The State Department published a 100-page report on Monday titled "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism", which asserts that the Cuban regime's Intelligence Directorate (DI) continues to operate an active network of spies within the United States, with significant infiltration into civilian and military institutions.
The document does not identify new agents by name nor provide any unpublished evidence, but it compiles estimates from former counterintelligence officials and documented historical cases to argue that the Cuban threat is not a relic of the Cold War but an ongoing reality.
The former head of Counterintelligence at the CIA, James Olson, is quoted with a strong statement: "The Cubans have still penetrated our government... we only know the tip of the iceberg. They are much better than the KGB."
On his part, former counterintelligence official Christopher Simmons, who was involved in dismantling several Cuban networks after the end of the Cold War, has publicly estimated that the DI still maintains dozens of unidentifiable agents operating in U.S. territory, including alleged agents in high government positions.
The report rates the DI as "one of the most effective human intelligence operations in the world" and notes that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the agency redirected its operations towards the United States as its almost exclusive target, while maintaining its networks of agents and methods.
To illustrate the historical scope of that infiltration, the document reviews emblematic cases.
Victor Manuel Rocha, former ambassador in Bolivia and former director of Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council under the Clinton presidency, spied for Cuba for approximately 50 years before being arrested in December 2023. He was .
The then Attorney General Merrick Garland described it as "one of the deepest and most enduring infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent."
Ana Belén Montes, recruited in 1984 as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, became the lead analyst on Cuba at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. She disclosed the identities of at least four undercover agents and the location of a secret military base in El Salvador. She was arrested in 2001 and released in January 2023.
Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn passed classified information from the State Department to Havana for 30 years using shortwave radios. Myers was sentenced to life in prison in 2010 and died in prison in March 2026 at the age of 88, showing no remorse.
The report also warns about the current geopolitical dimension: Cuba hosts 18 known signals intelligence facilities, of which China actively operates three and Russia two.
According to the document, the intelligence personnel of both powers on the Island has tripled since 2023. The Cuban regime, the text notes, serves as a platform from which China, Russia, and Iran project operations against the United States.
The Secretary of State Marco Rubio presented the report with the message: "For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the primary sponsor of radical leftism and third-worldism in the United States. The American people deserve to know."
The publication falls within the maximum pressure policy of the Trump administration, which in June imposed sanctions on the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) under Executive Order 14404, identifying it as an instrument of the Cuban government that "supports Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence activities."
The report concludes that "confusing Cuba's poverty with its harmlessness is a complete misunderstanding of the threat."
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