MIAMI — A federal judge sentenced a Cuban spy to life in prison Thursday, the second man to be sentenced in a group of five Cubans convicted of seeking to spy on U.S. military bases and Cuban exile groups in Florida.
U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard handed down the sentence to Ramon Labanino, an agent convicted in June of espionage conspiracy for trying to spy on two south Florida bases.
On Wednesday, Lenard sentenced Gerardo Hernandez, the ringleader, to two life sentences, for espionage conspiracy, and for murder conspiracy in the deaths of four exiles whose two small planes were shot down near the communist-run island by Cuban fighter jets in February 1996.
Hernandez was the only one to be convicted of murder conspiracy. Prosecutors said he knew in advance about plans in Havana to shoot down planes belonging to the exile group Brothers to The Rescue.
Like Hernandez on Wednesday, Labanino spoke for about 20 minutes to the court before his sentencing, arguing that he simply sought to protect his country from the threat posed by exile groups.
President Fidel Castro's government has denounced Wednesday's sentencing of Hernandez, saying the United States turns a blind eye to violence plotted from U.S. soil by anti-communist Cuban Americans. In the latest salvo in a long campaign to get the five Cubans freed, Cuban officials and state media derided the U.S. judiciary and defended Hernandez as a patriotic hero.
At the end of a seven-month trial in June, three of the agents, Hernandez, Labanino and Antonio Guerrero, were found guilty of espionage conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. The espionage charge hinged on efforts to penetrate military bases, although the spy ring did not obtain any secret information.
Two other agents, Fernando Gonzalez and Rene Gonzalez, were convicted on lesser charges. The sentencing is being conducted over several days and all five plan to appeal.
The spy ring they were accused of belonging to was dismantled in 1998. Their trial involved dozens of witnesses and several thousand pages of evidence, much of it in the form of reports written by the Cuban agents to their handlers in Havana and decrypted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
While many exile groups are fiercely anti-Castro, they are generally peaceful. But in arguing that the five convicted men were simply patriots defending their country, Cuba cites four decades of aggression against the island, ranging from the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to a wave of bombings in 1997 and numerous assassination plots against Castro.