From November 1991 to July 1994, Rocha served as Deputy Chief of the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. From July 1994 to July 1995, he worked as the Director of Inter-American Affairs on the U.S. National Security Council, influencing diplomacy with the Cuban government. Between 1995 and July 1997, Rocha operated as the Deputy Principal Officer of the U.S. Interests Section of the Embassy of Switzerland in Havana, Cuba, which was the de facto U.S. embassy in Havana until the 2015 Cuban thaw that normalized diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. Between July 1997 and November 1999, Rocha served as Deputy Chief of the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina.[1] He also served in Italy.[10]
Ambassadorship to Bolivia
President Bill Clinton appointed Rocha as U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia on June 14, 2000, and he was sworn in on July 14, 2000. He presented his credentials to the President of Bolivia on August 4, 2000, and served as ambassador until August 7, 2002.[9] At the time of his appointment as ambassador, the State Department said that he and his wife, Karla Wittkop Rocha, had two children.[2][10]
Rocha was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He also was on the University of Miami's International Advisory Board. At one time, Rocha also was a member of Henry Kissinger's International Council on Terrorism and was on the advisory board of the Cuba Transition Project of the University of Miami. He served as a special advisor to the U.S. military commander of SOUTHCOM. He was Director of Government Relations for Arcos Dorados Holdings, the company that owns and manages most of the McDonald's restaurants in Latin America. He was a senior advisor on International Business for American law firm Foley & Lardner LLP, with his office in Miami, and president of Barrick Gold Corp. Pueblo Viejo, in the Dominican Republic.
The communications and marketing firm LLYC hired Rocha as a Senior International Business Advisor in September 2023.[12] Upon learning of the U.S. government's criminal charges against Rocha for acting as an illegal foreign agent for Cuba, his employment was terminated.[13]
On December 1, 2023, Rocha was arrested in Miami, Florida, where he was living, and charged with acting as an illegal agent of the Cuban government.[2]
Unless the copyright status of the text of this page or section is clarified and determined to be compatible with Wikipedia's content license, the problematic text and revisions or the entire page may be deleted one week after the time of its listing (i.e. after 03:43, 24 June 2024 (UTC)).
What can I do to resolve the issue?
If you hold the copyright to this text, you can license it in a manner that allows its use on Wikipedia.
To confirm your permission, you can either display a notice to this effect at the site of original publication or send an e-mail from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-enwikimedia.org or a postal letter to the Wikimedia Foundation. These messages must explicitly permit use under CC BY-SA and the GFDL. See Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials.
Note that articles on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view and must be verifiable in published third-party sources; consider whether, copyright issues aside, your text is appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia.
Otherwise, you may rewrite this page without copyright-infringing material. Your rewrite should be placed on this page, where it will be available for an administrator or clerk to review it at the end of the listing period. Follow this link to create the temporary subpage. Please mention the rewrite upon completion on this article's discussion page.
Simply modifying copyrighted text is not sufficient to avoid copyright infringement—if the original copyright violation cannot be cleanly removed or the article reverted to a prior version, it is best to write the article from scratch. (See Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing.)
For license compliance, any content used from the original article must be properly attributed; if you use content from the original, please leave a note at the top of your rewrite saying as much. You may duplicate non-infringing text that you had contributed yourself.
It is always a good idea, if rewriting, to identify the point where the copyrighted content was imported to Wikipedia and to check to make sure that the contributor did not add content imported from other sources. When closing investigations, clerks and administrators may find other copyright problems than the one identified. If this material is in the proposed rewrite and cannot be easily removed, the rewrite may not be usable.
Place {{copyvio/bottom}} at the end of the portion you want to blank. If nominating the entire page, please place this template at the top of the page, set the "fullpage" parameter to "yes", and place {{copyvio/bottom}} at the very end of the article.
Federal law requires people doing the political bidding of a foreign government or entity inside the U.S. to register with the Justice Department, which in recent years has stepped up its criminal enforcement of illicit foreign lobbying.
According to the criminal complaint filed against Rocha in the U.S. District Court for Southern Florida, he has admitted to gathering intelligence for Cuba since 1981, despite the federal government's classification of the Cuban government as a sponsor of international terrorism.[1][14] In a video recorded by an undercover agent, Rocha praised Fidel Castro, called the United States the "enemy", and boasted about spying for over 40 years.[4]
Rocha allegedly described traveling in 2017 to meet his handlers in Havana by first flying to the Dominican Republic under his U.S. passport, then using his Dominican Republic passport to travel to Panama City, where he boarded his final flight to Cuba.[15][1]: 18–19 On other occasions, Rocha flew directly to Cuba using his U.S. passport.[1]: 19 Rocha reportedly became a citizen of the Dominican Republic through marriage in 2014.[16]
According to the criminal complaint, Rocha said that he was instructed by Cuba to "lead a normal life", and created a fictitious persona of a "right-wing person".[17] Rocha's $750 campaign donation to Republican Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar was returned after his arrest.[18]
In April 2024, Rocha pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government. He was subsequently sentenced to 15 years in prison and ordered to pay a $500,000 fine.[4][17]
