• Submitted by: manso
• United States
• Politics and Government
• 09 / 11 / 2010

---

La Alborada - September 10. On September 9, the Los Angeles Times published an article about Alan Gross, the USAID subcontractor who has been jailed in Cuba, with this headline: "Case of detained American hampers U.S. effort to ease Cuba ties."

Here is a headline we don't expect to see in the mass media: "Continuing subversive efforts hamper Cuba's effort to ease US ties."

The problem, we are told, is not that the US insists on attempting to overthrow the Cuban government, but that Cuba persists in catching its covert agents; if only the Cubans accepted US attempts to overthrow their government, relations would improve.

That last part is probably true. In fact, if Cuba allowed the US to install a government of its liking, relations would really improve. But that is not a likely turn of events.

The LAT article notes that Gross entered Cuba five times in nine months, a remarkable frequency for someone traveling with a tourist visa. Gross could not have gone for that long without realizing that he was acting undercover for the State Department under a contract in the category of --in USAID code words-- "just and democractic government", meaning one like the one in Honduras, and that he was repeatedly lying in declaring himself to be a tourist.

We don't know exactly what evidence Cuba accumulated during the nine months, nor what exactly Gross was up to. It does not help that the State Department, which regularly calls for transparency on the part of other countries, has been quite opaque in this matter.

The USAID contractor, DAI, which sub-contracted Gross, has issued a changing series of explanations. The one cited by the LAT, possibly provided for the article, is that he was helping Jewish groups "access Wikipedia, CD versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, things as benign as that. He was making it possible to access the Internet."

It's doubtful that many Jews in Cuba read Britannica-level English; even more doubtful that CD versions of the encyclopedia have anything to do with Internet,as any internaut knows. More likely, Gross was working within his specialty of
setting up Internet access through satellite connections; in this case,illegally, under Cuba's laws. Cuba's government finds its own satellite connections to be very expensive. How could end users in Cuba afford to pay for satelllite services? Who was to pay for the connections?

This is one of the mysteries in the case. One major unknown is the "Jewish community" at issue. Cuba's Jews are estimated to number from several hundred up to 1,500. They are mostly in Havana, but there are synagogues also in Camaguey and in Santiago --on the other end of the island--, as well as small congregations in a few other cities. Which community was the beneficiary of Gross' services? All of them? [None? klw]

The principal Jewish congregation in Havana is headed by Adela Dworin. She maintains good relations with the government and recently joined US nationals Jeffrey Goldberg and Julia Sweig for conversations with Fidel Castro. She has stated that she never met Gross. Who did?

It's understandable that State will not say publicly who was putatively working with USAID/DAI/Gross, but so far there is no way to tell even whether there was a real congregation or synagogue involved or whether the asserted Jewish-community end user was as virtual as the images on Internet.

When the arrest of Gross became news, the official spin was that the contract was just a leftover from the Bush years, leaving the impression that State under Obama and Clinton was unable to do anything with such a contract but to follow it to the end, despite its impact on relations with Cuba and the change in the White House. In fact, the post-Bush USAID has continued to issue similar contracts targeting special-interest groups with the end purpose of undermining the government of Cuba.

In the face of all this, the headline writers at LAT consider that the obstacle to better US-Cuba relations is the detention of one of the USAID agents, and not the USAID series of "democracy" programs that led to the detention.

The arrest cast a pall over conversations between the two governments, on a pending bill in Congress that would somewhat loosen trade with and travel to Cuba, and on the White House's possible move to reinstate some licensed travel. It also generated a shadow over the entire Jewish community in Cuba, as it is now not clear who, if anyone, was cooperating with USAID. Not a good outcome.

There may be a solution in the works, but only concerning Gross. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who recently went to Cuba, told the LAT that "I think what is happening, in my view, is fairly soon there will be a legal proceeding that will determine his offenses and his guilt...."Hopefully, the charge will be a visa violation and they'll let him go with time served."

In the meantime, it's full speed ahead at USAID and State. Those contracts are still being advertised and issued, their end goal remains the same, and the Helms-Burton law still requires the US government to pursue the overthrow of the Cuban government.

Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/117640