The Last Soldiers of the Cold War: The Story of the Cuban Five

Through the 1980s and 1990s, violent anti-Castro groups based in Florida carried out hundreds of military attacks on Cuba, bombing hotels, dusting Cuban crops with insects, and opening fire with machine guns on Cuban beaches. The Cuban government struck back with the Wasp Network – a group of a dozen men and two women – sent to infiltrate the Florida organizations.

The Last Soldiers of the Cold War tells the story of these unlikely spies, and their eventual unmasking and prosecution by US authorities. Five of the Cubans – Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González – languished in US prisons for years on charges of espionage and murder. Internationally best-selling Brazilian author Fernando Morais tells the story of the Cuban Five in vivid, novelistic, page-turning prose, but he also delves probingly into the decades-long conflict between Cuba and the US, the growth of the powerful Cuban exile community in Florida, and what he calls the travesty of justice that resulted in long or life terms for the Cubans on wrongful charges of espionage and murder. Based on years of research and including exclusive interviews conducted in Cuba with members of the Wasp Network and their families, The Last Soldiers of the Cold War is both a real-life spy thriller and a searching examination of one of the Cold War's last stands.

From The Last Soldiers of the Cold War:

Uncertainty was not an unusual feeling among the Cuban population of south Florida. Not trusting anything or anybody, in Miami, was never a cardinal sin. The atmosphere of mutual distrust, prevalent since the birth of the diaspora at the start of the 1960s, had turned into a kind of collective paranoia after the landing of the 130,000 marielitos in 1980. It was enough for someone to introduce himself at some organization’s meeting as an "upright anti-Castroist"—anticastrista vertical, an expression used by those who swore never to bow down before the threats of communism— for him to be viewed with extra caution by the older veterans of exile. Not even icons of the anti-Castro struggle, like José Basulto, managed to escape unscathed by the whispers coming from the domino tables and bars of Little Havana. In these places Basulto’s many failed actions had only one explanation: the Brothers leader was also a Castro agent. Over the years the Cuban community in Miami had ceased to be surprised when it found out that this or that extreme militant, who had proclaimed himself willing to die to put an end to the Cuban Revolution, was nothing but an intel- ligence agent sent by Havana. What was new this time was that Ana Margarita’s fears were shared not by her compatriots, but by the United States government.

Months before her wedding to [Juan Pablo] Roque, a smiling, middle-aged American, with gray hair and rosy cheeks, had rented a furnished room on the fourth floor of number 8021 on 149th Avenue, in the Kendall district of southeast Miami. The small property had been chosen because of one peculiarity: from its only window it was possible to see, with the naked eye, what was going on in the apartment across the street, where René González lived. The tenant had no plans to occupy the place as a home, but rather to convert it into a Surveillance Operations Center (SOC), which in police jargon is also called a "stakeout." The good-natured American, who had used a false name and documents to rent the property, was Mark D’Amico, an experienced official from the FBI’s Anti-Terrorist Squad. On installing himself full-time in Kendall, D’Amico was taking the first steps of a secret operation launched by the US Department of Justice to investigate clandestine activities among Cuban residents in Florida.

Taking turns with him on the stakeout—carried out with the help of powerful binoculars equipped with night vision capability—were FBI agents Julio Ball and Myron Broadwell, who jotted down every detail of the Cuban’s routine: what time he left the house, how long he stayed out, what time he came back and what he did when he was in the apartment. Luckily for them, René’s day varied very little: he woke up early, made breakfast, did some push-ups in the narrow corridor between the bedroom and the kitchen, left the house and ran for forty minutes around his apartment building, which occupied the whole block. He would come back home, take a shower—almost always cold, to save electricity—spend half an hour in front of his IBM 386 microcomputer, and leave for work at around eight o’clock in the morning. He would come home between eight and nine at night, and sit at his computer until going to bed some time after midnight. Only when they were sure about his entry and exit times did the FBI start to make incursions inside the apartment. On their first visit, the phone was bugged and listening devices installed in both rooms. They were careful not to force entry, picking the locks instead. While one agent was busy in the apartment, the other would watch the entrance of René’s building and the street through his binoculars. In the event of René breaking his routine and coming home early, the agent monitoring the street would warn his colleague via walkie-talkie in order for him to escape without leaving a trace. In most cases it was D'amico who did the watching from their kitchenette, while Ball and Broadwell took charge of rummaging through René’s apartment. Each nook and cranny, every drawer, every cupboard was photographed every day. At the end of the search a hard disk was connected to the Cuban’s computer, copying every operation, including all messages sent and received the previous day.

A few weeks of this surveillance was sufficient for the FBI to unravel the mystery that years later would explode onto the front pages of American newspapers: a captain of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, René was an intelligence officer sent by the Cuban government to infiltrate the United States. Far from being a hard blow dealt against communism, as the Florida press had enthused in 1990, the theft of that training plane from San Nicolás de Bari Airport and the pilot’s risky escape to Miami, with barely enough fuel, were all part of a meticulous operation planned by the Cuban Department of State Security (DSS).

René’s real identity, however, had not been the only thing that the FBI had investigated. What astonished the authorities was the discovery that he was just one part of a network of false defectors spread throughout southern Florida—all of them in fact intelligence agents trained by Cuba to infiltrate anti-Castroist organizations in the United States. And all of them, from then on, came to be kept under rigorous surveillance by the FBI, with their phones bugged and microphones installed clandestinely in their homes. Just as D’Amico, Ball and Broadwell were in charge of René, another fifteen agents were already watching and gathering information on around ten addresses scattered around Miami, Key West and Tampa.

The discovery of this shady ring of informants poses an unanswered question: what leads could the American police have used to get to the secret agents? On the Cuban side, the officials at the DSS swear to have no details that might help uncover the mystery. In Miami the enigma still remains, since the FBI has refused to make public any information other than copies of the vast correspondence between Havana and the infiltrated agents in Florida, collected from their computers. This paperwork sheds no new light nor does it suggest the existence of a traitor among the group, nor whether the FBI reached the network thanks to slip-ups made by one of the Cubans. As the first document confiscated by the FBI was dated December 1995, all that can be said for sure was that of the eight years they were active, the secret organization operated for at least five years without being discovered by the American authorities.