ATLANTA — The trial of Immigration and Naturalization Service official Mariano Faget has been under way for more than a week in Miami, and everything that has come out in court confirms that the case is a politically motivated frame-up.
Cuban-born Faget was arrested in February on charges of being a Cuban government mole. His arrest was on the eve of a scheduled Federal Court hearing on the fate of six-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez, held by his Miami relatives since his December rescue from the Florida Straits. His father, Juan Miguel, and the Cuban government have been demanding Elian's return to Cuba.
The case was an obvious attempt to depict an INS riddled with Cuban operatives so as to discredit the service's ruling that Elian belonged with his father.
In fact, Faget was not a Cuban operative, as the prosecutors themselves have been forced to admit at trial. Their theory now is that Faget was trying to ingratiate himself with Cuban officials for commercial advantage, even though the charge is technically espionage, passing on classified information to someone not authorised to receive it.
However, the actual information that Faget is accused of passing on was false and was designed not to be kept secret — surely a sign that no such "espionage" ever took place.
Fabrications
Faget was passed false and fabricated information, deliberately designed to alarm him, which revealed that a former member of the Cuban Interests Section in the US, as well as four other Cuban government officials, were defecting. The former diplomat had been the main contact between Faget and a company he and a lifelong friend, New York businessman Pedro Font, had set up to do business in Cuba if and when that became legally possible.
Font was scheduled to meet with the "defecting" diplomat's successor the very same day the government gave Faget the news of the phony defection. Faget immediately called his friend from his own office at Miami INS headquarters to give him a heads-up, afraid that Font would become caught in spy versus spy games between Washington and Havana.
It is quite evident that no-one in the government believed the cock-and-bull story it fed the press about Faget and Font being part of a spy ring operated by the fake defector and his successor in the interests section.
For, obviously, if they were real spies, Faget and Font would have realised that if the defection story were true, they would soon be outed, and if it were false, that meant the FBI was on to them and they were the targets of a sting. Either way, both could be expected to make a run for it.
But instead of immediately moving to arrest Faget and his co-conspirator, the government waited almost an entire week before calling the hapless bureaucrat in for questioning. And they allowed Font, supposedly Faget's superior in the spy ring, to travel out of the country, to China of all places.
Violations
The Miami trial has also given a good picture of the pigpen of US criminal "justice" and how its procedures are routinely violated by police, government agents and prosecutors.
The FBI has readily admitted that the real reason they arrested and charged Faget is that he refused to become a witness against his lifelong friend. He was not initially a suspect, they now claim, and only became one when he refused to join the government in framing Font as a Cuban spy.
As a result, prosecutors have now charged Faget with making false statements to the FBI, an obvious ploy to give the jury a possible compromise option, finding him guilty of the lesser count of fibbing to the FBI while declaring him innocent of espionage.
The fiction that Faget wasn't a suspect also covers the FBI's failure to properly warn Faget that he was the target of an investigation, that he had a right to remain silent and that he had a right to have a lawyer present. If he had been a suspect, then none of his statements could be used against him.
Further, the right to cross-examination has been blatantly violated. An FBI "expert" was allowed to testify that the two Cuban diplomats involved were, in fact, spies; no cross examination was allowed.
This is in spite of the fact that one of those diplomats, Jose Imperatori, was in the United States at the time the case broke. Ordered to leave the country, he refused to do so voluntarily, offering instead to give up his diplomatic immunity so he could testify to establish his own innocence and that of Faget.
Instead of allowing him to do so, the US government kicked him out of the country as soon as his immunity expired — thus putting him beyond the reach of a defence subpoena.
It is not without irony that Mariano Faget, a lifelong government bureaucrat who never hid his antipathy for the Cuban revolution, has become a victim of the system he served so loyally for so long.
It is striking confirmation of the old Wobbly slogan, "an injury to one is an injury to all", for the methods used against Faget were those made routine in the government's campaigns against the labour movement, against blacks, undocumented workers, student radicals, and communists, while the Mariano Fagets of this world cheered the government on.
For Mariano Faget himself, this has been a learning experience. In his testimony, Faget recalled what was said at a meeting with Jose Imperatori in the lobby of a Miami hotel, a meeting that was surreptitiously taped by the FBI.
"He asked me to come visit Cuba", Faget said.
"I told him I couldn't do that because I wouldn't be safe there. We weren't talking about anything subversive, but I told him that if we were having this conversation in Cuba, he would be arrested and I would be arrested for plotting to overthrow the government.
"I told him that the only country in the world where we could have this conversation was one with freedom and liberty like this one", Faget said.
"Of course he disagreed.
"The facts bore out that I was probably wrong and he was probably right."
BY GILBERTO FIRMAT