By scapegoating US institutions to justify spying, Rocha is still helping Cuban regime | Opinion
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Don’t believe the spy.
Guilty-pleading Victor Manuel Rocha, sentenced in Miami to a mere 15 years in prison, is still helping the 65-year-old Cuban dictatorship.
He’s still stoking the fires of the United State’s right wing to weaken this country.
Only now — in the same way he played the part of supporting Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy and being an asset to Cuban exiles as a former U.S. ambassador who championed the cause of a democratic Cuba — Rocha is dipping into U.S. culture wars to smear a prestigious American institution.
Instead of owning his shame for betraying the adopted homeland where his life became a rags-to-riches story, the Colombian-born, Harlem-raised ex-diplomat is using Yale University as scapegoat for his decades of spying crimes.
At a time when prestigious universities are under political scrutiny — and a divisive presidential election is taking place with Trump again on the Republican ticket — Rocha is blaming the private Ivy League school founded in 1710 in New Haven, Connecticut, for his alleged radicalization.
“During my formative years in college, I was heavily influenced by the radical politics of the day,” Rocha, 73, told U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom Friday. “My deep commitment at that time to radical social change in the region led me to the eventual betrayal of my oath of loyalty to the United States during my two decades in the State Department.”
If anything, this is a statement that signals to Cuba: Here I am, your faithful servant. Rescue me.
READ MORE: Convicted ex-U.S. diplomat says ‘radical politics’ at Yale turned him into Cuban spy
Guess who went to Yale, too?
What gall, and how stupid does he think some of us university-trained Americans are?
There’s not a spit of truth in saying that attending a liberal university radicalizes you into becoming a soldier for the extreme left — much less one who covertly works for a regime 90 miles from Florida whose allies are enemies of the United States and democracy: Russia, Iran, China.
Rocha is the exception, not the rule.
Case in point: Right-wing extremist Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also went to liberal Yale and to Harvard University Law School, and is trying to turn Florida public schools, from grade school to college, into bastions of ultra-Christian conservatism for political benefit.
By Rocha’s logic, DeSantis would be a raging Democrat, blue through and through. Or, at least, a reasonable Republican conservative, with hands-off, small-government in mind, instead of inserting government into personal life decisions and leading the Florida GOP to autocratic dominance.
He’s not alone. In fact, some accuse Yale of producing radical elite conservatives.
A liberal education
A liberal education, however, isn’t supposed to radicalize but challenge students to become critical thinkers, a necessary trait to develop in a democracy where “one citizen, one vote” decisions shape this country. Critical thinkers, in theory, don’t blindly follow political norms.
They learn to engage in deep research and to analyze history, people and choices.
Every generation experiences campus activism that reflects the world we live in. It’s part of the college experience. But even those “radicalized” can change.
Humans don’t remain stagnant throughout their lives, not physiologically nor intellectually.
Plenty of Cubans and Latin American leftists have evolved in their thinking since Fidel Castro rose to power in 1959— and trends point to less support, not more, for the Cuban regime led by Miguel Díaz-Canel, with the aged Castro-styled communist gang as supporting cast.
Cubans today grapple with what a post-Castro Cuba should look like. A sector of the left, recently exiled, has changed so much that they’re now far-right pro-Trump.
What Rocha supported — and was pledging to still support when he thought he was talking to a Cuba handler, not an FBI agent — wasn’t a noble revolution seeking social justice.
He was working for leaders who, like Rocha in Miami, live the good life.
Dictators retain wealth in political isolation — playing spy games.
