25 Feb 2021
Miami’s Cuban-American community held a commemoration event Wednesday to honor the lives of Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales, four Americans killed by the Communist Party of Cuba while flying over international waters in 1996.
The four men were members of a group known as Brothers to the Rescue that organized humanitarian missions over the Caribbean, seeking to find wayward Cuban refugees adrift at sea attempting to reach Florida. The Cuban military shot their planes down without any provocation and has never justified the murders, killing all four. Only one person Gerardo Hernandez, a spy convicted of sharing pivotal information with the Castro regime that allowed it to target the victims ever went to prison for the crime. President Barack Obama freed Hernandez and returned him to Cuba in exchange for hostage Alan Gross; prior to his release, the Obama administration arranged to ship Hernandez’s sperm to Cuba to allow him t
17 Dec 2020
The Cuban government appointed Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, the only individual arrested in relation to the murder of four American citizens by the Castro regime in 1996, to the State Council, a national regime entity, on Thursday.
The move represents a promotion for the spy, who until this week led the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), Cuba’s specialized neighborhood espionage network.
Hernández was a member of the “Cuban Five,” a spy collective sent to infiltrate pro-democracy groups in Miami. He was serving two life sentences and 15 years in prison for conspiracy to murder when then-President Barack Obama freed him in 2014, allowing them to return to Cuba to a hero’s welcome.