Ponente
Descripción
Author/presenter: Teishan A. Latner
Author/presenter affiliation: Thomas Jefferson University (Philadelphia, USA)
Author/presenter email address: teishan.latner@gmail.com
Paper abstract:
This paper examines the phenomenon of U.S. citizens who spied for Cuba, during and after the Cold War, because they disagreed with Washington’s regime-change policies. This “solidarity espionage,” as it might be termed, constitutes a little-studied example of U.S. citizens engaging in a form of civil disobedience as a result of deeply held feelings of moral opposition to the foreign policy of their government. Yet solidarity espionage also illuminates a broader, hidden history of North American internationalism, from Henry Reeve in the 1870s, to Bob Baldock in the 1960s, in which U.S. citizens have “switched sides” to support the cause of Cuban independence through militant action. This paper devotes its analysis to three U.S. citizens who became spies for Havana due to their desire to aid Cuba in defending itself from specific Washington policies, including economic sanctions, regime-change operations, and state-sponsored terrorism, whose stated aim was to weaken or destroy the Cuban Revolution. Ana Montes, a respected senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who was the U.S. intelligence community’s highest-ranking Cuba expert in the 1990s, was unmasked as a spy for Cuba in 2001. Walter Kendall Myers, a U.S. State Department officer and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, gave classified information to Cuba for thirty years until he was arrested in the United States in 2009. Carlos Alvarez, a psychology professor at Florida International University, provided Havana with information about anti-Castro Cuban American organizations for thirty years before being arrested in 2005. Although not as well-known as the “Five Heroes” Cuban intelligence agents, who penetrated rightwing Cuban American groups in Florida until their arrest in 1998, the stories of Montes, Myers, and Alvarez reveal an unusual example of how American citizens have used civil disobedience in order to act in support of Cuban national sovereignty and in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.
