WASHINGTON — Two days before President Obama ended a half-century of diplomatic estrangement with Cuba, his national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, asked Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona to be the only Republican on a secret flight to Havana to bring home a jailed American, Alan P. Gross — and to tell no one.
“I felt like I was in a Tom Clancy novel,” Mr. Flake said.
Now Mr. Flake, who has spent the past decade waging a lonely battle against his party to push for easing restrictions on Cuba, is the chief Republican defender of the new Obama policy. White House officials are counting on him to make their case with his party’s rank and file, even as Republican leaders and Cuban-American lawmakers threaten to keep the president from appointing an ambassador or funding an embassy in Havana.
On Tuesday morning on Capitol Hill, Mr. Flake will be in the sights of one of the most outraged Republicans on the issue, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida (the son of Cuban immigrants), who has called the president’s policy “a concession to tyranny.’’ Mr. Rubio, the chairman of the Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, is holding this Congress’s first hearing on Cuba, setting the stage for a possible confrontation with Mr. Flake, a member of the panel.
But Mr. Flake has already moved ahead: Last week he filed a bill to end the decades-old ban on American travel to the Communist island nation.
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So far, Mr. Castro has not. “But he was a lot more forthcoming with Jeff than I expected,” Mr. Leahy said.
Mr. Flake recalls Mr. Castro’s blunt greeting to him: “Where’s the Mormon?”
In November, Mr. Flake and Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, met with Mr. Gross, who was despondent and “had already said he had spent his last birthday in prison,” Mr. Flake recalled. After that, Mr. Flake saw Ms. Rice in her West Wing office. He presented her with a list of steps the president could take, using his executive authority, to relax restrictions against Cuba, he said. “And I said, if there are negotiations going on with Alan Gross, I don’t want to know about it.”
In fact, Ms. Rice said, the deal to release Mr. Gross, in a complicated prisoner swap negotiated with the help of the Vatican, had already been set. Less than a week later, she called Mr. Flake and asked him to get on the plane. The senator sent a text message to his wife, telling her he would be home later than planned.
