The Cuban 5 are five Cuban men who infiltrated CIA-backed expatriate Cuban terrorist groups based in Miami, Florida. They discovered that an extremist group 'Brothers to the Rescue' was practising its plans to bomb Cuba by dropping pipe bombs from aeroplanes, and the Cuban government passed on the evidence of this illegal activity to the US administration.

The US response was to arrest the five Cubans who had discovered the plot and to set up a trial in Miami where in 1998 three were sentenced to life imprisonment and the other two to 15 and 19 years in prison.

A US court in 2005 decided in 2005 that their trial had been unfair and ordered a retrial in a new location. The Attorney General had this decision overturned and the convictions were upheld in 2006 and 2008. Despite an unprecedented number of petitions from human rights organisations, jurists and others from around the world, the US Supreme Court refused to examine the case this June; Obama had urged them not to hear it. A retrial is to start shortly for three of the men, but under the same judge who found them guilty at the original unfair trial.

The whole prosecution is a part of the political war by the US against the socialist revolution in Cuba which started in 1959. Cuba is seen as a threat to their control and business interests in the whole of Central and South America and determined to isolate and destroy it. The infamous 'Monroe Doctrine' originated by President James Monroe in 1823 now means that Latin American countries are free to choose any government they like so long as it isn't too left-wing.

Apart from an abortive attempt at invasion - the Bay of Pigs, proposed by Nixon, planned by Eisenhower, approved by Kennedy and turned into a fiasco by the CIA, the main weapon used against Cuba for the past 50 years has been a US commercial, economic and financial blockade, repeatedly condemned by the United Nations, most recently by 185 votes to 3 with 2 abstentions.

More pictures on Demotix:
 http://www.demotix.com/news/cuban-5-eleven-years-jail

and later on My London Diary,