A former US ambassador was sentenced Friday in Miami to 15 years in prison after being convicted of spying for years on behalf of Cuba, the arch-enemy of the United States.
Victor Manuel Rocha, 73 years old, was arrested in early December and charged with spying for the Cuban communist government, while he was climbing the ladder of American diplomacy as he had access to secret documents and influence on foreign policy.
The ex-diplomat, admitting guilt to the charges, received the harshest sentence permissible under the law, as declared by Judge Beth Bloom following a session lasting three and a half hours. Additionally, the sentence included a substantial fine of five hundred thousand dollars.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said when he was indicted that this case “is one of the longest intrusions into the highest levels of a foreign agent inside the American state.”
The minister stated, “Rocha served as a covert operative for the Cuban government for over four decades,” until an FBI probe uncovered his activities.
Undercover agent
Victor Manuel Rocha held high-level positions in the US State Department. Before he ended his career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as ambassador to Bolivia between 2000 and 2001, he was notably a member of the National Security Council, a body affiliated with the White House, between 1994 and 1995, during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
He held positions in many American embassies in Latin America, including Havana, according to a judicial document.
Rocha, originally from Colombia, gained American citizenship before starting his work in 1981 with the primary intelligence agency of Cuba’s communist government, as the investigation has uncovered.
Even after he left the State Department in 2002 after serving there for thirty years, he continued his work as a spy for Cuba, as the US Department of Justice explained.
He was exposed by an FBI agent who presented himself in 2002 and 2023 as an agent in the Cuban intelligence services, according to a court document.
Carefully avoiding the possibility of being traced, Rocha went to an appointment with this undercover agent, who hid a radio and a camera to record their conversation.
Enormous
He spoke to the undercover agent about the “comrades” in Cuba, asked him to convey his “warm regards” to the intelligence command in Havana, and spoke of the “great sacrifice” he had made during his life as an undercover agent.
During a second meeting with the same fake agent in Miami, he said that what he did “over about forty years” on behalf of the Cuban government was “tremendous.”
The US Department of Justice stressed last December that the former ambassador residing in Miami “always referred to the United States as the enemy and used the word ‘we’ to refer to himself and Cuba.”
Since the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959 in the midst of the Cold War, relations between the two enemy countries have witnessed many espionage cases.
In 2001, Ana Montes, a military intelligence analyst, was arrested on charges of espionage and admitted that she had collected intelligence information for Cuba over a decade.
In 2010, American diplomat Kendall Myers was sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of spying for Havana for 30 years.
The United States has imposed a blockade on Cuba since 1962 and includes it on the list of countries supporting terrorism.
