SIGN UP FOR OUR 
Alan Gross with his wife Judy, attorney Scott Gilbert, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. watch television on board a U.S. government plane headed back to the U.S. as the news breaks of his release, Dec. 17, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)
By Lucia Leal
Washington, Jan 23 (EFE).– U.S. citizen Alan Gross believes the Castro brothers no longer hold the reins of power in Cuba, nor are they relevant to the island’s future, and he would like to visit again the country where he was imprisoned for five years as “a pawn, a prisoner of two governments” at daggers drawn for decades.
In an interview with EFE, the U.S. contractor, whose incarceration in Cuba was a stumbling block to any reconciliation of the two countries, said the Cuban government is “fractured in different factions trying desperately to hang onto their piece of a disintegrating pie.”
“The Castros are no longer (really) in power. They’re not relevant to the future of Cuba,” Gross, 66, said at the Washington apartment where he has lived since shortly after his liberation on Dec. 17, 2014, the same day the diplomatic thaw between the United States and Cuba was announced.
Cuba’s ex-President Fidel Castro, he said, “isn’t a young man, his time is limited and his days are over.”
“He belongs to the past. Cuba can’t allow itself to live in the past, and everyone knows it,” said Gross, for whom President Raul Castro “does not have complete control, as his brother did.”
Gross, an electronics specialist contracted by the U.S. to install devices that would allow access to the Internet for a small Jewish community in Cuba, was arrested in 2009 and sentenced in 2011 to 15 years in prison for what the Cuban government described as “actions against the territorial integrity of the state.”
“I didn’t go to Cuba to do intelligence work. I went to Cuba to improve the way people connected with the Internet, as 3 billion people do every day,” Gross said.
Though he never saw his work in Cuba as a risky business, he said that the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which contracted him, “definitely” knew that the mission they assigned him was illegal on the island.
Gross, a fervent defender of the process of bilateral rapprochement, radiates positive energy and does not appear bitter about what happened, convinced that it is better “to concentrate on the next five years than on the last five.”
He is also convinced that the United States will “inevitably” lift the embargo on the island, because “most Americans want it” and “at this point in time, it’s really insignificant” and doesn’t do anything to stop Cuba from trading with the world. EFE
