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“MIAMI: An impossible place for justice” |
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By that time, the defense had filed no less than five motions to move the trial to a more neutral site. It was obvious that Miami was the last place in the world the five Cubans could get a fair trial. Social science backs up Guerrero’s observation. One of the nation’s foremost experts in the Cuban exile phenomenon, Dr. Lisandro Pérez[1], wrote, “the possibility of selecting twelve citizens of Miami-Dade County who can be impartial in a case involving acknowledged agents of the Cuban government is virtually zero.”
Only in Miami would these defendants be tried by a jury drawn from a community permeated by what Dr. Pérez termed an “exile ideology” which favors US military intervention to topple Cuba’s government and supports armed invasions by exiles––attitudes confirmed by independent polling unrelated to the case. So well-known are these positions––and the consequences of diverging from them-- that prospective jurors readily admitted they would be afraid of retaliation “if I didn’t come back with a verdict in agreement with what the Cuban community feels, how they feel the verdict should be.”
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