been heroes for the United States.

In the end, the concept he took away from The Five led him to say on one occasion: I wish our military were like you.

I was impressed because I never thought about the extent to which we had reached the lawyers, the extent to which we had succeeded in getting the lawyers to understand our cause.

When we were going to start preparing for the trial, on top of the fact that our lawyers had to pass the security exam, they put the evidence in a secret room, which is called a secured closed information facility (SCIF), and it was a secret office.

To go to the SCIF we had to get up at about four o’clock in the morning, go through a tiring process, the five of us lying on the floor, and then get to a secret floor they had tucked away inside some back storage rooms in that hell hole, which was where the office was. We would arrive at ten o’clock or eleven o’clock and then at twelve o’clock or one o’clock we would leave. Two or three hours to check, because they had to leave. We would read with the guards behind us, with the marshals, the lawyer also had to go through their process to enter, in short, a diabolical system they created so that we would not review our own evidence, besides many of the documents they accumulated were recipes, Tony’s poems, love letters, they put the seal of secrecy on everything. They did this so that we would not have time to read anything. So, what did we do, we chose the most important, because as I knew where I was, I searched and found where there was a terrorist act that we discovered, the day they were going to shoot at the plane Fidel was on, when they were going to fire a rocket at it. A C-4 explosive was going to be brought into Havana through the airport. A bottle of shampoo that was a bomb to be placed in Tropicana. Or when they tried to plant bombs in Cuban power plants. What had happened in Copacabana, they immediately warned us to activate the networks and go out into the streets to look for the terrorists. A bomb they were going to put on a boat in the Miami River, another one they were going to explode on an airplane. We got all that from the evidence because we knew it all.

I was the officer. Tony sent me his information, the Santos also sent me their information, so I knew what was there, if they had really caught him. That was what saved us in the end, because seeing only twenty percent of the information made it impossible to defend ourselves with the strongest case. We also had a lot of graphic evidence, such as photos, etc.

Gerardo had a lot of evidence of photos of these terrorists practicing with rifles in the Everglades, with fifty caliber weapons. I remember one time one of these people who was on a small boat had a fifty-caliber rifle on board. It’s a powerful weapon that can go through tanks, pierce a building. When he was arrested, he said he had that rifle to kill sharks. Nobody believed that. However, in court they accepted it, and he was acquitted.

The case of the Five is an example of how the press is manipulated in the United States, which is why at first the lawyers looked at us with frightened faces, because they thought we were really dangerous spies.

The lawyers who defended us won an award given by the Florida State Bar for defending the most unpopular case in the State, because that takes courage. They took risks, in fact, they were threatened at one time. They were all daring and had to pass a security exam in order to have access to secret, sensitive information. Everything was to complicate their work so that they could not defend us.

Resentence

When I learned of the Court’s decision, the world fell on my head. In 2005, when they gave the verdict that the trial had been annulled, we thought that we had achieved the final victory, and just a year later, on August 9, 2006, they gave us the answer that no, that everything was reversed, that the trial had been correct, and that the only thing that the judges considered was that three of us were going to be resentenced.

There, we were Fernando, Tony and myself. When the three of us went to court, our sentences were decided, however, they never wanted to lower Gerardo’s sentence, under the pretext that he had two life sentences, and in any case, removing one of them would not benefit him. That was what they said.

Even if they had removed the life sentence for conspiracy to commit espionage, he had the other life sentence, which was conspiracy to commit murder, and that is where the problem arises, because this second case is very unfair, the whole process was unfair, but this case was much more unfair. He should have been resentenced, it is not the same to have one life sentence rather than two, there are other considerations with the prisoner, but they never wanted to give Gerardo the slightest hope in that sense, and the impact was violent, because the result of a trial that was null and void was maintained, it had been annulled by the three judges unanimously. This had never happened before in the American justice system, when three judges declare a mistrial, the decision cannot be appealed. What we faced after that was a labyrinth, motion, counter motion, until in 2010 we were finally resentenced. Tony’s sentence was reduced from life and 10 years to 22 years, Fernando’s from 19 to 17 years, and in my case from life and 18 years to 30 years. But it was the same because 30 years is like a life sentence, when we were released, I still had 10 years to serve. If I had stayed with that sentence, I would have been sixty-one years old.

After resentencing I returned to the U.S.P. (United States Penitentiary) McCreary in Kentucky. The Cubans there threw me a welcome home party, they thought I had definitely left due to sentence reduction, but when they found out I was coming back, they threw me a special meal.

There was everything, they even invented a homemade wine, and we had a good time. I was received happily for the reduction of the life sentence plus eighteen years to thirty years, which meant that I would have one day to be released for good, and the reception was nice. Even the guards were also affable, there was one who told me that I did not deserve to be in prison, that I should be released or be in a prison for political prisoners, a military prison, and that really touched me.

When I went back to McCreary, I had fourteen years to serve, but that’s considered a short sentence, so I no longer belonged in a maximum-security prison, I belonged in a medium security prison, and because of that they sent me to the hole, they told me I had to go there, for security reasons, until my transfer to a medium security prison.

I was there for about two months until I was finally transferred to Jesup, Georgia, which was medium security.