Cuban Five’s Rene Gonzalez Is Now Just Cuban

HAVANA TIMES — The US State Department agreed to allow former Cuban intelligence agent Rene Gonzalez –one of the Cuban Five– to give up his United States citizenship, allowing him to remain in Cuba, said Gonzalez on Thursday.

After serving 13 years and one month in US prisons on October 7, 2011, Gonzalez, also a citizen of Cuba, was released on the condition he stay for three years under “supervised parole” in the United States, reported DPA news.

Judge Joan Lenard allowed Gonzalez to travel to Cuba in late April under strict conditions to attend the funeral of his father.

During his stay in Havana, his lawyer Philip Horowitz filed a motion in federal court in Miami stating that his client would give up his US citizenship in exchange for finishing out his parole with his family in Cuba.

Judge Lenard accepted the proposal.

Gonzalez showed the press the Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States and noted that the next legal step will be to present the judge a ‘status report “to modify the conditions of probation.

Gonzalez is one of five Cuban agents imprisoned in the United States in 1998, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) dismantled the “Wasp” network that collected information on Cuban exile groups in Southern Florida.

The agents admitted belonging to Cuban intelligence, but said they were not spying on US national interests but anti-Castro groups that were planning violent actions against the island.

In 2001, they were convicted in a politically charged trial in Miami and handed sentences ranging from 15 years to two life sentences for conspiracy and operating as foreign agents without notifying the US government.

Numerous lawyers associations and judicial organizations around the world have condemned what they consider a bias trial after which the defendants were given unusually harsh sentences.