Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Agent who renounced U.S. calls himself ‘Cuban patriot’
HAVANA — A Cuban agent who served 13 years behind bars in the United States for his role in an espionage ring showed off a certificate renouncing his U.S. citizenship Friday and said he is nowjust a “Cuban patriot.”
Rene Gonzalez — who was born in Chicago, grew up in Cuba and held dual U.S.-Cuban citizenship — is the first of what the Cuban government calls heroes to complete his sentence and return to the island in a case that has plagued U.S.-Cuban relations since the 1990s.
He agreed to renounce his U.S. citizenship last week in exchange for the waiving of the remainder of a three-year parole in Florida that was tacked on to his prison term.
“I’m nowsimply a Cuban citizen, a Cuban patriot, which in all cases I’ve always been,” Gonzalez, 56, said in a Havana news conference.
The men known as the “Cuban Five” were convicted in a 2001 trial of conspiring to spy on Cuban exile groups and U.S. military activities in Florida as part of a Cuba-backed espionage ring.
Gonzalez flew to Florida in an allegedly stolen crop duster in 1990, posing as a defector.
The case is little known outside the Cuban exile community, but it is a national cause in Cuba, where pictures of the five, with the word “Volveran” — They will return — are posted everywhere.
Cuba says the agents were unjustlyconvictedand excessively punished, and that they were only collecting information on Cuban exile groups planning actions against the island.
Gonzalez, a former military pilot, said he was enjoyingwalking the streets ofHavana again, but that he was not yet truly free because his four colleagues are still imprisoned.
One of Gonzalez’s codefendants is serving a double life sentence for his part in the shooting down in 1996 of aU.S. plane flownby an exile group that dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana. The other three are serving sentences that range from 18 to 30 years.