Standing strong against the Cuban regime would help liberate the Cuban people, protect regional and global security, and provide lasting stability and prosperity.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A high-level U.S. government delegation was recently in Cuba seeking “improved law enforcement coordination” to stem a growing exodus that in 2022 alone saw 313,488 Cubans arrive in the U.S. (nationwide encounters), mostly after treacherous journeys by land and sea. As it has done several times in the past, Cuba is using its citizens as weapons to extract enabling concessions. Appeasing and rewarding a totalitarian regime that oppresses and impoverishes its people and attacks regional democracies is misguided, especially as it continues to suffer from its own failures. It ignores the true nature of the system and provides legitimacy and resources to strengthen the ruling elite rather than empower its people. A short-sighted approach only postpones the inevitable collapse of a failed state, prolonging the agony of the Cuban people.

This latest act of treating Cuba’s Communist government, an avowed enemy of the United States, as a legitimate diplomatic actor comes at a propitious moment — for the Cuban government. Ana Belén Montes, one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history, was recently released from federal prison after serving 21 years of an already lenient 25-year sentence. She had been spying for Cuba for almost 17 years. As senior Cuba analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, she had access to top-secret intelligence from dozens of federal agencies. Montes worked diligently to convince the U.S. intelligence community that, after the end of Soviet communism, Cuba posed no significant security threat. Other agents of influence worked in tandem within the U.S. government and academic circles to support this view and to mold policy in Cuba’s favor.

Montes was released on January 8: the 34th anniversary of my 1989 defection as an officer of Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI) and my extraction by the CIA from Ecuador, where I worked with diplomatic protection. Having trained at two KGB academies in Moscow and directed Cuba’s intelligence work for seven Latin-American countries, I informed the U.S. intelligence community of the high penetration Cuba had achieved here and in many other countries. I had spent years figuring how to leave, increasingly convinced until it was inevitable. Coming from a bona fide revolutionary background, my disillusion had mounted as my privileged positions exposed the obvious contradictions between Marxist and social-justice orthodoxy and the reality of the system. I wanted to expose the truth behind the façade and the regime’s pernicious nature.

One of the first truths I tried to expose was that I knew that two young women, whose names I did not have, had been recruited at their American university to penetrate federal agencies. Their reports were so valuable that Fidel Castro received them weekly and used them to neutralize the U.S. and increase Cuba’s international influence. It took twelve years to find Montes. The other spy, Marta Rita Velázquez, who had top-secret security clearance at USAID, escaped to Sweden. I also knew of DI spies at the State Department. Yet it was not until 2010 that Walter Kendall Myers was sentenced to life in prison and his wife was sentenced to 81 months. They had spied for Cuba for 30 years.

In her post, Montes exposed some of the nation’s highly guarded secrets, which Cuba happily transfers to other U.S. enemies. She cost at least 65 lives, including of a young U.S. Green Beret, by providing information used by Cuba-backed guerrillas in El Salvador to stage a deadly attack. Yet she has remained unapologetic for her betrayal and continues to defend a criminal regime. At her trial, she argued that Cuba deserved to be treated with neighborly respect and compassion, with tolerance and understanding for its different ways. Upon her release, she decried the U.S. embargo for “choking” the Cuban people.

Regrettably, that twisted thinking continues to influence — and, perhaps, even prevail in — many influential circles. In such networks, some pass secrets and receive instructions, some exert influence knowingly, and others are well-intentioned but naïve useful idiots. The DI recruits people with social sensitivity to project them against valuable targets, fueling them with Cuba’s fake utopia of justice and equality as well as distorted anti-U.S. rhetoric many are eager to believe.

There are many more Cuba spies embedded in government, academia, media, and institutions throughout U.S. society. I knew of a network within Congress as well as of a U.S. senator compromised in the mid-1980s — lured into a sexual trap and photographed — who have never been exposed. Cuba has been so effective that, in the 1970s, a U.S. senator, having confirmed his shared objectives with Fidel Castro during a visit to Havana, was pledged clandestine funds for his presidential campaign. I can only guess if he received the money, as that information was highly compartmentalized.

These spy stories are not a thing of the past. Many of my former peers in the DI are still posted as diplomats around the world. In the 34 years since my defection, Cuba has only increased its worldwide efforts. These well-trained professional handlers are expert manipulators and even entrap unconvinced subjects. With my testimony and that of two more defectors, the think tank Cuba Archive — of which my wife is executive director — has calculated that Cuba has over 5,000 clandestine intelligence relations in the U.S. and over 1,600 in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this regard, the fact that Cuba has more embassies than most countries is not to be ignored. These are, in fact, staging grounds for extensive intelligence and diplomatic activities supported by a huge state apparatus dedicated to global influence and propaganda. This extensive work explains why Cuba’s failed economic and political system continues to enjoy impunity and exert an outsized global influence.

Cuba’s alliances with Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, Syria, and narco guerrillas, among other nefarious actors, are well known. However, few people understand that the DI’s main objective is to destroy U.S. society and its political-economic system, and to overthrow other regional democracies. Standing strong against Cuba’s perverse ways would help liberate the Cuban people, protect regional and global security, and provide lasting opportunities of stability and prosperity for Cuba, the U.S., and many other nations.