The Cuban Five

The Cuban Five

Overview

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The Cuban Five was a five-member, Miami-based, KGB-trained, Castro spy ring known as the DGI, whose activities were uncovered by the FBI in September 1998. All five were convicted in 2001 of conspiracy to commit espionage against the U.S. and conspiracy to murder Americans. The Supreme Court twice upheld the convictions of these Communist terrorists and accessories to murder.

According to the FBI’s affidavit, the convicted Castro agents were engaged in, among other acts:

  • gathering intelligence against the Boca Chica Air Naval Station in Key West, the McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, and the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Homestead, Florida;
  • compiling the names, home addresses, and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers, along with those of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica;
  • infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command;
  • sending letter bombs to Cuban-Americans;
  • spying on McDill Air Force Base, the U.S. armed forces’ worldwide headquarters for fighting “low-intensity” conflicts; and
  • locating entry points into Florida for smuggling explosives.

The Cuban Five also infiltrated the Cuban-exile group Brothers to the Rescue, which flew unarmed planes to rescue Cuban rafters in the Florida straits, also known as “the cemetery without crosses.” The estimates of the number of Cubans dying horribly in the “cemetery without crosses,” run from 50,000 to 85,000. Brothers to The Rescue risked their lives almost daily, flying over the straits, alerting and guiding the Coast Guard to any balseros, and saving thousands of these desperate people from joining that terrible tally.

By February 1996, Brothers to The Rescue had flown 1,800 of these humanitarian missions and helped rescue 4,200 men, women and children. That month, members of the Cuban Five passed to Castro the flight plan for one of the Brothers’ humanitarian flights over the “cemetery without crosses.” With this information in hand, Castro’s Top Guns saluted and sprang to action. They jumped into their MIGs, took off and blasted apart (in international air space) the lumbering and utterly defenseless Cessnas. Four members of the humanitarian flights were murdered in cold blood. Three of these men were U.S. citizens, the other a legal U.S. resident. Among the murdered was Armando Alejandre Jr., who came to the U.S. at age ten in 1960. His first order of business upon reaching the age of 18 was fulfilling his dream of becoming a U.S. citizen. His next was joining the United States Marine Corps and volunteering for service in Vietnam. He returned with several decorations.

* Source:M.A.S.H. Star Partners with Castro’s Spy Service” (by Humberto Fontova, 7-15-2012).

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