Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and National Security Council official, pleaded guilty to spying on the U.S. on behalf of Cuba for more than 40 years, the Department of Justice said Friday.
A federal judge presiding over the criminal case sentenced Rocha, 73, to a maximum 15 years in prison for obtaining classified U.S. intelligence while serving as a secret agent of Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence since 1973. Rocha admitted to the first two counts of the indictment, which charged him with conspiring to act as a foreign agent and conspiring to defraud the U.S. while acting as a foreign agent without notice.
“Today’s plea and sentencing brings to an end more than four decades of betrayal and deceit by the defendant,” assistant attorney general Matthew Olsen of the DOJ’s National Security Division said in a statement. “Rocha admitted to acting as an agent of the Cuban government at the same time he held numerous positions of trust in the U.S. government, a staggering betrayal of the American people and an acknowledgement that every oath he took to the United States was a lie.”
The judge also imposed Rocha with a $500,000 fine, three years of supervised release, a special assessment, and significant restrictions. In exchange for the guilty plea, prosecutors dropped more than a dozen other charges, including wire fraud and making false statements, according to the Associated Press.
The sentencing notably averted a trial, which would have brought to light new details on what Rocha specifically did for Cuba. Prosecutors told the judge those details remain classified.
The former diplomat worked as the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002 and served on the National Security Council from 1994 to 1995. He also used his former State Department employment to gather intelligence in order to influence U.S. foreign policy.
“Victor Manuel Rocha secretly acted for decades as an agent of a hostile foreign power. He thought the story of his covert mission for Cuba would never be told because he had the intelligence, knowledge, and discipline to never to be detected. Rocha underestimated those same skills in the prosecutors and law enforcement agents who worked tirelessly to bring him to justice for betraying his oath to this country,” said U.S. attorney Markenzy Lapointe for the Southern District of Florida.
Rocha was arrested and charged late last year for foreign espionage, in what U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland previously called “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent.”
The former envoy referred to the U.S. as an “enemy of Cuba” and called Fidel Castro the “Comandante” in praise of the late communist leader, according to the DOJ’s criminal complaint filed on December 1. He also said his covert work for Havana “strengthened the Revolution . . . immensely.” Rocha made these statements in a series of meetings in 2022 and 2023 with an undercover FBI agent posing as a covert representative of the Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence.
Rocha and the agent interacted with each other since November 2022, when the agent first contacted Rocha via WhatsApp. Rocha met with him two more times after the initial meeting and divulged about his time working as a Cuban agent while in the U.S. government.