Something’s cooking
By Fernando Ravsberg
From BBC Mundo
If you’re going to spy on the United States, I recommend that you do it for countries like Israel or Russia, with whom it seems Washington has some sort of “exchange agreement” whereby, if you’re captured by the F.B.I., you’ll be swiftly returned to your country.
In that case, the U.S. judiciary won’t intervene and, if some judge mistakenly does meddle, the charges will disappear as soon as the White House and the Kremlin agree to “how many of your agents for how many of ours.”
Things sour when espionage is produced between Cuba and the United States. That’s where realism and good manners end. To begin with, neither party admits that its spies are spies; on the contrary, they are all pictured as humanitarian activists.
The members of the Wasp Network – sentenced by the U.S. courts to harsh prison terms – are known in Cuba as “the Five Heroes,” men whose only task was to report on the violent acts being organized in Miami against the island.
In turn, Washington sells us Alan Gross as a kind of missionary who traveled secretly to Cuba with the noble task of helping the Jewish community to connect to the Internet. A communications fighter.
He is described as a “contractor,” a word that gives a neutral connotation to his activities. However, contractors are not members of the Peace Corps; on the contrary, there are more than 100,000 in Afghanistan right now, carrying out military and intelligence operations.
The good thing (for the spies) is that their governments never stop trying to rescue them. For the past 10 years, Havana has carried out one campaign after another; in Washington, a lot of people have been worried since Gross was captured last year.
The Cuba government even proposed exchanging the 75 political prisoners it held since 2003 for the five agents, but the White House rejected the offer. It was a logical response, since the dissidents caused more damage to the Revolution from prison than out of it.
So much so, that when the opposition reached its lowest point in activism, the only flame that remained lit was related to those prisoners – the Sunday marches by the Ladies in White and the hunger strikes.
Things have changed, however. A colleague who arrived from Washington recently, told me that all the politicians who spoke with asked him about Alan Gross. They seem much more interested now that the prisoner is an American.
The lady Secretary of State said that Washington would pressure the Cuban government, and I wondered how it would do it. A few days later, one of the five imprisoned agents was punished by being sent to “the hole” for two weeks.
The Cuban Parliament screamed bloody murder, denounced that it wasn’t a disciplinary measure by the prison but an F.B.I. directive, and demanded the immediate return of Gerardo Hernández to the “normalcy” of his cell.
Meanwhile, the word in Cuba is that Gross lost 40 kilograms since he entered prison, more than eight months ago. Still, Havana knows that, when the time comes to negotiate with Washington, the contractor “will weigh” more than all the Cuban political prisoners together.
But the suffering of the spies on both sides might be close to an end if we trust in the certainty with which Fidel Castro has announced that his five agents will be back in Cuba before December.
That prediction indicates that something is cooking and it could only be a prisoner exchange. So, Alan Gross may also be back with his loved ones very soon. It is good news for his family – and the families of the five Cubans.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/mundo/cartas_desde_cuba/2010/08/algo_se_cuece.html#more
