I just watched the 60 minutes interview with Alan Gross, or at least the portion of the interview that they choose to broadcast. Notably missing was the fact that he has reportedly agreed to work for normalize relations between the US and Cuba, which I thought might be part of the interview, and probably was, but the show did not broadcast anything like that.
This was about as disappointing as Steve Colbert’s interview on CBS’s Late Show a few days ago with Gloria Estefan, who said that “nothing” has changed in Cuba, and they talked about how her family was refugees ( without mentioning that her father was a soldier and personal bodyguard for Batista’s family, before he became part of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion, & that the CIA also discussed recruitment with her to the Agency). None of the comments were too surprising from her, but instead of Colbert asking the slightest probing question, he showed a picture of a raft and commented on how many (18) were on such a small raft, as an indication of how bad things are in Cuba. Not a single reference to the fact that the U.S. limits the number of Cubans who can come here legally and safely, but meanwhile allows an unlimited number of Cubans to come in illegally & dangerously, & then grants them aid & a preferential road to citizenship – in contrast with the way people from every other country are treated.
But back to 60 minutes. No one here is in position to challenge what Gross says he was told or experienced in prison, despite the implausibility of his claims that interrogators told him they would pull out his fingernails or hang him (Cuba has had an effective moratorium on the death penalty for over a decade, even for murderers & terrorists, and I do not believe it has used hanging in memory).
One CBS statement was demonstrably false: “Their prisoners were celebrated in Havana as the Cuban Five — intelligence agents sentenced to long terms in US prisons for espionage.” In fact, none of the Five were ever charged with, nor convicted of, espionage; and there was no evidence of any classified US Government information ever claimed or presented in their lengthy trial. All of them were tasked with monitoring extremist Cubans in Florida with a history of terrorist actions against Cuba; and only three of the five were even charged with “conspiracy to commit” espionage, which meant that the Miami jury was asked to convict them of what they would have done, even if they did not actually do that. And of course there was no mention of terrorist actions against Cuba being launched from southern Florida.
Here are some more important facts that did not make it into the broadcast:
USAID also was running projects under false pretenses, trying to trick Cubans into sharing their inclinations with the U.S. government, so this could be used to identify and recruit Cubans to become active dissidents or an opposition to their government.
Gross was paid $500,000 by USAID, to set up satellite communications that could not be traced, and using equipment that was not available on the open market, but limited to high-level state department or CIA agents, as documented by the AP (& mentioned in the USA Today report on this show, but not by CBS).
The Jewish community in Cuba did not request or welcome his project, which was an undercover USAID scheme.
The U.S. restrictions were at the same time preventing Cuba from having wide broadband needed to provide effective Internet service to it’s population overall, but CBS’s Scott Pelley promoted Gross as a courageous idealist, saying “You were bringing free speech to an oppressed people under the nose of a government that did not want that to happen.”
Gross, who said he lost 110 pounds, was morbidly obese before his imprisonment, though CBS did show one picture of him looking very haggard and emaciated.
Art Heitzer
