The former US ambassador, Victor Manuel Rocha, was a spy in Cuba's service since 1973 until he was arrested last December and ended up on trial as a “foreign agent”, a charge he pleaded guilty to guilty and for which he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
In February the 73-year-old, resident of Miami, had professed his innocence and then retracted his not guilty plea at the end of March, obtaining a plea agreement on his sentence. An agreement accepted yesterday by the federal judge of the southern district of Florida, Beth Bloom, who however demanded the inclusion of a compensation clause for potential victims and the revocation of citizenship, two additional penalties that will be evaluated in subsequent hearings.
“For much of his life, Mr. Rocha has lived a lie,” David Newman, director of the Department of Justice's national security legal affairs office, commented at a press conference after the verdict. “While he held several senior positions in the United States government, he was secretly acting as an agent of the Cuban government. This is a staggering betrayal of the American people.”
A Cuban spy at the State Department
Born in Colombia in 1951, Rocha moved to New York at the age of 10 after his father's death. The family lived with their uncle in Harlem and supported themselves thanks to the low-paid work of their mother, employed in a tailoring workshop. In 1965, Rocha won a scholarship to the Taft School, an elite institution in Connecticut.
Here, as he explained to the school's alumni magazine in 2004, he suffered a series of discrimination due to the color of his skin, even going so far as to consider the possibility of suicide after the refusal of what he considered his best friend to share a room with he.
After graduating from Taft School, he graduated from Yale University. According to State Department investigators, it was during this period, in 1973, that the Cuban spy agency recruited Rocha during a trip to Chile when President Salvador Allende was deposed in a US-backed military coup.
Naturalized as a US citizen in 1978, Rocha later also earned several degrees from Harvard and Georgetown universities. His career in the State Department began in 1981, leading him to hold several important positions in Latin America, including a series of missions in Bolivia, Argentina, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
For a brief period, during the Clinton administration, he even made it to the National Security Council of the White House. So much so that his career culminated with the position of American ambassador to Bolivia between 2000 and 2002. Here, as reported by the New York Times in 2002, he became the protagonist of a curious episode involving the then candidate and then president of Coca-Cola Evo Morales, supported by Fidel Castro.
As ambassador to Bolivia, Rocha warned voters that choosing the leftist as head of state would jeopardize US aid to the country, a statement that only ended up favoring Morales, who went so far as to thank the diplomat by calling him the his “best campaign manager” election.
Once he left the State Department he was then appointed advisor to the head of the Southern Command of the United States Armed Forces (SouthCom), whose area of competence includes Cuba, where in the 1990s he had already been assigned as advisor to the US diplomatic mission in Havana, at the time of his important role in the National Security Council.
All this gave Rocha access to important documents and information, including diplomatic and intelligence assessments of the Cuban regime, biographical profiles of diplomats, details on secret US-run programs and reports on the island from the rest of the world .
The potential damage done by the former U.S. national security ambassador is so great, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller admitted in December, that the administration and intelligence agencies are still trying to assess it. According to what was declared yesterday by the District Attorney's Office, this is a “long proceeding” which is still ongoing but in the end it may also prove impossible to know the true extent of the damage caused by Rocha.
The discovery
No details emerged from the trial as to why the FBI began to have suspicions about the former ambassador but, according to the documents, it all began at the end of October 2022 with the statements of an informant, whose identity was not revealed. However, Rocha was later approached by an undercover FBI agent, who introduced himself as a Cuban spy.
During conversations via WhatsApp with the infiltrator, the former diplomat betrayed himself by revealing the role he had played over the last 40 years. The investigations even revealed that he had met his handlers in Cuba in 2017, flying first from Miami to the Dominican Republic with his American passport and then from Panama to Havana with a Dominican document.
He eventually met the undercover agent at a Miami church in June 2023, confirming the FBI's suspicions and declaring that he was still on active duty for Cuban intelligence, despite his leave from the State Department. However, the man was only arrested last December. Today, as required by the plea agreement, he is cooperating with the US authorities.
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