Victor Manuel Rocha carried out one of the longest-running infiltrations of the U.S. government, according to the Justice Department.
Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. diplomat, was sentenced to 15 years in prison after admitting to acting as an agent of Cuba in what the U.S. Department of Justice described as one of Cuba’s most far-reaching and longest-running infiltrations of the U.S. government.
According to U.S. prosecutors, Rocha secretly supported Cuba’s ruling Communist Party and aided the country’s intelligence gathering against Washington for more than four decades, including during his 20-year career at the U.S. State Department.
“Today’s plea ends more than four decades of treason and deception by Mr. Rocha,” David Newman, a senior national security official at the U.S. Department of Justice, said at a news conference in Miami on Friday.
“For most of his life, Mr. Rocha lived a lie.”
Rocha, 73, was arrested at his home in Miami in December 2023 on charges that he had engaged in “clandestine activities” for Cuba since at least 1981, when he began his career as a U.S. diplomat.
He was accused of meeting with Cuban intelligence officials and falsifying information about his contacts to U.S. government officials.
An undercover FBI agent posed as a representative of the Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence and met Rocha repeatedly in 2022 and 2023. According to a court document, Rocha admitted to this agent that he had worked for Cuba for decades. The agent called himself “Miguel” and Rocha’s confession was recorded.
Rocha praised the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro and boasted about his more than 40 years of service as a Cuban mole at the center of U.S. foreign policy circles, prosecutors said in court filings.
“What we have done… it is enormous… more than a Grand Slam,” he was quoted as saying.
U.S. officials said they may never know the full extent of Rocha’s cooperation with Havana.
US-Cuba relations
Relations between Washington and Havana have been strained for more than 60 years, since Castro and his team of armed revolutionaries toppled a U.S.-backed dictatorship.
The US government then attempted to overthrow Castro through the so-called Bay of Pigs Invasion and through several assassination attempts in the following decades.
In 1962, Cuba also allowed the Soviet Union to secretly install nuclear missiles that were detected by U.S. surveillance. This Cuban Missile Crisis led to 13 days of tension and brought the US and USSR to the brink of nuclear war.
While former US President Barack Obama took steps to ease tensions with Cuba, former US President Donald Trump reversed several of Obama’s steps by banning Americans from entering Cuba and imposing economic sanctions on the island.
Incumbent U.S. President Joe Biden has lifted some of the Trump-era sanctions against Cuba, but many remain in place, slowing the country’s economy.
In addition, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted nearly unanimous resolutions condemning the U.S. embargo against Cuba more than 30 times. However, any meaningful action by the UN against the embargo requires the approval of the Security Council, in which the USA has veto power.