Top US diplomats used a high-level meeting with their Cuban counterparts on Friday to call for the release of an American held in a maximum security prison without charge for nearly three months.
Cuba alleges Alan Gross is a spy whose arrest proves Washington is still out to topple Cuba’s communist government.
Gross’ family maintains he is a veteran development worker who came to Cuba to distribute communications equipment to Jewish groups.
Both the US and Cuba also offered restrained praise for the discussions, which lasted about five hours and focused on migration issues. The Cubans said the talks at an undisclosed location in Havana were positive and respectful, while the US called them part of a larger, constructive process.
The US also said in a statement that its delegation, led by Craig Kelly, deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs and the highest-ranking US official to visit in years, “raised the case of the US citizen detained in Cuba and called for his immediate release.”
In its own assessment, Cuba made no mention of Gross’ arrest or of US officials’ broaching the issue, saying only that the meeting “took place in an atmosphere of respect.”
Elizardo Sanchez, head of the independent Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said a group of Cuban dissident leaders met with a US delegation late on Friday.
Gross was in Cuba on a program funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). He has been held since early December at Havana’s high-security Villa Marista jail.
The little-known USAID program in Cuba was begun under former US president George W. Bush and devotes millions of dollars to the promotion of democracy in Cuba.
There has been speculation Cuba will seek to exchange the 60-year-old Gross for five Cuban agents imprisoned in Miami since the 1990s after being convicted of spying.
Cuba considers them anti-terrorist fighters who were trying to shut down a bombing campaign by anti-Castro Cuban-Americans.
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