Allegations of the U.S. government's media campaigns to convict five Cuban antiterrorists arrested in that country in 1998, and the increase of the international struggle for their liberation marked this year the main events surrounding the case.

Closing the Seventh Legislature of Parliament, its president, Ricardo Alarcon, said that several years ago Washington designed a crusade to create a hostile environment facilitating the sentence of these Cubans, who were in the northern country keeping track of terrorist groups based in Miami.

The Five, as Ramon Labañino, Fernando Gonzalez, Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero and Rene Gonzalez are known, were victims of some media, used to condemn them beforehand in Miami and later to silence the case, recalled the parliamentary leader.

"Washington wants to bury the evidence of the profound injustice against Gerardo (Hernandez), punished with two life sentences plus 15 years, and the judicial farce of a process full of hidden or manipulated evidences", he stressed.

Martin Garbus, attorney for Gerardo, had filed a new petition (available in www.thecuban5.org) declaring the judgment violates the Basic Law, "therefore it should be declared invalid, and he and his colleagues released."

According to the resource of defense, there are documents showing that the U.S. government paid a lot of journalists to publish negative articles about Gerardo and his companions.

The legal document states that the "secret subversion of print media, radio and television by the government (the United States) in order to get a conviction has no precedent" and "violated the integrity of the trial and the Due Process Clause of the Constitution."

Garbus also argues that the Government, through millions of dollars in illegal payments and at least a thousand articles published over a period of six years, intervened in the trial and convinced the jury to declare the defendants guilty. "The conviction should be overturned," he said.

But Washington refuses to give evidences, while international campaigns in 2012 have been engaged in pressuring the White House to show all hidden evidences and to release the antiterrorists, when the legal battle is about to conclude.

In September, 14 years since being imprisoned, many voices were raised in favor of their release.

Messages through social network, letters to U.S. President, Barack Obama, walks, lectures, newspaper advertisements and billboards with images of the Five all over important cities in the world were some of the actions taken.

This year, in Washington there were also a day called Five days for the Five, in which offices of more than 40 senators and representatives were visited to tell them about the case, an initiative supported by several countries sending letters demanding the release.

As well in November, in the eastern Cuban province of Holguin, was held the traditional international colloquium for the freedom of the antiterrorists, attended by activists from 47 countries.

The forum, in its eighth edition, reviewed the actions agreed in 2011, and charted new strategies to add voices and lead more strongly the case to the public, especially to the U.S.

Parliamentarians from Cuba and other countries, presidents, Nobel Prize winners, religious leaders, institutions defending human rights, international organizations and some 350 organizations in solidarity with Cuba, among others, also reinforced their demands for release.

ARBITRARINESS IN THE PROCESS

The Five were arrested in 1998 for following the actions of violent anti-Cuban groups in South Florida, and convicted there to severe prison sentences.

The prestigious Chilean attorney Juan Guzman, who was responsible for nearly a hundred complaints against dictator Augusto Pinochet, said the trial in the United States lacks any support.

In an interview with Prensa Latina, the former judge of the Court of Appeals in Santiago de Chile assured intimate knowledge of the Cuban's court file, and he could notice "that deep down, with mere appreciations, a crime never committed was made up."

"They invented a charge having endangered the national security of the United States', something the U.S. military itself denied at the hearing," said Guzman, who attended in 2007 as an observer to the process presented by defense lawyers in the Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

In the trial, which began in the 2000 fall and lasted seven months, experts such as the former head of the Southern Command, General Charles Whilhem, retired Gen. Edward Atkinson, Admiral Eugene Carol, Colonel George Busckner and even the Ex director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, James Clapper, denied that the Five had access to classified or secret data.

"That caught my attention: the judges failed against that pronouncement, when members of the armed forces of the United States said that, at no time, the Cubans' actions represented a threat to U.S. national security," said the lawyer.

The main accusation against them, recognized by prosecutors and the judge from the indictment until the last day of the trial, was that they had, peacefully, without weapons, penetrated anti-Cuban terrorist groups in order to inform Cuba about their criminal plans, however, all the time they were treated by the press in Miami as spies and they were sentenced as such.

After a thorough review of the relevant documents, on August 9, 2005, a panel of three judges of the Court issued its opinion, a detailed 93-page analysis of the trial and evidence, reversing the convictions on the basis that they did not receive a fair trial in Miami.

A new trial was ordained, but in August 2006 the Full Court reversed that decision.

Finally, they received sentences ranging from 15 years to two life sentences plus 15 years, the latter imposed on Gerardo Hernandez.

Rene González was released after serving the penalty, but he is obliged to stay for three years in U.S. territory, under the regime of supervised release, which activists consider an additional punishment.

The lawyer admitted that, with the arrival of Barack Obama to the White House, he hoped the president decree an amnesty law that favored Cubans. "However, so far he has not made a decision," said Guzman.

Since the beginning of the confinement, implementation of practices considered by human rights organizations as psychological torture started, such as long periods of confinement in the hollow, the refusal for them to be visited by their relatives, and obstacles to a fair trial and process.

The U.S. government has repeatedly refuse visa for Olga Salanueva and Adriana Perez, wives of Gerardo and Rene respectively, to meet them.

According to data from the island, more than 3400 Cubans have been victims of actions organized and financed on U.S. soil, where anti-Cuban organizations that had penetrated the Five operate with total impunity.

For academics as French journalist Salim Lamrani, the cruelty against them is revenge against Cuba for refusing to follow orders from the White House since 1959.

The biggest example is the case of Gerardo Hernandez, sentenced to live in prison for a crime that never happened, for an event with which he had nothing to do, for a fabricated charge that the prosecutors themselves admitted they could not prove and had tried to remove.

Indeed many people are struck by the contrast between the freedom these violent groups have when carrying out their terrorist actions and the severity with which those who were trying to prevent them are punished.