A couple points:

1) My contention has always been that Cuba acted unusually aggressively in sentencing Gross to 15 years. You disagree, and claim that the 15-year jail sentence is only a "minor deterrent." By disagreeing with my point at all you are (by definition, again), implicitly arguing that there response was not unusually aggressive. Moreover, by using the phrase "minor deterrent" you said flat-out that he should have expected a lot more.

It's pretty fucking dishonest to claim Cuba was only "minorly deterring" foreign agents with a 15-year sentence and then argue he has never implied "a 15-year sentence is not only typical, but minimal."

2) You have repeatedly said Gross was convicted of "attempting to smuggle illegal contraband (after successfully smuggling more in earlier trips), with the goal of overthrowing the Cuban government, financed by a foreign (and openly hostile) country." You have accused gross of multiple separate crimes under Cuban law, and implied that are all perfectly within Cuba's jurisdiction. These crimes are a) being an agent of a hostile power, b) having a goal of overthrowing the Cuban government, and c) smuggling communications equipment. If Cuba could ban a), then the US could legally execute the entire Cuban bureaucracy because they are all agents of a power that is hostile to us. Since we can't do that to them, then any Cuban charges based on Gross's being a CIA contractor are clearly ridiculous BS. The same applies to b). Ukraine clearly can't charge all the Russian soldiers invading it with crimes in Criminal Court, therefore Cuba does not have the right to charge US CIA contractors for plotting it's demise.

Which leaves you with c).

3) The whole problem with your argument is you refuse to think what you are saying. For example this quote:
"What I did claim was that Cuba's sovereignty implies that they have no obligation to carve any exceptions in how they treat their prisoners just because of the passport that the criminal happens to be holding."
Words like "obligation" don't really mean much in relation to a) international law, or b) my argument. Under international law literally no country is ever obligated to do anything. There is no Starfleet sitting in orbit waiting to zap people for non-compliance. The way you zap people for non-compliance is you get pissed at them and ratchet up tensions. Most of the time this fails to get them to change their ways, but it's all we can do until we actually have One World Government with a Starfleet.

In this case, as I have proven, most of what Cuba charged Gross with are things it has no legal right to charge him with. They did it anyway. The remaining charge, smuggling computer equipment (the only thing he did on their soil), is the kind of thing that never results in a prison sentence. The US response to that has to be a cooling of relations, which (in Cuba's case) means and end to embargo-ending talk.

Which means either Cuba is full of people who are dumber then me, or they wanted to eliminate all talk of ending the embargo.

I don't really disagree with any of that, but it's not terribly relevant to my main point: Cuba had a whole bunch of options for dealing with Gross once they had him on their territory, and they chose the one which would increase tension with the US most. The arrest isn't the problem here. State's arrest eachother's covert agents all the time. The problem is that they can only try the Agent, and sentence him to 15 years in prison, if he's actually subject top their law (for example, if he's accepted their citizenship). Seriously IT NEVER HAPPENS.

If the Cubans had started with negotiations on the terms of imprisonment for the Cuban Five (rather then waiting four years, at which point no country is going to bother to negotiate), or just taken his shit and sat him back on the plane, or damn near anything but come down harder on this guy then African states do when they catch their neighbors plotting regime change; I'd be a lot more sympathetic to their claims to be in favor of ending the blockade.

Something like this always happens. A Democrat wins the White House partly by being soft on the embargo. He makes some noise about reducing the embargo. He doesn't have the power to unilaterally execute every Cuban in Florida above the age of 45, so exile-fucking-with-Cuba continues. And Cuba picks some particularly stupid example of exile-fucking-with-cuba and Responds with the full force available to it. They killed Clinton's attempts at reconciliation by blowing four exiles out of the sky. That's actually what got the Cuban Five arrested, because one of the Five sent the exiles flight plan to Cuba.

Your entire argument rests on the principle that it is normally accepted practice for sovereign states to imprison each-other's agents for long periods, even for agent's that have not taken citizenship in the country they are attacking. You actually go beyond this, implying that a 15-year sentence is not only typical, but minimal. You state this despite having no examples of it ever happening.

It strikes me that I'm the one who has been over-estimating you. I have clearly proven that a state's sovereignty allows it to do some things to foreign agents (ie: expulsion, threats, execution in war-time, etc.), but not this particular thing (a 15-year jail term). You, rather then do any actual work to defend your position, have argued definitions. And you really suck at it. I mean really. You're doing High School level debate tactics with the felicity of a particularly dim Middle Schooler. Your even worse at this part of the debate then you are at ad hominem. And roadkill is better at ad hominem then you.

