It's June 25th, 1989, at a courthouse in Havana, Cuba.

One of the nation's greatest heroes is in the dock, and is accused of crimes that have shocked Cuba's revolutionary hente.

Arnaudo Ochoa Sanchez, tall, slim, debonair, stands dressed in his grey military uniform, bed decked in ribbon

showcasing his remarkable loyalty to the communist cause, and it's almost unrivaled.

Ochoa joined Fidel Castro's revolution in 1957, two years before Castro-toppel dictator Fulhencio

Battista, and began throwing foreign businesses out of Cuba, including its drug traffickers.

He was the only survivor of a botched attempt to invade the Dominican Republic in 1959, and he helped repel the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

Ochoa had also seen action in a multitude of Cold War theatres, Angola, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ethiopia.

By 1984, Castro awarded Ochoa the title of Hero of the Republic of Cuba, its highest honor.

He's as close as a godless state gets to a saint, which makes Ochoa's downfall, his alleged downfall, all the more spectacular.

A judge reads out the list of charges, corruption, consulting Consulting with drug traffickers. Smuggling cocaine,

diamonds, ivory, sugar, and, gravest of them all, treason. Ochoa doesn't deny a word of it. He doesn't

dare. Instead, he offers up communist contrition, an apparatchiks mere corper.

While our party was declaring that it had nothing to do with drug trafficking, I was involved in it, says Ochoa.

I want to tell my comrades at arms that I believe I have betrayed my country, and I say in all

honesty, one pays for treason with one's life.

I'm sure it doesn't go into the grisly details of the shady deal that looks like it's brought an end to his career, and quite possibly his life.

That is the job of state propagandists, who over the coming weeks tell an incredible tale of graft and high crime, Medellin cartel

men, six tons of cocaine, Florida, and a $3.4 million bribe. Ochoa has done atrocious

things, he admits, in a procession of political aphorisms aimed, perhaps, at sparing himself from the bullets of a firing squad.

Everything was his own doing, he says. Neither Raoul Castro, the vice president, nor his bearded

brother, El Hefe had anything to do with it, he says. Were he to be executed, Ochoa adds,

...