CARACAS, August 10.— "The five Cuban political prisoners in U.S. jails have already been detained for more than 24 hours in violation of the logical consequences of a U.S. court, whose unanimous finding overturned their sentences and ordered a retrial," Ricardo Alarcón stated last night on his arrival in this city with Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque to participate in the debates of the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students.

The president of the Cuban National Assembly of People’s Power told the press that the immediate release of the Five must be demanded. The first person to articulate this demand, he explained, was U.S. lawyer Paul McKenna, defending Gerardo Hernández.

The attorney stated that his client has been declared innocent and has spent seven years in a maximum security prison, subjected to a special regime, and that is completely illegal.

Alarcón recalled that a recent report from the UN Panel on Arbitrary Detentions found the legal proceedings against the Five to be illegal and arbitrary. In the face of that document the Washington authorities argued that they had been convicted in the courts. "But now it is not an international institution that has reached that conclusion, but a higher U.S. court than the Miami one which unjustly convicted our compatriots. So what pretext can they come up with now to not release them?" asked the Cuban leader.

"The U.S. government will have to decide whether to appeal the finding or not, but in either case it has to let them out now," he maintained. "The appeal could take time and the retrial as well, and they should be waiting for either step outside the jails.

"It is the first time in history that the Atlanta Court of Appeals has produced such a detailed document, of 93 pages, in order to analyze step by step how a lower court was mistaken. However, the major U.S. press is ignoring the fact and continues repeating the same lies and distortions deployed from before the trial of Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino and René González," the parliamentary president affirmed.

The first step in the wake of the Atlanta ruling is that the Five should be taken to the same place where they were arrested, Miami, and the second is that they should be released, Alarcón noted, highlighting the professionalism and ethics demonstrated by the Court of Appeals.

"The battle for the Five," he explained, "has not reached its end; it is just that a new chapter is beginning and we have to keep up the fight in every way we can."

Antonio, René, Gerardo, Ramón and Fernando are already aware of the Atlanta Court decision. According to Alarcón, when Gerardo was informed of the news he summed up the situation with his habitual wit: "The game is zero, zero and now we’re at bat."

In the opinion of the leader of the Cuban Parliament, for its own good the U.S. government should not persist in placing obstacles in the way of the release of the Five, because that would go against its already debilitated international prestige; among other things, it will become more and more clear that the power capable of convicting and imprisoning anti-terrorist combatants is at the same time protecting notorious terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles.