Let us Be Clear, this was all an Exchange of Spies

The Obama administration is attempting to split hairs, and is claiming that the release of Cuban spies in American jails, and an as yet unnamed American spy in Cuban jail is a spy exchange, but that the release of Alan Gross was a humanitarian release.

It's a nice fairy story, but this was a spy exchange.

What Alan Gross was doing in Cuba was espionage.

Rolling the Wiki:

Gross was working with Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), a contractor working with USAID who had won a US$6 million U.S. government contract for the program in which Gross was involved, a controversial "democracy-promotion program" that ballooned under the Bush administration, to provide communications equipment to break the Cuban government's 'information blockade'. Gross received more than US$500,000, despite the fact that he spoke little Spanish and had not worked in Cuba before.

USAID's US$20 million Cuba program, authorized by a law calling for regime change in Cuba, has been criticized repeatedly in congressional reports as being wasteful and ineffective, and putting people in danger. Funding was held up briefly in 2010 over concerns following Gross's arrest.

Before his arrest, Gross visited Cuba four times in five months in 2009 on a tourist visa, according to American officials to deliver computer and satellite equipment to three Jewish community groups. In December 2009, according to Development Alternatives Inc., he was on a follow-up trip, researching how the groups were making use of the equipment he had previously distributed to them. As reported by the Jewish Daily Forward, Cuba's small Jewish community of fewer than 2,000 people who mainly live in Havana enjoys religious freedom, the possibility to emigrate to Israel, and has fairly good relations with the government under Raúl Castro, but has little influence, making observers wonder why the United States provides material to them under a USAID program that usually targets dissidents. According to a Latin America specialist for the Council on Foreign Relations it is possible that Gross’s mission was useful only in as much as it satisfied Congressional demand to take action in Cuba.

In January 2012, it was reported that Cuban authorities claim that Gross has visited Cuba as early as 2004, delivering a video camera to a leading Freemason who later declared that he had been a Cuban intelligence agent since 2000.

Gross filed reports for USAID of his four visits to Cuba in 2009. The report of the fifth and final trip was written by a representative of Gross's company. A review of the reports was revealed on February 12, 2012, by the Associated Press (AP). According to the reports, Gross was aware of the risks he was taking. AP reports that Gross did not identify himself as a representative of the U.S. government, but claimed to be a member of a Jewish humanitarian group. To escape Cuban authorities' detection, he enlisted the help of American Jews to transport electronic equipment, instructing them to pack items a piece at a time in carry-on luggage, and also travelled with American Jewish humanitarian groups doing missions on the island so he could intercede with Cuban authorities if questions arose. Gross declared that he was thoroughly inspected by the customs officials at Jose Marti International Airport when entering the country, and that he declared all of the items in his possession. The equipment he brought to Cuba on his fourth trip, most but not all of which is legal in Cuba, included 12 iPods, 11 BlackBerry Curve smartphones, three MacBooks, six 500-gigabyte external drives, three Internet satellite phones known as BGANs, three routers, three controllers, 18 wireless access points, 13 memory sticks, three VoIP phones, and networking switches. In his report on this trip, marked as final, he summarized: “Wireless networks established in three communities; about 325 users”. However, he went to Cuba for a fifth time in late November 2009 and was arrested 11 days later. When he was arrested, he was carrying a high-tech chip, intended to keep satellite phone transmissions from being located within 250 miles (400 kilometres). The chip is not available on the open market. It is provided most frequently to the CIA and the Defense Department, but can also be obtained by the State Department, which oversees USAID. Asked how Gross obtained the card, a USAID spokesman said that the agency played no role in helping Gross acquire equipment.

He was employed to transfer technology for the purpose of aiding opponents of the regime, what's more if you follow the links at the Wiki page, which show that he when he, "He enlisted the help of American Jews to transport electronic equipment," he was deceiving the people who helped him bring in electronics:

He did not tell the recipients that a U.S. government program outlawed in Cuba had paid for the equipment, it added, and used two unwitting U.S. Jews to slip some of the gear into the island.

Mr. Gross was a spy, and his release was a part of an exchange of spies.

This is not a bad thing.

Spy swaps are made all the time.

Presenting it as a purely humanitarian gesture is completely disingenuous.