- Written by Bernd Debsmann Jr.
- BBC News, Washington
A former career diplomat who once served as the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for working as a Cuban agent.
Prosecutors say Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, secretly passed information to the Cuban government for more than 40 years.
In February, Rocha changed his original not guilty plea in a Miami courtroom and vowed to avoid a trial.
The spy case has become one of the highest-profile cases ever between the United States and Cuba.
“I plead guilty,” Rocha said Friday in a federal courtroom in Miami, wearing a beige prison uniform.
In addition to jail time, Rocha must pay a $500,000 fine and cooperate with authorities.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland called Rocha's crimes “one of the most extensive and long-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by foreign agents.”
Mr. Rocha, who was born in Colombia and educated at Yale and Harvard, served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia from 1999 to 2022, and has also held various diplomatic assignments in Argentina, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
He also served in other government positions, including as a member of the National Security Council.
After his diplomatic career, Mr. Rocha served as an advisor to the U.S. Army's Southern Command, which oversees all of Latin America and the Caribbean, including communist Cuba.
In November 2022, an undercover FBI agent contacted Rocha on WhatsApp, claiming to be working on behalf of Cuban intelligence. Her representative said she was passing on a message from “your friends in Havana,” according to court documents.
Over the course of three subsequent meetings, Mr. Rocha revealed details of his previous espionage activities for Cuba. At one point, Rocha used the term “we” to describe Cuba and himself, vowing to “defend” what “we” did together.
When asked if he was “still with us,” Rocha told undercover agents that he was “angry” that his loyalty to the Cuban regime was being questioned. “It's like questioning your manhood,” he said.
The United States has had tense relations with Cuba since Fidel Castro overthrew the U.S.-backed Cuban government in 1959, a revolution that was quickly followed by a U.S. embargo.
In 2015, then-President Barack Obama and former Cuban President Raul Castro took steps to normalize relations, but many of those steps were reversed by the Trump administration.
Former CIA counterintelligence chief James Olson said in an interview with the BBC that the incident was emblematic of how Cuban intelligence “defeated” its decades-long US adversary.
“They owned us,” Olson said. “That's one of the reasons I have a personal grudge against Cuban intelligence, because they've been very successful in their operations against us.”
Mr. Olson called Mr. Rocha a “traitor.”
“He betrayed our country,” he said. “I think it's despicable and I don't think he'll ever see the light of day again.”