WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States denied yesterday Cuban allegations that a US contractor detained in Cuba last month for distributing satellite communications equipment is an American spy.

Cuban Parliament President Ricardo Alarcon on Wednesday said the man, who was arrested in early December for handing equipment to dissidents and has never been publicly identified, worked for American “secret services.”

“Those comments are false. Cuba has a history of mischaracterizing what Americans and NGOs in Cuba are doing.

This person is not associated with our intelligence services,” State Department spokesman PJ Crowley told reporters.

Alarcon shed no light on what the government plans to do with the prisoner, who President Raul Castro has cited as evidence that the United States continues its five-decade long campaign to subvert the island’s communist system.

US diplomats on December 28 visited the man, who worked for a Maryland-based company called Development Alternatives Inc that was involved in a US government program to strengthen civil society and promote democracy in Cuba.

“This is a man hired by a company that contracts for the American secret services,” Alarcon told reporters in Havana, citing a trend toward the “privatization of war” by the United States, which hires people to be “agents, torturers, spies.”