Cuban spies among us | Miami Herald

Victor Manuel Rocha is the latest Cuban spy to be convicted, but he is far from the first to be captured. In all cases the damage caused is difficult to estimate.

Rocha spied for communist Cuba for more than forty years at the US State Department, held important posts in Latin America and on the National Security Council.

He later worked as a private consultant for the U.S. Southern Command in Doral, which oversees Cuba. The Associated Press reports that “federal authorities have conducted a confidential damage assessment that could take years,” and if discovered, much of it will remain secret.

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Rocha was sentenced in April to 15 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. Others have stolen U.S. intelligence that has left Americans dead and engaged in influence operations to downplay Havana’s threat to the U.S.

For Havana, Ana Belen Montes, who worked at the Pentagon for 17 years at the Defense Intelligence Agency, spied; Walter Kendall Myers, a high-ranking State Department analyst who spied with his wife Gwendolyn for thirty years; and Marta Rita Velazquez, a legal officer at the Agency for International Development, who recruited Montes.

Carlos Alvarez, a professor of psychology at Florida International University, spent nearly three decades with his wife Elsa spying on their community and organizing trips for students to Cuba. Philip Agee, who worked at the Central Intelligence Agency, defected to Cuba in 1973 and eliminated 250 CIA officers and operatives.

In addition, Castro’s spies, posing as diplomats, operate in Havana’s embassy in Washington and at the Cuban UN mission in New York City. The Cuban dictatorship also sends illegal agents to spy and take active measures in America.

Havana’s WASP spy network infiltrated the United States to gather information on military installations and personnel, sow division among Cuban exiles, find places to store weapons and explosives, and terrorize and then kill a CIA agent living in Florida. murder with a mail bomb. They helped kill four during the Brothers to the Rescue shooting on February 24, 1996, and the network’s head, Gerardo Hernandez, was convicted of murder conspiracy.

These practices began in 1959. In 1961, the Soviet Defense Council ordered Czechoslovakia to use Cuban intelligence to infiltrate existing drug operations in the US and Latin America and lay the groundwork for “recruiting” these independent activities. Former senior Czech official Jan Sejna gave a detailed account of his meetings with Raul Castro, which he had on average four times a year between 1961 and 1968, the year Sejna defected to the US.

After the State Department determined in January 1982 that Havana had armed the terrorist group M-19 in exchange for drug smuggling into the US, Cuba was added to the list of state terrorist sponsors on March 1, 1982.

Four high-ranking Cuban officials were indicted by a U.S. grand jury on November 5, 1982, for narcotics smuggling.

• Rene Rodriguez-Cruz, member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party and president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship With The Peoples.

• Aldo Santamaria-Cuadrado, Vice Admiral in the Cuban Navy and member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.

• Fernando Ravelo-Renedo, Cuban Ambassador to Colombia.

• Gonzalo Bassols-Suarez, former Minister Counselor of the Cuban Embassy in Bogota and member of the Cuban Communist Party.

Ana Belen Montes was recruited by Cuban intelligence agents in New York City in December 1984, and on September 30, 1985, she reported working at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon.

Reg Brown, a former Army Counterintelligence Special Agent, also came to DIA in 1985. Chris Simmons, a career counterintelligence officer, describes in his 2023 book, Castro’s Nemesis, how Brown conducted an investigation that found that the “Castro regime was still trafficking drugs” and that this involved the “organized and sustained involvement of many of Fidel’s highest officials.”

The rating was sent to other DIA analysts for a “routine review” in early June 1989. Brown was shocked when CNN reported on June 27 about “Cuba’s arrest of 14 officials for drug trafficking.”

Simmons wrote, “Reg was suspicious of the coincidence. The timing of the internal release of his judgment and Havana’s crackdown were eerily close. Moreover, most of the Cuban officials mentioned in his assessment were among the thirty-three executed, imprisoned, dismissed, or who committed suicide.”

A Cuban spy at the DIA warned Havana that their role in flooding the US with cocaine would be discovered.

This was not the end of the Havana Cartel. With the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1999, Havana played a major role in the formation of the Soles Cartel and the dramatic increase in the amount of cocaine entering the US over the next 25 years.

In 1999, 3,186 Americans died from a cocaine overdose. After more than twenty years of cooperation between Cuba and the United States in the fight against drug trafficking, 23,513 Americans died in 2021 from the effects of cocaine.

Rocha and other Cuban spies like him are harming the U.S. government and tens of thousands of innocents.

John Suarez is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba.