Mission Against Terror

Directed by: Bernie Dwyer and Roberto Ruiz
When: 1 pm Saturday April 2 2005
Where: HCC Performing Arts Theater

When: 2 pm Sunday April 3 2005
Where: HCC Ybor Room

Mission Against Terror by Bernie Dwyer and Roberto Ruiz is a co-produced Irish-Cuban documentary on the case of the five Cuban men imprisoned for between 15 years and double-life plus 15 years on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage and related offenses.

Defense lawyers for the Cuban Five (as Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, René González and Antonio Guerrero have become known) insist that the men are not spies, were never a threat to US national security, never used violence and have been wrongfully convicted and excessively punished.

What the Cuban Five and their attorneys insist, and what is forcefully demonstrated in Dwyer and Ruiz's documentary, is that the men were actually trying to prevent further violent actions against Cuba and her people and against the United States itself by infiltrating ultra right wing terrorist organizations based in South Florida.

But the sorry history of anti-Cuban terrorism launched from the US does not begin with the trial of these five men. Mission Against Terror documents over 45 years of what one ex-CIA agent called the 'undeclared war' waged by terrorist groups against Cuba that has cost many lives on both sides of the Florida Straits.

Through interviews with some of the key protagonists in that bloody covert war, the documentary presents disturbing evidence that the so called “Land of the Free” is actually a haven to some of the world's most heinous criminals and killers.