Cuba spent decades recruiting American spies. Now Washington is turning the tables on Havana

Cuba’s government has spent decades recruiting Americans to betray their country. It objects to Secretary of State Marco Rubio inviting Cubans to cooperate with the CIA. Havana apparently believes espionage should remain a privilege of the dictatorship. The Trump administration is right to disagree.

Rubio is challenging a comfortable assumption in Washington: that Cuba is too broke to matter. A regime unable to keep the lights on can still penetrate a government, compromise an intelligence officer, and help America’s adversaries. Poverty has never disqualified a country from espionage. It can make espionage one of its more valuable exports.

I am an American of Cuban descent who spent more than two decades as a CIA operations officer, including service as chief of station in Latin America. That background leaves me with little patience for the assumption that a failing economy must produce an incompetent security apparatus. Dictatorships allocate resources according to what keeps them in power. Feeding the population and protecting the regime are different priorities. Havana has made its choice repeatedly.

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The record requires little elaboration. Ana Belén Montes became the Pentagon’s leading Cuba analyst while working for Cuban intelligence. She exposed American intelligence officers and distorted Washington’s understanding of the country she was supposed to assess. Victor Manuel Rocha served as a U.S. ambassador and on the National Security Council while secretly serving Havana. Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers sustained an espionage conspiracy for 30 years.

These were patient investments in access. Cuban intelligence cultivated ideological commitment, steered recruits toward useful positions, and allowed American institutions to supply salaries, credentials, and trust. Montes needed no fortune deposited offshore. Conviction was enough. The most damaging agent may be the respected expert whose colleagues cannot imagine that his judgment belongs to someone else.

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The consequences extended beyond stolen documents. Cuba’s Wasp Network penetrated exile organizations and targeted American military facilities. One of its officers was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the 1996 destruction of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. Four men died, three of them American citizens. Havana’s intelligence operations have carried a human cost that diplomatic euphemisms cannot erase.

Rubio’s invitation puts pressure where it belongs: on the people who keep the regime functioning. An intelligence officer, military official, or party insider may know which Americans Havana has recruited, which foreign services it assists, or who signed an order to arrest a dissident. That knowledge gives him something to offer. Washington should make clear that it is prepared to listen.

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The invitation also puts a question inside Cuban headquarters that no security chief can comfortably dismiss: Who among us has already answered? Even suspicion can consume time and manpower. Every officer assigned to investigate a colleague is an officer unavailable for another mission. A service accustomed to exploiting American trust should have to spend more effort defending its own.

The work behind that invitation must be exacting. Havana will send fabricators and sources it controls. A volunteer’s hatred of the regime does not establish that his information is true. Verify what he knows, test what he claims, and protect him if he proves reliable. The measure of success is a Cuban agent inside an American institution identified, a threatened source protected, or a Cuban operation stopped.

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The president needs to know who works for Havana inside our institutions, what its partners receive, and where its chain of command is vulnerable. A negotiator who knows what the other side is concealing is harder to deceive. A counterintelligence service that can identify the next Montes before she spends years in place can prevent damage that no prosecution will undo. That is the return on patient intelligence work.

Havana will call cooperation with Washington treason. A dictatorship always finds it convenient to confuse its own survival with the life of the nation. Cubans who expose the officials imprisoning their neighbors or the intelligence networks threatening other countries need no lecture on patriotism from the people responsible. The regime does not own their allegiance merely because it controls their passports.

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President Donald Trump and Rubio are right to force this choice. Pressure should make service to the regime more costly, while a credible opening gives insiders a reason to leave it. Washington must sustain both long enough to produce results.

The Cuban services have operated on a timetable measured in decades. America cannot answer with an attention span measured in news cycles.

For decades, Havana asked Americans to betray a free country. Washington should welcome Cubans willing to help their country become one.