Two years ago, Cuban counterintelligence officers arrested Alan P. Gross, a U.S. Agency for International Development subcontractor, as he boarded a plane in Havana for the United States. Later convicted in a closed trial of crimes against the state for smuggling sophisticated telecommunications equipment into Cuba, Gross is serving a 15-year prison sentence. Obama administration officials have declared that relations with Cuba will remain frozen until Gross is released, but the administration has not been willing to take the aggressive steps necessary to win his freedom. Gross’ fate, like Cuba policy generally, is now being sacrificed to electoral politics in Florida.

Ironically, if Gross were a CIA officer, he would probably be free by now. In 2010, Washington traded 10 Russian “sleeper” agents for four Russians jailed in Moscow for spying for the West. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter crafted an informal bargain in which Cuba released four CIA agents imprisoned since the 1960s, in exchange for clemency for four Puerto Rican nationalists convicted of attempting to assassinate U.S. government officials in the 1950s. The history of the Cold War is replete with such trades. The CIA takes care of its own.

But Gross did not work for the CIA. He worked — in his words, as a “trusting fool” — for a USAID contractor participating in a U.S. government-funded democracy-building program. He traveled several times to Cuba on a tourist visa carrying computers, cellphones and satellite communications technology for independent nongovernmental organizations and individuals in Cuba’s Jewish community.

The Cuban government regards USAID’s democracy-promotion program as subversive, geared to foment regime change. It arrested Gross, a bit player in this larger diplomatic drama, to send Washington the message that Cuba will not tolerate such actions. U.S. officials expected that once the Cubans had made their point, they would free Gross on humanitarian grounds. But that hasn’t happened. As Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez told The New York Times in September, any humanitarian release would have to be based on “reciprocity.”

By that, Havana means the release of the so-called Cuban Five — five intelligence officers dispatched to the United States in the 1990s to spy on militant anti-Castro groups in the Cuban-American community and imprisoned here since 1998. Their prolonged incarceration is a cause celebre in Cuba, and one can only assume that Cuban security officials are just as intent on looking after their own as are intelligence agencies everywhere.

When Jimmy Carter traveled to Cuba in March, his hosts floated the idea of an informal swap modeled on the release of the CIA agents and Puerto Rican nationalists in 1979. Carter has publicly called for the release of both Gross and the Cuban Five, albeit without linking the cases.

Thus far, however, the Obama administration has been unwilling to even consider such an exchange because of the inflammatory politics of the Cuban Five case in Miami’s Cuban-American community. When former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson went to Havana in September hoping to negotiate Gross’ release, the State Department gave him only a meager list of reciprocal U.S. actions to offer. The Cubans indignantly refused to let Richardson even meet with Gross.