Cuban spy Manuel Rocha’s plea deal raises new questions for claims holders

When Carolyn Lamb saw the news of the arrest of Cuban spy Victor Manuel Rocha on the news last December, she recognized it immediately. He was the same man who had sat in his living room in Omaha 17 years earlier, trying to make a deal.

Rocha, 73, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Friday for acting as a foreign agent for the Cuban government, pleading guilty to two counts of conspiracy. In addition to the prison term, Rocha faces three years of supervised release, a $500,000 fine and several other conditions.

Rocha’s arrest last year stunned the diplomatic community, in part because of his longevity as an agent: more than 40 years, much of it spent working for the U.S. State Department, including a stint as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and another at the National Security Council. .

In exchange for a reduced sentence, Rocha’s deal requires him to cooperate with prosecutors and reveal what clandestine activities he carried out for Cuba.

Carolyn Lamb hopes this trial will reveal what Rocha has been doing in her living room for nearly 20 years.

Lamb describes how Rocha traveled across the country in 2007 and offered to buy the paper rights to an 80-acre farm, a 1959 Buick and thousands of shares of Cuban telephone company stock that belonged to Lamb’s father before they were seized by the Castros. regime.

Castro not only nationalized American property; he seized all private property. Every home and business became government property, and none of the owners were paid for them. With a few exceptions, this is still true today.

In 1970, the U.S. government valued Lamb’s claim at $489,208 and set an annual interest rate of 6 percent from the date of loss to the date of settlement. According to this formula, Cubans today owe $1.9 million. That number increases with each day that passes without a deal.

“They told me my statement was crap,” Lamb says of Rocha and a business partner that day in Omaha. They offered her $114,000 in compensation. Lamb said she was insulted and suspicious of what she saw as such a low offer.

There are nearly 6,000 American claims to property and land in Cuba, all seized by Fidel Castro’s government after his 1959 coup. The value of the claims totals more than $7 billion, and many are held by major U.S. brands such as Pepsi, General Electric and Twentieth Century Fox.

This large-scale confiscation of Americans’ property was a major reason why the United States imposed an embargo on Cuba more than 60 years ago.

Before the embargo can be lifted, claims to those properties must be resolved.

“It is still one of the biggest obstacles to normalizing relations with Cuba,” says Jason Poblete, Lamb’s lawyer.

“Era [Rocha] part of a plan to help depress the value of these claims, to give the Cuban government an escape clause?” Poblete wondered aloud.

The lower the value of the claims, the less the Cuban government will have to pay in any future negotiated settlement.

Poblete also wondered whether Rocha was obstructing the process. “Has it made it more difficult to resolve the claims issue?” she said in an interview with CNBC.

It would be helpful for the Cubans to have information from Rocha because in a negotiation over the claims “any information you could get would be helpful,” said John Kavulich, head of the U.S.-Cuba Economic and Trade Council.

But if Rocha’s participation in the credit trading business was actually part of his secret work, this would be news to his business partner.

Timothy Ashby says he was “astonished” by Rocha’s arrest because “he was almost too right-wing to be believed”, and Ashby could not imagine Rocha working for a communist government.

But looking back, Ashby says there were signs. “She had a thing for the rich.”

And that’s not all. “Once a week he had his offices cleaned for bugs because he said he was worried the FBI would listen to them,” Ashby told CNBC in a recent interview.

Ashby assumed that Rocha’s paranoia about the wiretaps was a response to the George W. Bush administration’s opposition to Cuba’s claims of purchasing assets.

But according to the Justice Department, by then Rocha was already in his third decade as a Cuban agent.

Ashby says buying the credits was his idea, and he brought Rocha in because of his ties to the U.S. government.

The company they formed eventually raised $10.5 million and purchased nine claims including large tracts of land and some hotels. But they were forced to suspend the operation, Ashby says, when the Bush administration deemed their activities a violation of the embargo.

Timothy Ashby now writes spy novels. He didn’t know that he would be a character in a real life case.

Born in Colombia in 1950, Rocha became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1978 and a State Department employee in 1981. Over the course of his long diplomatic career, he served at U.S. embassies in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico, Argentina, and finally in Bolivia, where he was ambassador.

In the mid-1990s he spent a year on the National Security Council, where he had special responsibility for Cuba and later served in the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Throughout your career, the Justice Department says you had exclusive access to nonpublic U.S. government information.

Rocha was captured when an undercover FBI agent, impersonating a Cuban spy, caught him on camera during 3 separate meetings in Miami in 2022 and 2023.

According to the Justice Department’s complaint, during the meetings Rocha behaved like a Cuban agent, consistently referred to the United States as “the enemy” and used the term “we” to describe himself and Cuba.

“What we have done… is huge… More than a Grand Slam,” he boasted at one point.

Records suggest that Rocha was recruited by Cubans in Chile in the 1970s and may have become a State Department employee expressly to become an undercover agent.

In FBI records, he says his known right-wing persona was part of his cover.

After retiring from the State Department in 2006, Rocha became an advisor to the United States Southern Command, a joint command of the United States military whose area of ​​responsibility includes Cuba.

It was around this time that he entered the claims business.

Poblete hopes Rocha’s debriefing with U.S. officials might reveal more about what information he was providing to Cubans about the claims, the grievance process and whether he was manipulating the settlement process to thwart it.

Lamb says she and minor claimants feel forgotten.

“We are not part of a large voting bloc and we do not have deep pockets to pay lobbyists on our behalf.”

Poblete said his client could actually sue Rocha. “We will use every tool to help Americans whose property has been confiscated.”