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December 18, 2014

Cuban Five, U.S. Contractor Alan Gross Released From Prison 
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The softening of U.S.-Cuba relations also came with the release of
prisoners in both the United States and Cuba. Cuba released Alan Gross,
a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) on humanitarian grounds. Gross was arrested in 2009 and
sentenced to 15 years for smuggling in illegal technology for opposition
groups. Cuba also released a top spy identified by Newsweek as Rolando
Sarraff Trujillo, a former cryptographer at Cuba's Directorate of
Intelligence who worked secretly for the CIA. In exchange for Trujillo's
release, the United States has freed the three remaining members of the
Cuban Five — a group of Cuban intelligence officers arrested in
the United States in 1998 and convicted of conspiracy to commit
espionage. They say they were not spying on the United States, but
trying to monitor violent right-wing Cuban exile groups responsible for
attacks inside Cuba. We will host a roundtable on Cuba after headlines.

 

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