For 30 years, ex-employees of the State Department Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn Myers passed classified materials to the Cuban government in exchange for little monetary compensation. Their motivation? A starry-eyed idealism that held Cuba’s totalitarian communist society as the model that man should aspire to. It is an idealism that has certain elements that diverge from reality so drastically, that one wonders how they can subsist in a day-to-day fashion. It is an idealism that proposes that:

• Total denial of individual human rights by emphasizing “Collective Needs” is a type of progress
• The United States is the source of all evil in the world
• Murder is justified in the name of Communism

Those are only a few of their “ideals,” and these are only a few of the spies. Cuba has specialized in recruiting the true believers in their tyrannical ideology in order to obtain sensitive materials that may eventually find their way into the hands of our enemies. Ana Belen Montes, the senior Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, was another one of these spies who passed sensitive information that directly led to the death of a US operative in Central America. Her motivation was likewise ideological, an ideology that seeks to destroy the United States.

Ana Belen Montes

So as the people in Washington debate on how to play nice with the Castro government, maybe they should consider how a country with highly restricted trade and travel with the United States has been able to infiltrate our intelligence agencies. Before opening our wallets and borders to Communist Cuba, the government should first ask the question: will normalizing relations with a country that steals US secrets and passes them to our enemies help national security or hurt national security?

-AG