On May 7, Kendall Myers — a former Cuban regime spy within the U.S. State Department, known to Cuban intelligence as Agent 202 — died in prison. He compromised U.S. national security, and according to The New York Times, “would have been in a position to provide them with up-to-the-minute information on what was happening inside the State Department’s intelligence community.” Yet his story is not unique.

A recent FBI podcast mentioned — almost as a footnote — how Castroist espionage has preyed upon American universities for years. By recruiting students susceptible to the romanticization of the leftist Revolution, the regime has managed to place spies in positions of power — individuals whose primary allegiance is ideological rather than driven by material gain.

One of the analysts participating in the roundtable explained how recruitment within U.S. institutions of higher learning — often before students held any public office — lays bare Havana’s patient methodology. Intelligence services were willing to wait decades for a “relationship” to bear fruit.

This was the case with former U.S. Ambassador Víctor Manuel Rocha and former National Security Analyst Ana Belén Montes. Both chose to divulge secrets or act against their own country in order to support the Castros, having been manipulated since their days as university students.

For various reasons, the United States has long been squarely in the crosshairs of Cuban intelligence spies, agents, and collaborators. Two reasons, however, stand out.

First, because selling gathered intelligence to allies — such as North Korea or China — is highly lucrative. And second, because, unable to engage in conventional military confrontation, Fidel Castro decided to undermine the North American nation from within using “cancerous cells”: promoters of socialist ideology.

Exploiting contradictions and social ills within American society, leftist ideologues sold younger generations the notion that “burning the country down” — renouncing their self-respect, their culture, and their history and traditions — was a sensible solution.

Promoting this brand of destructive, collective mea culpa served no purpose other than to benefit the nation’s enemies.

Not a New Story

In pursuing this strategy, Cuban socialism “has recruited a large number of agents across many countries and poses a grave and ongoing threat to international security,” asserts Cuban journalist Camila Acosta. “Universities have consistently ranked among Havana’s primary targets.”

María Werlau — honored by the State Department as a hero in the fight against human trafficking and director of the nonprofit organization Archivo Cuba — believes that this infiltration of American academia has been taking place since the 1960s.

It coincided with the international call for “decolonization,” the sexual revolution, and the emergence of thinkers and movements that dismantled and singled out Western civilization as the unredeemable culprit behind sins that, supposedly, only it had committed.

In these turbulent waters, Castroism saw an opportunity to torpedo its greatest geopolitical rival from within. To this end, it relied on training and resources from the Soviet KGB — then a key ally of Havana and the progenitor of its own intelligence services.

Institutions of higher learning were a strategic arena for destabilizing the country.

There, they sought to mold the minds of generations of Americans who would later occupy positions of influence in the business, political, and cultural sectors. Following the vision of the leftist pedagogue Paulo Freire, these institutions held the potential to become a factory for revolutionaries.

Freire himself worked in 1969 as an associate professor at Harvard University, and throughout the 1970s as a Special Consultant to the Department of Education of the World Council of Churches.

From this vantage point — driven by his promotion of Gramscian philosophy, which elevated the Marxist oppressor-vs.-oppressed paradigm and prioritized cultural struggle — he exerted influence over state-mandated school curricula in various newly independent nations across Asia, the Americas, and Africa.

In 2006, U.S. federal authorities charged a married couple — Elsa Prieto Álvarez, 55, and Carlos M. Álvarez, 61 — with having acted as secret agents for Cuba for many years.

Prosecutors stated that Álvarez, an associate professor at Florida International University (FIU), had spied for Havana since 1977, while his wife, a coordinator at the university’s Counseling and Psychology Services Center, had been doing so since 1982.

The FBI believed that, using computers in their home connected to their university offices, the Álvarez couple could “gain electronic access to student records and faculty information.”

Álvarez traveled to Cuba and other countries under the auspices of FIU and other institutions. Under the pretext of traveling for academic purposes, Álvarez would meet with the Cuban intelligence officials who supervised him and his wife to receive new orders and, in turn, report on completed missions.

Cuba instructed the Álvarez couple to recruit American students, leveraging their positions at the state-run educational institution in Miami.

In 2002, Cuba’s Intelligence Directorate (DI) suggested that Carlos Álvarez begin identifying and evaluating students — some of them from FIU, still linked with Cuban espionage — who were planning to travel to Cuba as part of an exchange program called “Puentes Cubanos” (Cuban Bridges).

It all appeared entirely innocuous, framed solely within the context of academic interest — a phenomenal cover for Castroist infiltration.