By Kevin McCauley
Burson-Marsteller is helping Judy Gross wage a campaign to free her husband who was arrested in Havana in 2009 and charged with smuggling high-tech communications equipment into Cuba.
Alan and Judy Gross |
Don Baer, B-M vice chairman and chief strategy officer, told the Jewish Daily Forward that his firm is working for Gross. He was a senior advisor in the Clinton White House.
Working as a subcontractor of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Alan Gross delivered communications equipment to Jewish centers in Cuba to enable them to access the Internet as part of the State Dept.’s “democracy building” program in Cuba.
A Cuban court sentenced Gross to 15 years in jail for participating in a “subversive project of the U.S. government that aimed to destroy the revolution through the use of communications systems out of the control of authorities.”
Judy Gross has appealed to the Cuban Government on humanitarian grounds to free her 62-year old husband who suffers from severe arthritis and has lost more than 100 pounds.
She has expressed disappointment in the Obama White House for failing to press Cuba harder for her husband’s release. Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. has said Gross was “unjustly imprisoned.”
The New York Times, in a March 20 editorial, accused Cuba of using Gross as a “bargaining chip” to gain the release of the so-called “Cuban Five,” the group jailed in 2001 after being convicted on spying on the Cuban exile community in Florida.
One of the five, Rene Gonzalez, is on probation in Florida. A federal judge has ruled mid-March that he could return to Cuba to visit his dying brother.
The Times believes the Cuban government should allow Gross to return to the U.S. to visit his cancer-stricken mother, and then “once both men are home, an agreement to keep them home should be made.”
It acknowledged that Gross misrepresented himself when he entered Cuba on a tourist visa and brought in communications gear without a license, but believes “a 15-year sentence for those violations is absurd and inhumane.”
Gonzalez returned from Cuba to the U.S. on April 13, as required by the deal made by the two countries.
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