For example, you have claimed flat-out that Cuba has the right to ban other country's agents from doing things even when those agents are on their own territory. This is the only way you can maintain that Cuba actually has the right to ban US Agents from plotting regime change in DC. You further claim that anyone who disagrees with you on any of these points is clearly a hypocrite and not giving Cuban sovereignty the same respect he gives US sovereignty. But your definition contradicts itself: if the Cubans have the legal authority to order US officials in Washington DC to stop doing things, then the US also has the right to order Cuban government officials to stop doing things. For example, a US law ordering Cuban officials to stop detaining all political prisoners and Alan Gross is perfectly valid.

Therefore Cuba must not have the right to do anything to US Agents until they enter Cuban territory, or it follows the US has the right to order Cuban Agents around.

Which in turn means that charges against Gross for things he did while in the US (ie: planning to overthrow the Cuban government by computer-aided democracy) are invalid under international law.

Why would space colonies want to break away?

Presumably any earth-entity capable of colonizing the far reaches of the Solar system would have to be a fairly important country. It would also offer any thriving colony the local equivalent of a path to statehood. Why secede when you can get two Senate seats?

A lot of SciFi is based on the assumption that future leaders have not learned the lesson of the past. Even the Brits have learned that at some point you off the colony a choice: go independent without a war, or get a vote in Parliament.

Legally speaking they only had him on the charges of smuggling. Cuba has no sovereignty over the CIA's plans, so it has no right to challenge those plans in Civil Court.

International relations is about relationships. It's iterative, not a series of one-off encounters,

Let's use a romance metaphor. Let's say you had a major tiff with your wife and she threw you out. Then she let you move back in and sleep on the couch. If you actually want to get all the way back into her bedroom you'd better be careful about how you handle any new conflict that appears or you'll scupper your chances at getting back together. For example, if she insists you let her dog out every 30 minutes overnight because little Poopsiekins poops a lot that's clearly unreasonable, and you would ordinarily be justified in responding with a hearty "Hell no you controlling bitch, deal with your own damn dog." But if you actually want to get back into her bed you'd better do something different.

The US-Cuba relationship (or the Syria-Lebanon relationship, or any other pair you care to mention) works just the same way. They went Communist in the late 50s for reasons that made sense to them. We really didn't like that, so we downgraded our official relationship to nothing and made it illegal for them to do business with any of our people (embargo). Since then whenever we start to thaw out the relationship they make sure that they take a precedent-setting America-annoying position during the next conflict.

They have 100% sovereignty over their stuff. We have 0% sovereignty over their stuff. There are some places where it gets complicated (ie: Guantanamo), but in general it's pretty clear. Our Agents are clearly our stuff.

As for whether I'm being "narrow and arbitrary," I challenge you to name a single intelligence officer of any state, who was imprisoned for several years by another state, for a crime that didn't involve human rights violations. I'm sure somebody, somewhere, in the history of the world has done it. But damned if I can think of an example.

This isn't a computer game, where your choices are limited to things the game designer thought of.

The standard response to these things is actually more effective at deterrence, while doing less long-term harm to the relationship with the other country. You arrest the agent. You may even charge the agent. but you start immediate negotiations for the freedom of said agent. This has the advantage that a) it generally wrings a concession of some kind in the short term, b) in ensures the hostile state's intelligence services know they have to be more careful in sending their guys in, and c) in ensures that we're not talking about imprisoned Agent X years later. You will note that Cuba failed to get a) with it's strategy, and we are indeed talking about Gross years later.

To quote myself:
"If you want to get something big in international relations you reduce tensions, that means when the other side does something that fills you with righteous indignation you do your best to ignore it. In Gross's case that would have been a simple arrest, perhaps followed immediately by negotiations to free the Cuban Five (the arrest was in Dec. '09, followed by years of nothing, a trial starting in Feb. of '11, and then the offer to swap in May of '12)."

I thought that was pretty clear. I've never said anything about an unconditional release.

So you've gone from "paid agent of a hostile government and therefore should be in prison for 15 years," to "I only meant that Cuba banned 'military-grade' SIM Cards." Congratulations on winning your minor point.

As for your second point, you're claiming a law banning the import of communications equipment is valid. The pro-Cuba argument requires not only that Gross be guilty of technically being in violation of the law, it also requires that the law itself be just. After all it's fairly trivial to find historical examples of laws that were legitimate in the sense that they were legally passed, and on the books, but were not in any modern sense of the term "legitimate." So you have just said, flat-out, that it is perfectly acceptable for a nation state to ban computer equipment that it can't hack solely because said state fears that it's people would use unhackable equipment to replace the President.

