The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, is against the Broadcasting Board of Directors (BBG) because it has “unlawfully failed to disclose specific US government-paid contracts with journalists” who published materials that were negative to Cuba and prejudicial to the case of the Cuban Five.

The legal complaint states: “The public is entitled to know to what
extent the US government covertly paid journalists who wrote stories related to the case that were likely to reach and influence both the jury pool and the seated jury while the US simultaneously carried out these prosecutions.”

According to the complaint, the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), submitted a request on January 23, 2009, to the BBG seeking public disclosure of the BBG’s funding of journalists including specifically identified contracts between the BBG and these journalists. However, the government is unlawfully refusing to produce these documents.

In 2006, a FOIA request filed by the Miami Herald newspaper disclosed for the first time the information that key South Florida journalists had been paid by the government before and during the trial of the Cuban Five. The lawsuit seeks to further amplify this information and to further expose the role of the government in what amounts to jury tampering, biasing not only the jury pool but even the actual seated jury in a trial in which the jury was not sequestered, and subjected daily to a barrage of negative media coverage of the Five.

Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerrero, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labañino and Fernando Gonzalez – internationally known as the Cuban 5 – were arrested in 1998 and condemned to harsh sentences ranging from 15 years to two life terms for monitoring anti-Cuba extremist groups in South Florida that were planning and carrying out terrorist attacks against the Caribbean nation.