‘From my heights,’ an art exhibit by a former Cuban agent accused of espionage in the United States, is inaugurated

Representatives of Venezuela and Cuba organized the show in Washington

By David Brooks

From La Jornada, Mexico

Washington, July 11 — Rays of light emerge from the green door of a cell in a maximum-security prison.

A brush and a pen paint verses and write images. There are pictures of Havana and the road to Santiago; also, of the snow-covered mountains of Colorado (through a cell window); there are a couple of nudes, a tiger, a macaw, Che, a mother. There are also pure verses, the kind that take your breath away not necessarily because they are from a universal poet but because they are written by a man who is free and proud. All this emerges from behind a green metal door.

There, on that door, painted in one of the pictures, titled “The Door to my Cell,” Antonio Guerrero has painted and written poems for the past 10 years. He refuses to be imprisoned by his life sentence.

The exhibition, “From my heights,” was inaugurated in the Andrés Bello cultural hall of the Venezuelan Embassy in this city. Artists, politicians, diplomats, analysts, sympathizers and others filled the room, where representatives from Venezuela and Cuba welcomed what Guerrero calls “a beginner’s works.”

However, their transparency, natural honesty and the hand that translates into colors his nostalgia, hope and innocence transform those works into something more: a rebellion against injustice. And that’s palpable in the room.

Guerrero is one of five men sent from Cuba to Miami to infiltrate the anti-Castro terrorist groups responsible for the deaths of more than 3,000 Cubans in the past four decades.

With the information collected in Miami by the team of agents, numerous attacks against the island were prevented. Much documentation was collected on the activities of such groups, which was submitted to the FBI by the Cuban government in 1998 to arrest the people responsible for several attacks.

Instead of arresting the terrorists, the government of the United States arrested the five Cuban agents and accused them of espionage, even though they never spied against the U.S. Government. They were found guilty in a trial conducted in Miami, despite protests that said an impartial trial was impossible in that city.

Voices against injustice

Right now, with almost all the legal recourses exhausted — and despite a series of errors in the legal process that undermine the case against them, and challenges to the injustice of the process from some 10 Nobel laureates, the United Nations and international figures such as Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Nadine Gordimer and Howard Zinn, among others — experts say President Barack Obama has the opportunity and the legal authority (executive clemency) to end this affair and release them.

Unless this is done, no step forward can be taken in the normalization of relations between Washington and Havana, say lawyers and diplomats close to the case. Gore Vidal has said that “the case proves that we have a legal, political and constitutional crisis.” This and other statements from renowned figures accompany the exhibition.

“Who is Antonio Guerrero? A humanist, painter, poet, good son, good father, who left everything to go into obscurity in Miami and protect the people of Cuba and Latin America,” said Ambassador Jorge Bolaños, chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington and former Ambassador to Mexico, at the show’s opening.

Bolaños points out that, while The Five, as they are known, are “behind bars in maximum-security cells, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles walk freely through Miami.” Both men, charged and convicted of some of the worst acts of terrorism in the hemisphere, are fugitives of Venezuelan and Cuban justice.

The United States has not responded to any of the repeated requests for Posada Carriles’ extradition, while The Five serve sentences that total four life terms plus 75 years, Bolaños said.

During the day, Guerrero paints and writes his poems and teaches Spanish and mathematics to the other inmates, the Cuban ambassador said, adding: “At night, he dreams of justice.”

José Pertierra, a Washington attorney, the hero of innumerable immigrants because of his generous support and defense of their rights (and his sense of humor), and the man entrusted by the Venezuelan government with the legal conduct of Posada Carriles’ extradition, said during the inauguration that a couple of months ago he talked in Havana with Giustino di Celmo, whose 22-year-old son, Fabio, was murdered in 1997 in the Copacabana Hotel by one of the bombs set off during the terrorist campaign coordinated by Posada Carriles that Guerrero and the other four attempted to stop.

“Fabio’s Dad is 90 years old. At the Havana restaurant named after his son, he told me he wrote a letter to Antonio Guerrero, to Tony, from which I copied these lines: ‘The first ray of the sun in the next several days should fall on the darkness cast over the monstrous injustice of your imprisonment.’ Giustino those drawings by Antonio Guerrero are little rays of sun that fall on the darkness cast over the monstrous indifference of the government of the United States to the suffering of The Five. It is up to us to convert them into bolts of action,” he said.

Time to rectify

Pertierra insisted that President Obama “needs to understand that Posada and the other Miami Cubans were the tools of terror his government used against Cuba. That is why the FBI did not arrest them, and that is why it arrested The Five. His responsibility now is to rectify that injustice.”

From Cell 219, Unit BB of the maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo., Guerrero offers his images and his verses, some of which have been turned into songs and recorded by some of the top Cuban artists.

Among the hosts and organizers of the inauguration were Angelo Rivera Santos, chargé d’affairs at the Venezuelan Embassy, representing Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, who was in Caracas for official reasons, and Patricia Abdelnour, cultural attaché of the Venezuelan Embassy, along with Ambassador Bolaños and his diplomatic team.

The exhibition will be open to the public until July 27.

David Brooks is La Jornada’s Washington correspondent.