I think that little paragraph fairly neatly explains why I'm condemning Cuba on this issue.

It gets tricky with anti-American left wing Latin American countries, because they tend to think their national sovereignty trumps your businesses right to make normal business decisions. Businessmen fucking hate that. Some of them are quite reasonable. Others do things that just kinda make you go "What the fuck?"

The Argentines, for example, just nationalized their oil company because they wanted all it's money to be invested in new wells. The businessmen refused to do this because a) Argentine refused to let them charge market rates, and b) Argentina is a really shitty place to drill oil wells. In the year or so since they seized the company their production has dropped 8%. Apparently drilling for oil is really hard, and when you fire the beast petroleum engineers in the country bad things happen.

What crime did he physically commit while he was in Cuba? All his planing happened in the US, where planning to overthrow the Cuban government is legally mandated by the Helms-Burton Act. What he did in Cuba was possess a couple pieces of computer equipment the government didn't like. The equipment is perfectly legal in literally every single country on the earth except Cuba and a few other hold-outs, so I ask again what crime did he commit while in Cuban jurisdiction?

As for the embargo ban, you're vastly over-simplifying a complex situation. Your argument is that no President has ever explicitly offered to raise the embargo. That is literally true, but it completely ignores how reality works. In the real world it's incredibly rare to open up diplomatic negotiations with "if you do A, B, and C big thing D will happen." This is particularly true where D is a US statute. President Obama does not have the authority to totally lift the embargo on Cuba. He can't make that offer as step one. That would literally be Unconstitutional. What he can do is carve out some exceptions to the policy where the statute gives him some discretion, and then if things go well he may be able to convince Congress to let up a little more. So he tried it, and the Cubans responded by increasing tensions to the max possible at literally the very first opportunity.

BTW, I'm not arguing all US Citizens have immunity from prosecution. I'm arguing that US Agents who are not citizens of (or legal residents of) the country where they do their US Agent shenanigans almost never get imprisoned for said shenanigans. This is not actually unique to the US. Angolan agents, Syrian agents, literally the agent of any government that is in the UN, is de facto immune to being imprisoned for shenanigans he commits on his government's behalf unless he has somehow accepted the sovereignty of the country where he is doing said shenanigans. Thus the Cuban Five, all US Citizens, got long jail sentences. The Russian 10 got sent home after a couple months.

Partly this is due to the complex legal construct called "sovereignty," but mostly it happens because when a foreign government sends an agent to your shores to fuck with you the problem for you is not the individual guy they sent to your shores, it's that a government with thousands of more agents wants to fuck with you. Convicting the agent seems like the sensible option to most people, who are used to thinking in terms of ordinary crime rather then international relations, but it will actually increase the problem of random-foreign-government-fucking-with-you because now they have another reason to be really pissed off.

"Military grade SIM Cards?" WTF does that mean? Hard to hack?

As I said in other posts, the standard response in a situation like Gross's is not a jail sentence. If you bother to do some actual research you'll find precisely zero other instances of spies getting long-term jail sentences for operations that hadn't actually happened.

Note that there would have been no political cost for them in freeing Gross, if they'd done it back in 2010, in exchange for something trivial yet tangible. The reason there's a cost is that they chose to convict him under their laws, and they've set a very high bar for freeing him.

The Cubans are great at spin.

One country's relationship to another is even more complex then one person's relationship to another. This particularly true when one is the US, where a massive thicket of statutes and Constitutional law make it very difficult for any one person to change US policy. Helms-Burton is an Act of Congress. It's the President's job to enforce it. He could order his guys not to enforce it, but that would royally piss off Congress and mean he had no chance of ending the embargo (which is also a statute).

The Cubans know this.

If they actually wanted the embargo to end Gross would have been arrested, there would have been a huge diplomatic blow-up, and he would have been returned in exchange for some concession or other. You do this for a couple reasons:

1) Holding Gross is gonna piss off Obama, which makes it less likely he's gonna go into the arena and fight Ros-Lehtinen.
2) It allows Obama to play up his anti-Castro credentials, thus under-mining Ros-Lehtinen.
3) It gets them something they want. Maybe the something something is trivial (ie: two of the Cuban Five aren't allowed to speak with their wives because those wives were Cuban intelligence officials and are banned from the US), or it may be more substantive (ie: the Cuban Five serve out their jail terms at a "prison" in Cuba), or it may be extremely substantive (ie: the Cuban Five get out of jail free); but it is something you can play up to your people as a success.

