The Department of State published a 100-page report this Monday titled "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism" which documents nearly seven decades of espionage, ideological subversion, and the exportation of revolution by the Cuban regime against the United States, with cases that reached the highest levels of the U.S. government.
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio presented the document with a direct message: "For over six decades, the Cuban regime has been the main sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States. The American people deserve to know."
The most harmful spies
Víctor Manuel Rocha embodies the model of recruitment of Cuban intelligence: an ideological agent who rose to the most sensitive positions in the government. Educated at Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown, he was recruited in Chile in 1973 and spied for approximately 50 years. He became the Director of Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council under Clinton, ambassador to Bolivia, and advisor to Southern Command. Arrested in December 2023, he confessed to an undercover agent that what Cuban intelligence had achieved was "enormous and more than a grand slam." Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland described him as “one of the deepest and most enduring infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent”.
Ana Belén Montes was recruited in 1984 as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins and rose to become the senior analyst on Cuba at the Defense Intelligence Agency, nicknamed "the Queen of Cuba." From that position, she informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff while delivering that same information to Havana. She revealed the identities of at least four undercover agents and the location of a secret military base in El Salvador. Former National Counterintelligence Director Michelle Van Cleave testified that Montes "compromised practically everything we knew about Cuba." She was arrested ten days after 9/11 and released in January 2023.
Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn spied for 30 years from the Department of State. A great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, Myers was recruited after a trip to Cuba in 1978 and for three decades passed classified information via shortwave radios and meetings with handlers under false identities. In 1995, they secretly met for four hours with Fidel Castro in Havana. Sentenced to life in prison in 2010, he stated that his "only goal was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution." He died in prison in March 2026 at the age of 88, without regret.
The Wasps' Network and the Downing of Brothers to the Rescue
The Red Avispa, dismantled in 1998, operated in South Florida with a dual mission: to infiltrate Cuban exile organizations and to place agents in military facilities.
Its leader, Gerardo Hernández, oversaw the operation of Brothers to the Rescue through two agents who served as volunteer pilots. On February 24, 1996, Cuban fighter jets shot down two unarmed civilian planes over international waters, killing four people.
Decoded communications revealed that Havana had prepared an operation called "Scorpion" to provoke that confrontation. Hernández was sentenced to life imprisonment and was released in December 2014 as part of Obama's diplomatic opening, returning to Cuba as a hero.
A lingering threat
The report documents that Cuba currently hosts 18 signals intelligence facilities, three operated by China and two by Russia, capable of intercepting military communications from the southeastern United States.
Former CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Olson warned, "The Cubans have penetrated our government. We only know the tip of the iceberg. They are much better than the KGB."
In June 2026, the State Department sanctioned ICAP —described as the central node of the entire Cuban influence network— and its travel agency Amistur under Executive Order 14404 issued by President Trump.
That same month, a network aligned with the regime distributed a "National Rapid Response Plan" to launch coordinated actions against federal facilities, military bases, and ICE centers within 24 hours of any military action against Cuba.
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