“They had operated on him with an open heart and he was delicate,” said his ex-wife, Ana Margarita Martínez.
MIAMI, United States. – Juan Pablo Roque, former pilot of the Cuban Air Force and member of the Wasp Networkknown for his infiltration of Cuban exile organizations in Miami and, in particular, in Brothers to the Rescuedied in Havana this Tuesday, November 25, at the age of 70.
According to his ex-wife, Ana Margarita Martínez, his death occurred after he underwent open heart surgery and contracted “a virus.” Until now, Cuban authorities have not offered an official version of the causes of death.
Luis Domínguez, member of the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba and person in charge of the database Cuban repressorsconfirmed Roque’s death through three people with past ties, as he explained to Cuban Diary. Domínguez also noted that Roque died “because of a virus,” but stressed that the precise nature of that infection has not been clarified by any official or medical source within the Island.
More details about the former agent’s health were provided by Cuban-American publicist Ana Margarita Martínez, Roque’s ex-wife, in statements to Cuban journalist based in Miami Mario Vallejo. “They had operated on him with an open heart and he was delicate. Then he got a virus, one of those that is around Cuba now, and he died,” Martínez explained.
The relationship between Roque and Martínez led to one of the most documented cases of identity fraud linked to Cuban espionage in the United States. The link was built on a false operational identity and was revealed when the spy unexpectedly returned to Havana in 1996, without notifying his wife.
The case was examined by American courts and by the international press, due to the human and judicial scope of the deception. In an interview given in 1999 to the British newspaper The Guardian, Martínez described the impact of the revelation like this: “Can you imagine waking up one day and discovering that the last four years of your life have been a lie? That you have been married to a spy? (…) I felt so betrayed, used, violated. I saw that our relationship had been a farce. I was humiliated in my community. I felt so much anger.”
Born on October 11, 1955, Roque trained as a military pilot in Cuba. In 1992 he appeared at the Guantánamo Naval Base and claimed to have escaped from the Island by swimming. This apparent desertion opened the doors of Cuban exile in the United States, where he quickly gained the trust of relevant figures and organizations in the exile community in Miami.
With that facade of a deserter, Roque managed to infiltrate the humanitarian organization Brothers to the Rescue, which carried out flights over the Strait of Florida to locate rafters in danger. As a pilot of that group, he participated in search and rescue missions, while providing information to Cuban Intelligence. His work as a spy in the service of the Government of Havana ended abruptly when he returned to Cuba without prior notice, one day before the downing, in February 1996, of two Hermanos al Rescate civil aircraft by Cuban fighter jets in international waters.
It was later learned that Roque was a member of the Avispa Network, the network of spies deployed by the Cuban regime in southern Florida during the 1990s. The objectives of this structure were to infiltrate exile organizations, monitor anti-Castro groups, penetrate US military installations and support operations of the Cuban Government in US territory.
The Wasp Network was made up of at least 14 agents, five of whom were arrested and convicted in 1998 in the process known as the “The Five” case, a name used by official Havana propaganda to present these spies as heroes.
Roque’s activities were closely linked to the downing of Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996, in which civilians Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales, Mario de la Peña and Armando Alejandre Jr. died. According to statements by the organization’s founder and director, José Basulto, to the América TeVé network, Roque worked for a time as a paid double agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), while maintaining his loyalty to Cuban Intelligence. Basulto has described him as a man who informed Havana about the activity of Brothers to the Rescue, although Roque always denied having known in advance that the pilots would be killed.
The Cuban Repressors project, of the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, included Juan Pablo Roque in its database years ago, where he appears as a “violent” repressor, with responsibility for the murder of the members of Hermanos al Rescate. The file associated with his name maintains that the then lieutenant colonel “notified Cuba through Gerardo Hernández, of the Avispa Network, about the data on the flights of the organization that the Cuban Government was preparing to shoot down on February 24, 1996, and escaped to Cuba.”
The trajectory of the spy and the Wasp Network itself was brought to the cinema in the film Wasp Network), directed by Frenchman Olivier Assayas and based on the book by Brazilian writer Fernando Morais. Large sectors of the Cuban exile have questioned the film for softening the human impact of the 1996 demolition. Roque himself criticized the treatment of his figure in an interview with the digital media CiberCuba, in which he stated that, although the film seemed “more credible” to him than the book on which it is based, the film “is quite far from reality, because it tells things as they were not.”
