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.
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