What you do not do, under any circumstances, is do nothing for 15 months, charge the guy, have an entire fucking trial, and then wait another year to make a damn demand. That gets you jack-squat. You get no end to the embargo, you don't get 3), you don't get nothing.

Which leads pretty much everyone to conclude the Cubans actually wanted nothing.

It's pretty clearly an unusual way to say "soft power."

He's arguing that if we could trade with Cuba they'd all be so jealous of all our cool shit that they'd rebel and the Castros would be shot. It sounds stupid, until you realize this is part of the process that destroyed the Soviet Union. It's not working so well in China, but it does seem to be a major reason Putin couldn't hold onto all of Ukraine.

He's a US Citizen, not a Cuban citizen, and he wasn't in Cuba long enough to actually do anything. In those circumstances the normal protocol has been that the agent gets sent home after a lot of diplomatic drama. This is precisely what played out with the Russian spy ring Obama broke up back in 2010. It's not what played out with the Cuban Five because a) they had all taken US Citizenship and b) their shenanigans included telling the Cubans about a planeful of anti-Castro activists that thew Cuban Air Force immediately shot down.

Look at it this way: when Gross committed his crimes, who had jurisdiction? Since US AID doesn't blow things up, you can't bring in military anti-terrorism precedents. You can claim the Cubans had a logical reason to throw his ass out of the country after a major diplomatic bitch-session, but that's not what they did.

As for the $20 Billion a year market, of course it hasn't been on the table. Whenever a President makes a move towards putting it on the table the Cubans do something like blow that plane-load of Cuban exiles out of the sky. Cuban complaints we haven't offered to lift the embargo are precisely like my complaints that women I have never had a civil conversation with won't sleep with me.

If you want to get something big in international relations you reduce tensions, that means when the other side does something that fills you with righteous indignation you do your best to ignore it. In Gross's case that would have been a simple arrest, perhaps followed immediately by negotiations to free the Cuban Five (the arrest was in Dec. '09, followed by years of nothing, a trial starting in Feb. of '11, and then the offer to swap in May of '12).

The "they were only trying to stop fanatical anti-Castro terrorism" story is their version. The US version is that Cuban Five were also trying to infiltrate Southern Command, which is the US Military command responsible for everything we do in Latin America. Moreover the Cubans used intelligence from one of the Five to destroy that Cessna they blew up back in '98. The Cuban story isn't particularly credible. If you're Cuba you don't send five spies to the US without a side mission of "infiltrate the Southern Command" because there's no way in hell you believe that the US Military isn't involved in anti-Cuban shenanigans.

So no, they aren't gonna get those five guys back until their sentences run out. Rene Gonzales is already out.

Works to something like $20 Billion a year. That's a credible figure. We do $650 billion with Canada in a year, and Cuba ain't that much smaller.

The problem with their argument is that whenever a US President tries to reduce tensions, they do something to ratchet them back up. For example, Obama was inaugurated in Jan of '09, announces easing the embargo by allowing families in the US to visit and send money more easily in April, and by December some poor schmuck (Alan Gross) is rotting in a Cuban jail for bringing computer equipment in for Jewish groups. It's true that if you're an evil dictatorship stopping your local people from doing that is not unreasonable, and it;s true our government paid for it, but it's also true that you could easily stop him seizing his computers and deporting his ass. Now if Obama ever does anything nice for Cuba (such as sticking his neck out on ending the embargo) people supporting the embargo strongly have a trump card: why would we trade with a country that is holding one of our guys in prison for the crime of helping people access the internet?

It would cost them literally nothing to let this guy go, but they insist on keeping him in prison where he can only prevent them from accessing that $20 billion a year export market.

Which means most independent observers have long concluded the Castros like the embargo, because it allows them to claim everything that is wrong with the country is Evil Foreign Gringo's fault. Which justifies things like arresting guys for bringing in computer equipment.

Whether the analogy holds really depends on how the contract is written. Which we can't know because he hasn't told us which contract he's got.

AT&T has agreed to deliver a certain amount of data to his house. If the contract says that all data they send to his network counts as "delivered to his house" he's screwed. It's not their fault he agreed to this. If the contract says it has to be data he specifically requested he might have a case.

Most likely in the US he doesn't really have a paper contract. He has bought a product AT&T advertised, there was an asterisk warning about "terms and conditions" and he doesn't even know how to check what said terms are.