Cuba: did USAID KO deal for Gross release?
Cuba: did USAID KO deal for Gross release?
Submitted by Weekly News Update... on Tue, 04/15/2014 - 11:43 Caribbean Theater
Cuba
politics of cyberspace
US citizen Alan Gross, serving a 15-year prison term in Cuba for his work there as a contractor for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), held a liquids-only hunger strike from April 3 to 11 to protest his treatment by both the Cuban and the US governments. According to Scott Gilbert, Gross's Washington, DC-based lawyer, the prisoner started his hunger strike after he learned about an April 3 Associated Press report on ZunZuneo, the "Cuban Twitter" service that USAID launched after his arrest in December 2009. Gross was charged with seeking to subvert the Cuban government by supplying dissidents with Internet technology, and ZunZuneo had the potential to damage his legal case.
A statement released by a public relations firm hired by Gross's family said he had called off the fast at the request of his 91-year-old mother but that he planned to continue protesting. "There will be no cause for further intense protest when both governments show more concern for human beings and less malice and derision toward each other," Gross added, according to the statement. (Miami Herald, April 13)
Actions by USAID officials and contractors may in fact have directly sabotaged efforts to arrange an early release for Gross, an April 9 article by Newsweek reporter Jeff Stein suggested, citing Fulton Armstrong, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Council (NSC) Latin America specialist who worked as an aide to then-senator John Kerry (D-MA) in 2010. According to Armstrong, the Cuban government was willing to consider freeing Gross if the US rolled back some of its "regime change" programs in Cuba. Armstrong said he and an aide to then-representative Howard Berman (D-CA) got an agreement from top USAID and State Department officials for the rollback.
Cuban officials "responded very positively and said that the cleanup—which they understood would be done in phases—would certainly help them make the case for expedited procedures for Gross's release," Armstrong told Newsweek. But some USAID officials refused to go along with the plan. "They reassured their contractors and grantees that, despite rumors of change, business would continue as usual—information that would surely reach Cuban ears—and they later leaked to the press that, in fact, program funding remained unchanged and the reforms were not being implemented," Armstrong said. "At that point, the discussions about program reforms to gain Gross's release ended." (Newsweek, April 9)
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