Stop Castro's Blackmail

MARCH 16, 2011


From The Miami Herald's Editoral Board:


Cuba's cynical maneuver


OUR OPINION: No improvement in U.S.-Cuba relations until Alan Gross is free

The 15-year verdict handed down by a Cuban "court" against U.S. citizen Alan Gross is the deeply unjust result of events that bear no relationship to due process in an impartial legal system. Let's call this cynical maneuver what it really is — blackmail.

The 61-year-old Mr. Gross is not a criminal of any sort. He's a chess piece manipulated by the Cuban regime in the relentless war against its own people. The Castro brothers want to stop ordinary Cubans from obtaining the slightest bit of information from the outside world from any independent source. Punishing this envoy from a private U.S. company financed by a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development is a convenient way to deter further efforts to circumvent Cuba's extensive system of communications surveillance.

Satellite phones are increasingly common instruments used to make calls around the world. But not in the Orwellian world run by Fidel and Raúl Castro and their paranoid minions. In Cuba, a satellite phone like the one Mr. Gross is accused of carrying for use by the island's tiny and impoverished Jewish community is deemed a dangerous weapon in an alleged "cyber war" being waged by the U.S. government to bolster a web of spies plotting to bring down the government.

In most any other country, a violation of customs regulations might result in a stiff fine and possible expulsion from the country. In Cuba, where the state controls all information outlets, violations that threaten the state's hegemony are seen as crimes that endanger the security of the state.

The real target of this mock-judicial charade is the "pro-democracy" funding from USAID designed to promote Cuba's budding civil society movement. People who can think for themselves, talk to each other and learn from each other without government intrusion represent a danger to the state's tyrannical masters, which practice various forms of mind control designed to snuff out any kind of independent action.

At a minimum, the punitive actions against Mr. Gross should throw a splash of cold water on what some call the warming in relations between Washington and Havana. He should be released unconditionally and immediately. As long as Alan Gross remains in jail, there can be no improvement in U.S.-Cuba relations.

President Obama came to office saying his administration would respond positively to an unclenched fist from previously hostile governments. We doubt that the mistreatment of Alan Gross by the Cuban government is what he had in mind as an appropriate response.

Oscar Elías Biscet, a longtime dissident, was released by the Cuban government last week after enduring years of suffering following an arrest in 2003 for the crime of speaking out against the government. His release is gratifying to his many admirers in and out of Cuba, but it doesn't change the fact that the physician should never have been imprisoned to begin with.

On Monday, the courageous Mr. Biscet called the Castro regime a "total dictatorship" that fears an informed citizenry. The actions against Alan Gross prove his point.