Alan Gross pledged to return to Cuba should the government release him to visit his ailing mother.

“I would return to Cuba,” Gross told CNN in a home interview May 4. “You can quote me on that. I’m saying it live. I would return to Cuba if they let me visit my mother before she dies. And we’ve gotten no response, no response whatsoever.”

He dismissed a reported Cuban offer to fly his mother, who lives in Texas, to Cuba as “baloney,” noting that she is too ill to travel.

His mother, 90, is suffering from inoperable cancer; his daughter also has undergone cancer treatment since his arrest.

Gross was arrested in 2009 and sentenced last year to 15 years on charges related to his distribution of communications equipment to the island’s small Jewish community, working as a contractor for the U.S. Agency on International Development.

He has appealed for humanitarian leave of two weeks. — jta