Former Cuban Army Lt. Col. Jose Leonardo Fernandez Pupo, 53, came into U.S. custody after he commandeered a Cuban commuter flight shortly after takeoff from Bayamo, Cuba, on July 7, 1996. He fired a shot over the pilot's head, forcing the plane to land at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Although he admitted to the act, a federal jury in Washington acquitted Fernandez Pupo of sky piracy charges on May 29.
The 36-year veteran of Cuba's Army Intelligence Corps argued through a public defender that he was fleeing imminent arrest in his country. Friday, as part of his political asylum appeal to Immigration Judge John M. Bryant, Fernandez Pupo calmly detailed a steady disenchantment with the Castro regime following his 1990 return to Cuba from intelligence work in Angola. When ordered by the army to help suppress popular unrest in 1994, he testified, he instead secretly helped form the Aug. 5, 2000 movement, which was plotting to overthrow the Castro regime.
``I didn't understand that, if we were there to defend the population, how could we repress them?'' Fernandez Pupo testified through a translator, arguing that his initial distrust of the regime was triggered by the deaths of two prominent military men.
The first was Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, who was executed for drug trafficking in 1989. Fernandez Pupo said Ochoa was innocent and called him ``Fidel Castro's scapegoat.''
Then came the 1991 death of Gen. Jose Abrantes Fernandez, jailed for allegedly diverting Ministry of Interior funds. His cause of death was reported as a heart attack, which Fernandez Pupo disputed.
``As a Catholic person I don't believe it -- and will never believe
it,'' he testified. ``History in the future will find out who was the
assassin of this compatriot.''
Imminent arrest?
On July 3, 1996, he said, his official job was Chief of Mobilization for Guantanamo Province. But he was also secretly forming the movement, whose fellow members sent him a message that the state police were about to detain him for interrogation. So he fled -- with the help of other members of his secret group who hid pistols on the airplane he hijacked.
Only once did the 32-year member of the Communist Party display emotion during the two hours of testimony under questioning by Miami attorney Wilfredo Allen. His eyes turned red and welled up when he described the fate that befell his wife after he fled the island.
``My life is an inferno,'' she wrote in a letter, he testified. In addition, she was confined for a time to a psychiatric hospital, followed, had her home pelted with rocks by members of the so-called Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, and eventually fled their home in Guantanamo Province.
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials oppose the asylum request, arguing that despite his acquittal Fernandez Pupo is a criminal who sought to subvert the legal methods of migrating to the United States by hijacking the plane. In opening statements, federal attorney Bruce Dizengoff called Fernandez Pupo ``a charming individual, a charismatic individual, but a devious individual.''
Federal officials argue that Fernandez Pupo never mentioned the
anti-Castro movement during his debriefing at the Guantanamo Naval Base,
suggesting he invented the idea to bolster his bid for political
asylum. Few details
He also at one point testified that his colleagues in underground work were ``compañeros'' whom he had known ideologically and professionally for 30 years. The group got its name, he said, from the violent repression by Cuban armed forces of anti-government protests in Havana on Aug. 5, 1994.
The testimony is especially tantalizing at a time when several bombs some believe to be set by an internal, underground Cuban opposition have exploded at Havana hotels popular with foreign tourists.
Testifying on behalf of Fernandez Pupo, Cuban human rights activist Armando Valladares testified that he believed Cuban military men were behind the blasts because they had access to both the explosives and the ability to come and go from the hotels at will. Valladares spent 22 years in Cuban jails, ending in 1982. From 1986 until 1990 he served as Ronald Reagan's U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
He also testified that just four years ago Fernandez Pupo would have easily won political asylum -- and not have to resort to a hearing before a judge with the Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review.
The hearing was adjourned until Sept. 2 to give Allen and co-counsel Luis Fernandez, also of Miami, time to bring in witnesses to rebut the State Department's position that Fernandez Pupo had other means of leaving the island.
Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald