HAVANA – President Raul Castro on Tuesday attended the funeral in Havana of Carmen Nordelo, the mother of one of the five Cuban agents jailed in the United States for spying.

Fidel Castro, Raul’s older brother and predecessor, sent a wreath to Colon cemetery for the 76-year-old Nordelo, who died on Monday.

She was the mother of Gerardo Hernandez, now serving two life prison sentences for espionage and for his alleged role in the Cuban air force’s 1996 downing of two small planes belonging to the Miami exile group Brothers to the Rescue, an incident in which four men aboard the aircraft died.

Hernandez, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labañino, Fernando Gonzalez and Antonio Guerrero were arrested by the FBI in 1998 and found guilty in a Miami federal court three years later.

While acknowledging that the “five heroes” are intelligence agents, Havana says they were spying not on the U.S. government, but on Miami’s Cuban exile community.

Cuba says the men were sent to Florida in the wake of several terror bombings in Havana allegedly masterminded by anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles.

A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta overturned the spies’ convictions in 2005, citing the “prejudices” of Miami’s anti-Castro Cubans.

But the full court later nixed the spies’ bid for a new trial and reinstated the original convictions, and the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear their appeal. EFE