A US used a development agency’s supposed anti-HIV program to surreptitiously send young Latin Americans to Cuba to foment discontent in the Communist nation and provoke political change.  And Uncle Sam didn’t pay these people too well, either.

The US denies the program was covert.  Starting in October 2009, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to Cuba.  In one case, they posed as members of an HIV-prevention workshop, other times they were passed off as tourists.  But in each case, they were sent in to try to identify “potential social-change actors” – Cubans sympathetic to the anti-Castro cause – and gin up rebellion.

The program was marked by ineffectiveness and incompetence.  One participant says that his training consisted of a 30-minute seminar on how to evade Cuban intelligence.  He also said there appeared to be no safety net for anyone who was caught by Cuban authorities.

For their trouble, the young people were paid as little as US$5.41 per hour.  If they had just gone to America to flip burgers at Macca’s, they’d have gotten a raise of almost $2 per hour.

USAID didn’t the plug on the program until September 2012, long after American contractor Alan Gross had been arrested in Cuba for allegedly possessing spy equipment while trying to install internet service for Havana’s Jewish community.  Gross was convicted and jailed in March 2011 – a year and a half before USAID decided to stop sending young people from other countries in harm’s way.

A group of Rabbis sent a letter to President Barack Obama, asking him to negotiate the release of Alan Gross, now 65-years old and not even halfway through his sentence in a Cuban prison.  He is reportedly in poor health, deeply depressed, and has said goodbye to his wife and daughter, believing that his country has abandoned him and he will die where he is right now. 

Havana has repeatedly tried to trade Gross for three Cuban intelligence agents jailed in the US, but the US rebuffed these advances.