Wife of returned Cuba agent expecting, thanks to US senator’s help
CUBA is celebrating the return of three intelligence agents imprisoned in the United States for more than a decade, and the joyful but puzzling news that one of their wives is expecting just two weeks from now.
Adriana Perez’s pregnancy has been the talk of Cuba since she appeared with Gerardo Hernandez at the island’s parliament this weekend. Perez beamed and held hands with Hernandez as he caressed her baby bump, clearly visible beneath a flowing blue dress.
A top adviser to US Senator Patrick Leahy said yesterday that the lawmaker helped arrange for Perez’s artificial insemination, one of the stranger chapters of 18 months of back-channel negotiations that culminated with Washington and Havana’s announce- ment they will resume diplomatic ties after more than 50 years of hostility.
Tim Rieser, foreign policy aide to Leahy, said it all began with a February 2013 trip to Cuba by Leahy, who has visited the island multiple times since the early 1990s, met with both former and current presidents Fidel and Raul Castro and opposes the US embargo.
Leahy and his wife, Marcelle Pomerleau, a registered nurse, met Perez, now 44. At the time, Hernandez was still at a federal prison in Victorville, California, serving two life sentences on murder conspiracy and other charges. Cuba had complained repeatedly that the US was denying her a visa to visit her husband.
‘‘She made a personal appeal to Marcelle. She was afraid that she would never have the chance to have a child,’’ Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the State Department and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, said in a statement. ‘‘As parents and grandparents we both wanted to try to help her.’’
Back home, Leahy’s office began working with US Government officials. Conjugal visits are not allowed in the federal penitentiary system, but officials identified a precedent where artificial insemination had been permitted for an inmate.
Around the beginning of this year, a first attempt at artificial insemination was made, but it failed. A couple of months later, a second attempt worked. The procedure itself was carried out in Panama and everything was paid for by the Cuban Government, according to Rieser.
US officials had been trying to win better conditions for Alan Gross, an American man who was serving a 15-year sentence in Cuba after he was caught introducing restricted communications equipment as part of a US Government democracy island.
Rieser lobbied for Perez to receive a US visa and she was able to visit Hernandez twice in the last year and a half, after apparently only being allowed to see him once before.
That US officials facilitated Perez’s pregnancy made a big impression on Cuban officials, for whom the agents’ return was one of the country’s most important international policy goals.
And it helped set the tone for the secret negotiations that culminated with the deal announced last Thursday, under which the last three of the ‘‘Cuban Five’’ returned home and Cuba freed a US intelligence asset jailed for nearly 20 years on the island. Gross was also released as a humanitarian gesture.
The couple’s baby is a girl, and she’s due in about 15 days.
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