Alan Gross’s Wife Pleads to Raul Castro
HAVANA TIMES, March 21 — The wife of US government agent Alan Gross, currently serving time in a Cuban prison, called Tuesday on Raul Castro to authorize an urgent trip by her husband to the US, reported AFP.
“I hope that President Castro will now authorize the request for Alan to visit his sick mother, Evelyn, who is suffering from terminal lung cancer,” said Judy Gross.
Her request comes in the wake of permission granted by a US judge to allow a similar visit by Rene Gonzalez, a Cuban intelligence officer who is now on probation after serving over a decade in US prisons.
Gonzalez may be allowed to visit his ailing brother on the island, but must still obtain permission from the US Treasury Dept.
Gross, sentenced in April of last year to 15 years in prison, asked the Cuban president five days ago to permit him a two-week visit to see his mother, who will soon be turning 90.
Three differences, including the one dawn brings up:
(1) González has completed his sentence; he was in U.S. prisons for 13 years and is on “supervised release”.
Gross has many years of his sentence remaining; when he is on “supervised release”, then no doubt Cuba would grant permission for him to visit family in the United States (while knowing full well that he would most likely not return).
(2) We all know that González will return to the United States for the rest of his “supervised release”; he is loyal to the other men of the Cuban Five and would not want to do anything detrimental to their treatment.
We certainly don’t know that Gross would return to Cuba to serve out his sentence; he would have no reason to do that. Granting permission for Gross to leave for two weeks would be the same as ending his sentence.
(3) To begin with, any honest person who studies the cases of the Cuban Five knows very well that their trial was outrageously unjust and their sentences are undeserved. They were not plotting regime change in the United States. They were trying to defend Cuba against terrorist attacks.
Alan Gross was definitely plotting regime change in Cuba. He was breaking Cuban law and he knew he might get into trouble for doing that, but he was being paid half a million dollars for his activities in Cuba. USAID, a branch of the U.S. State Department, sent him there knowing he could be arrested for breaking Cuba’s Law 88, which makes it a violation of Cuban law to introduce into Cuba, accept, or distribute materials from the U.S. Government that would aid in implementing the Helms-Burton Law in Cuba.
Helms-Burton is U.S. law but, unlike the Platt Amendment, it has not become Cuban law and Cubans are determined to keep it that way.
big difference. Rene will be compelled to return for the sake of the other 4. But Gross will certainly never return to Cuba once his foot hits US soil.