Dynamic properties of robotic manipulators, including inertia, damping, and friction, limit the transparency of a haptic-feedback teleoperator. In this paper, we de- velop a position-exchange controller to provide haptic- feedback for a surgical teleoperator. The controller con- sists of proportional controllers and model-based feed- forward terms that cancel the dynamic properties of the manipulators. We show that the teleoperator transmits the impedance of a soft environment to the operator when the gains of the proportional controllers are very high and dynamic terms of the manipulators are can- celed. However, the high gains and complete cancel- lation of the dynamic terms of the manipulators can make the teleoperator unstable. We use Llewellyn?s cri- teria for absolute stability to limit the controller para- meters to values that keep the teleoperator stable during interactions with any passive user and environment. Experimental results using a custom version of the da Vinci Surgical System show that 70% of the inertia of the slave manipulators during low-frequency motion and almost all static friction of the manipulators dur- ing sliding motion can be canceled.