U.S. government agencies have different criteria for sanctioning adversaries and preventing them from engaging in the U.S. economy. Our biggest foreign adversaries, like China, benefit from this lack of interagency coordination, which must come to an immediate...
Three bills, led by U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), which prevent the Chinese Communist Party from taking advantage of our nation, has successfully passed the U.S. House of Representatives and are now awaiting Senate consideration. “The House of Representatives has...
Annually, Brazil hosts “Operation Formosa” which are military exercises conducted by several nations. This year, the Chinese Communist Party’s armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), has been invited to participate. Beijing participating in the exercises,...
Since Hamas’s horrific October 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel, U.S. cities and campuses are seeing a disturbing rise in antisemitic, pro-terrorist violence. There remains concern that participants in these acts are here on visas and are not being held...
U.S. Navy destroyer USS Carney, homeported at Naval Station Mayport, Florida after an eight-month deployment to the Middle East. This historic deployment saw 51 engagements with Iranian-backed terrorists, the most engagements with a foreign adversary by a Naval vessel...
The Office of the Surgeon General announced a public advisory warning of alarmingly high levels of parental stress. The advisory and the Surgeon General’s accompanying op-ed, offered a set of “solutions” that fail to address the actual wants and needs of struggling...
“Earlier today, I asked Unanimous Consent that a July 29, 2011 editorial by The Washington Post entitled “Cuba Should Free Alan Gross” be entered in the official Senate Record.
“I condemn in the strongest possible terms the Cuban regime’s unjust incarceration of Alan Gross. As the editorial highlights and as the Castro regime well knows, Mr. Gross is simply a humanitarian who was seeking to help the Jewish community in Cuba access the Internet. Only the most oppressive, totalitarian regime would seek to jail someone for trying to expand access to uncensored information.
“As this editorial notes, “The regime in Havana is so brittle and creaky that it blanches at the idea of its subjects communicating too freely with the outside world, lest they undermine a communist system whose attempts at economic development have delivered scanty results.”
“I also want to take this opportunity to once again call on the Obama administration to halt its new Cuba policies that liberalize travel and expand allowable remittances to Cuba. This unilateral gift to the Castro brothers by the Obama administration is totally unwarranted, especially in light of Mr. Gross’ case as well as the ongoing repression of the Cuban people.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/cuba-should-free-alan-gross/2011/07/29/gIQAwz77hI_story.html
ALAN P. GROSS, the U.S. Agency for International Development subcontractor who committed what Cuba considers the unconscionable offense of making the Internet available to members of its minuscule Jewish community, has almost exhausted possible judicial appeals of his 15-year prison sentence.
Mr. Gross, 62, a resident of Potomac, was arrested in December 2009 as he prepared to fly home from Havana. Convicted on trumped-up charges in March this year, he appeared a few days ago before Cuba’s highest tribunal to appeal his conviction and plead for release. The outcome of his appeal, expected in the coming days, is certain to be dictated one way or another by Cuban leader Raul Castro — and will be a sign of whether Cuba is remotely interested in better relations with Washington.
Cuba, besides its repressive ally Venezuela, is virtually the only place in the Western Hemisphere where distributing laptop computers and satellite phone equipment intended to connect people to the Internet — Mr. Gross’s supposed “crime” — could be construed as subversive. The regime in Havana is so brittle and creaky that it blanches at the idea of its subjects communicating too freely with the outside world, lest they undermine a communist system whose attempts at economic development have delivered scanty results.
There are plenty of humanitarian reasons to release Mr. Gross, who has been confined for 19 months. Somewhat overweight when he was arrested, Mr. Gross has lost 100 pounds, according to his wife and other American visitors who have been allowed to meet with him; he also suffers from gout, ulcers and arthritis. His daughter is struggling with cancer, and his mother is reported to be in poor health.
Cuban authorities have portrayed Mr. Gross as a spy involved in an enterprise aimed at undermining the regime. That seems unlikely in the extreme. In fact, Mr. Gross, a veteran development worker who had minimal command of Spanish, was part of a democratization project of the sort the U.S. government runs in countries all over the world.
At the time of his arrest, Mr. Gross was working for Development Alternatives Inc., a Bethesda firm that had won a $6 million government contract to promote democracy in Cuba. His work consisted mainly of providing computers and satellite phones to Cuban Jews, a community thought to number about 1,500, so they could access the Internet, whose use is restricted in Cuba, and contact Jewish communities beyond Cuba’s shores. Not exactly a cloak-and-dagger project likely to bring the Castro brothers to their knees.
The Obama administration has made it clear that any improvement in relations with Cuba is on hold pending Mr. Gross’s release. That’s a fitting response to the communist regime’s knee-jerk behavior in persecuting an American whose “crime,” if any, may have been an excess of naivete.