Introduction
Seventy years of influence, ninety miles away
Since 1957, many Americans have seen Castro's Cuba as they hoped it would be rather than as it was: democratic rebels, a literacy and health-care miracle, an underdog standing up to Washington. This guide takes a different view.
Our argument is that Cuba's influence in America has worked on two tracks. The first is romantic and ideological. The bearded guerrillas, and later Che Guevara's face, gave American journalists, students, Black radicals, celebrities and politicians a revolution to admire. Havana cultivated that image deliberately, through front committees, solidarity brigades, guided tours and a sanctuary for American fugitives. The second track is operational: a small intelligence service that, by any measure, has punched far above its weight. It recruited a senior DIA analyst, a State Department analyst and a U.S. ambassador, planted agents in Florida's exile groups and on U.S. military bases, and used that intelligence to help plan the 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes.
Opinion and fact are kept separate. Every entry gives the documented record with linked sources and a status label. Our interpretation appears only in clearly marked Our Take boxes. Being critical of the Castro regime also means being honest: some claims about Cuban plots are unproven, exile militants committed real terrorism against Cuba, and the Cuban people, including the hundreds of thousands who have fled, are the regime's first victims. The Named Spies theme lists every publicly documented Cuban agent, officer or asset we could find, with each case's outcome.
Central Theme
The Romance of the Revolution
From Herbert Matthews' 1957 Sierra Maestra scoop to the solidarity brigades: why so many Americans fell for the bearded rebels, and how Havana worked to keep it that way.
The Timeline
Choose an era
Themes
Threads that run through the eras
Pick a theme to see every related entry, from the 1950s to now, in the search section below. The Romance theme comes first because it ties the ideological and operational stories together; Named Spies is the full audit of Cuban espionage cases.
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Sources & Method
How this guide was built
Entries were researched in October 2026 from primary government documents (Justice Department and FBI releases, court opinions and indictments, State Department and Treasury sanctions notices, ICE releases, ODNI assessments, the Office of the Historian, the National Security Archive), contemporary reporting by major news organizations (AP, Reuters, The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, BBC, CBC, UPI), think-tank work (CSIS, CRS), and Wikipedia overview articles that cite them. Many older newspaper articles are linked through the LatinAmericanStudies.org archive, which reproduces them. Source links were checked at the time of writing.
Quotations appear only where the wording was found in a primary or cited source. Elsewhere the guide paraphrases. Several widely repeated quotations that could not be traced to a reliable source were left out.
Point of view. This guide has an editorial position: it is critical of the Castro regime. That position appears only in boxes labeled Our Take and in the central essay. The sections labeled The Record contain only sourced statements of fact.
Fairness. An indictment is an accusation, not a finding of guilt. Entries say when charges were dropped, when cases were handled only as immigration matters, and when people were never charged. A decision not to prosecute is not proof that no spying occurred, and the reverse is also true: defector claims and anonymous intelligence are labeled as allegations. Private individuals named only in defector debriefings are not named here.
Limits. Many Cuban intelligence cases are still classified. The Named Spies audit covers only people publicly convicted, charged, or identified by a government or court record, plus defectors and officers named in reliable reporting. Some stories, such as the Raúl Castro prosecutions and U.S.–Cuba contacts, are still developing.
Status labels
Key overview sources
Image Credits
Pictures & licenses
All images come from Wikimedia Commons and are public domain or under the licenses shown. They were downloaded and resized for this guide. When no photo of the person or event itself was available, the entry uses an image of a related place, document, or institution, and the caption says so.