The Cuban spy traded to the US for jailed Cuban intelligence agents who was out of contact with his family for nearly a month is in the US and is doing fine, his sister told reporters in an interview on Tuesday.
Vilma Sarraff, who lives in Spain, said her 51-year-old brother, Rolando Sarraff, called her for the first time since his release on Dec. 17 last year amid a big thaw in US-Cuban relations. The brother told her he is “free and doing fine.”
She declined to say where he is living in the US or anything else about Rolando Sarraff, a former cryptologist in the Cuban Directorate General of Intelligence who helped the US crack a purported Cuban spy network in Florida.
Sarraff’s mother, Odesa Trujillo, told reporters that she and her husband — who live in Havana — had heard nothing from their son since his release, but were optimistic about getting news about him within days. She said that Sarraff’s 79-year-old father, also named Rolando, had come down with pneumonia since his son’s release.
The younger Rolando Sarraff was identified last month by a former US official as the released spy who US President Barack Obama hailed as one of Washington’s most valuable assets when he announced the thaw in relations. However, US and Cuban officials never disclosed to his family where he went after his release.
Vilma Sarraff spoke a day after the US confirmed that Cuba had freed 53 political prisoners who had been promised their liberty as part of the historic accord between Obama’s administration and the Cuban government.
Before his downfall, the younger Rolando Sarraff helped the US crack the so-called “Wasp Network,” a Florida-based Cuban spy ring that included members of the so-called Cuban Five, the last three of whom were released in exchange for him.
The Cuban Five were convicted in Miami in 2001 of being unregistered foreign agents; three were also found guilty of espionage conspiracy for failed efforts to obtain military secrets from the US Southern Command headquarters.
The elder Rolando Sarraff is a retired lieutenant colonel in Cuba’s armed forces and a former journalist with Cuban news agency Prensa Latina.
He and his wife last month said they did not know the details of their son’s work, adding that they knew only that he had been convicted of being a CIA spy nearly 20 years ago.
The younger Sarraff was arrested by state security agents in 1995.
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