Marco Rubio stated in an interview with Fox News that Cuba is "the only country that has systematically implanted and concealed spies within the U.S. system, without even paying them," during the presentation of a State Department report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.
The statements made by the U.S. Secretary of State were aired on the program "My View with Lara Trump" and shared by the official account of the State Department on X, where Rubio described Cuba as a "superpower of espionage and influence operations" despite having only 9.5 million inhabitants and being located 90 miles from the U.S. coast.
Rubio cited two emblematic cases to support his argument. The first is that of Ana Belén Montes, an analyst from the Defense Intelligence Agency who was arrested in 2001 and sentenced to 25 years in prison, whom he described as "one of the greatest intelligence failures of the U.S. and one of the biggest penetrations into our system."
Montes was released in January 2023 after serving her sentence.
The second case is that of former ambassador Víctor Manuel Rocha, who was sentenced in April 2024 to 15 years in prison and a fine of $500,000 for spying for Cuba since 1973. "We had an ambassador, a U.S. ambassador, who turned out to be a Cuban spy and was recently convicted," Rubio noted.
Beyond classic espionage, the Secretary of State linked the Cuban network of influence to the 2020 protests, the emergence of Antifa, pro-Hamas activism on college campuses, and actions against immigration agents.
"There is nothing organic about it. It is funded, it is organized, and Cuba is part of that network and in some cases a critical part," he stated.
Rubio also noted that the same protesters who "were burning things in 2020" appeared with "pre-printed banners" in front of a courthouse 48 hours after Nicolás Maduro's capture, demanding his release, and then joined the protests against the immigration service.
Regarding Latin America, the secretary stated that "every leftist communist insurgency that has destabilized governments in the region over the last 40 or 50 years found its support, its assistance, or, in many cases, its origin in a Cuban influence operation."
In response to criticisms labeling the report as "fear tactics" to justify military action, Rubio was categorical: "Everything in that report is factual, and frankly, I don’t believe they can refute it."
He added that there are "enough people in key nodes of our society, including teachers," who have ideological sympathy towards the Cuban regime, and that this affinity is precisely "the way they obtain spies without paying them."
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez rejected the report, calling it a "fallacy" and accused Rubio of fabricating a pretext for an aggression against Cuba, while the ruling Miguel Díaz-Canel labeled it a "neo-McCarthyite pamphlet."
The report from the State Department, published on July 20, 2026, also links the Cuban regime to intelligence facilities connected to China and Russia on the island, and was accompanied by a new round of sanctions against Havana.
Filed under: