The Cuban government freed a former Hialeah truck driver jailed since 2006 for a people-smuggling attempt in which a smuggler died and allowed him to fly home because he was ill.

Julio Rafael Mesa Fariñas, 51, said he was taken to the Havana airport Wednesday directly from a cell next to the one where U.S. subcontractor Alan Gross is being held and flew to Miami with the help of U.S. diplomats in Havana.

During his six years in prison, Mesa said, he was hospitalized several times because of hunger strikes, was bitten twice by guard dogs while handcuffed and suffered hypothermia when he refused to wear prison uniforms.

Cuban officials told him that he was being freed because of his ill health. He is now in a wheelchair and suffered a seizure Thursday that landed him in a hospital, Mesa told El Nuevo Herald during a lengthy phone interview Friday.

Mesa said he and two other Cubans set out from Mexico’s Caribbean state of Quintana Roo aboard a 40-foot boat in April of 2006. They had been hired to pick up 44 people trying to escape from the southern coast of Pinar Del Rio Province.

The Cuban government alleged the boat was intercepted by one of its Coast Guard vessels, failed to heed a warning to stop and took “aggressive actions” that required guardsmen to open fire. Geovel González Morera, one of the smugglers, was shot and killed and Rosendo Salgado was shot in the foot. Salgado and Mesa, both U.S. citizens, were sentenced to 26 and 20 years in prison, respectively.

“There was no warning of any kind. A flare went up and they automatically opened fire. They assassinated Morera,” said Mesa, who added that he plans to file a lawsuit against Cuba “for Morera’s murder.”

Mesa noted that during the clash a guardsman threw a rock that hit him on the head, causing partial paralysis and landing him in a hospital for a month. While odd, he said, the rock-throwing is noted in the documents of his court case.

He launched several liquids-only hunger strikes at the Combinado del Este prison in Havana to demand a transfer to La Condesa, reserved for foreigners, or a reduction of his sentence, Mesa added. Former political prisoners Oscar Elias Biscet and Angel Moya confirmed Friday that they met Mesa in prison and that he staged several hunger strikes. Other details of his tale could not be independently confirmed.

Mesa said he was in and out of several hospitals because of his hunger strikes, and spent two periods in the prison wing of the Military Hospital Carlos J. Finlay in Havana’s Marianao section. That is the hospital where Gross is being held.

Gross was arrested in late 2009 and was sentenced to 15 years for delivering sophisticated communications equipment to the Cuban Jewish community. The equipment was paid for by the U.S. government as part of a program that Havana has labeled as “subversive.”

Mesa said during his second stay at the military hospital where he was held for 60 days before he was released, Gross appeared to be thinner and “unwell” but “in good spirits” and that he had benefits that Cuban prisoners did not, such as air conditioning in his room and a special diet.

Guards did not allow them to talk, he added, but he heard Gross shouting that a State Security official “had lied” by promising benefits, such as a reduction in his sentence, if he cooperated with the investigation.

Also held at the military hospital is Rolando García Pereira, a U.S. resident convicted of people trafficking in 2001.

Mesa left Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and during a return visit he met a woman and they had a son. He promised smugglers to pick them up for $20,000, he said, and was working off the debt when he was captured.

He said that after Cuban officials told him that he would be freed, two U.S. diplomats in Havana visited him to arrange his departure. He received a valid U.S. passport, and a daughter sent him the money for the flight to Miami.

It was not immediately clear whether Mesa could face criminal charges in the United States for the people-smuggling case.

As he left Havana, Mesa said, Cuban immigration officials stamped every single page of his passport so he could never use it again. Arriving in Miami in a wheelchair and with a stamped-up passport after a six-year absence, he said he was greeted with a “Welcome home. No questions. No nothing.”