Envoy Ousted by U.S. Returns to Cuba a Hero

HAVANA —  A Cuban diplomat who hid out in the Cuban Embassy in Canada after being expelled from the United States over espionage suspicions received a hero’s welcome when he returned home Thursday after five days of uncertainty.

President Fidel Castro embraced Jose Imperatori as the diplomat stepped onto the tarmac late Thursday afternoon. Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and Ricardo Alarcon, the National Assembly president, also were in the high-level delegation welcoming him.

“I am very happy to be back in my homeland again,” said Imperatori, who had tried unsuccessfully to be returned to the United States to defend himself against accusations that he was the contact for a U.S. immigration agent accused of spying for Cuba.

“There is no proof. . . . It doesn’t exist,” Castro told reporters. The Communist government has maintained in recent days that its mission in the United States has never engaged in intelligence gathering.

Imperatori, the former vice consul of Cuba’s Interests Section in Washington, was accompanied on the flight by his wife, Raquel Fundora, who had gone to Canada with about 50 well-known Cubans to pick him up.

Imperatori boarded a Cubana Airlines plane Thursday. According to a Cuban government statement, he had ended his four-day hunger strike earlier in the day.