Cuban agent, wife got US help with pregnancy

Associated Press

HAVANA

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 U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy said Monday 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 announcement they will resume diplomatic ties after more than 50 years of hostility.

Tim Rieser, foreign policy aide to Leahy, told The Associated Press that 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 U.S. embargo.

Leahy and his wife, Marcelle Pomerleau, a registered nurse, met with Perez, now 44. At the time, Hernandez was still at a federal prison in Victorville, Calif., serving two life sentences on murder conspiracy and other charges. Cuba had complained repeatedly that the U.S. 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 chairs the Senate subcommittee on foreign appropriations, said in a statement. “As parents and grandparents, we both wanted to try to help her.”

Back home, Leahy’s office began working with U.S. 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.