VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: Many patriotic Venezuelans have over the years found it expedient to remove themselves to Miami. There, they join multitudes of others enjoying the land of K-Mart from the conservative factions of the rest of Ibero-America. Most notably Cubans, of course, but also from every other country in the southern portion of our American hemisphere.

On Calle Ocho or many other neighborhoods one may find retired death-squad members living cheek-by-jowl with former military and civil officials of the various Fascist juntas which for so many years, from the Rio Grande del Norte to Tierra del Fuego did Washington's bidding.

• Very violent terrorism, including the sabotage of airliners most notably against Cuba but also against other nations has been based here and in the surrounding regions of Florida since 1960. That fine man, well known in Caracas, Luis Posada Carilles is resident here.

The communist island is always a target of such persons and has sought to protect itself by infiltrating agents of its intelligence service into the various anti-Castro militias. This is surely its practice today as it was yesterday.  Years ago, information provided by five of these agents was fed back to the FBI and other North American authorities in order to interfere with one of the many sabotage plots directed at the island.

Instead of arresting the would-be terrorists, US authorities used this information to back-track the infiltrators who provided it. These five men are serving long, in some cases, life sentences in some of the harshest of our prisons -- the places where train the guards of Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo.

Seeking the legal repatriation of these men is a prime goal of Cuban diplomacy and in recent weeks eloquent arguments for their liberation have been advanced by none other than Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada, one of Cuba's most senior officials. These show an impressive grasp of not only Cuban and international law but also of our own.

• But, unfortunately, Comrade Alarcon does not seem to understand that here in the new empire, the successor state to the now-dead republic, laws mean nothing. All such convictions as those of the five are decided on political grounds and the punishments for persons so targeted usually are far in excess of what is meted out to mere drug dealers, robbers, rapists or killers. So it is in this instance.

These men like many other politicals in the US Gulag will not see the light of day unless perhaps Cuba can find and arrest five US nationals engaged in sabotage or espionage and then arrange a swap. A commando raid against one or more of these prisons could be another method to be considered. But that has obvious drawbacks. To appeal to the helpless Obama administration, even if it were, as it is not, inclined to make a new approach to the island, or to the reactionary Supreme Court is utterly a waste of time.

There is here no law but that of reciprocity. I am surprised that Comrade Alarcon seems not to realize that.

From the imperial<