The forgotten lady who gave her life for Cuba

There is one specific aspect of the recent thaw between the US and Cuba which nobody has mentioned and that bothers me a lot.

We have all heard about the Cuban 5, the last three of which were now freed and we heard about the Jewish American spy Alan Gross who has now returned to the USA.  The media has also reveled the name of the top US mole in Cuba who had provided the USA with information about the Cuban 5 which lead to their arrest: Rolando Sarraff Trujillo who is now in the USA.  So all is well, and everybody is back home, right?

Wrong.

Amongst the people whom Trujillo's betrayal was Ana Belen Montes, who was the top DIA analyst for Cuba and who, after observing from the inside the hypocrisy and outright evil of the US policy towards Cuba decided to betray the USA and become a spy for Cuba.

You could say that Ana Montes was Rolando Trujillo's counterpart in the USA.

Except that Trujillo is free, while Montes still rots in jail.

And, apparently, the Cuban government made no effort to get her freed.

I don't personally care much about moles primarily because most of them end up breaking an oath to their country, and that bothers me a lot.  Unlike an intelligence agent, whether under diplomatic immunity or clandestine, a mole takes a formal oath to the country he/she betrays, something which intelligence agents don't do.  But if there is one thing which even the prosecution admitted in the case of Ana Belen Montes is that she acted purely on political/ideological grounds, because she believed in her heart that what she was doing was right.  She got no money from the Cubans, she was not entrapped in some sordid sex scandal and she was no acting out of petty revenge or resentful ego problems, as so many traitors typically do.

She knew the risks better than anybody else, but she took them because she believed that this was the right, honorable, thing to do.

And now the Cubans have apparently turned away from her (while the US did get Trujillo free).

I cannot see any excuse for the Cuban government's willingness to release Trujillo for anybody else but Montes.  The plight of the Cuban 5 was not nearly as dramatic has Montes' and Trujillo was directly responsible for her arrest.  And yet the Cubans seem to have forgotten her.

David Rovics wrote an absolutely beautiful song for Ana Belen Montes and I hope that she will get to hear it one day.  You can listen to it here:


I can only imagine how Montes feels today knowing that Trujillo is free while she is forgotten.  And I don't blame the USA for jailing her.  But it bothers me a great deal that the Cubans have apparently turned away from a lady who gave her life for Cuba.

The Saker