Manuel David Orrio, a Cuban agent who posed as a journalist, displays cameras and gear he said were gifts of a Cuban American group.Jose Goitia - AP
'Dissidents' Were Informers - Cuban Trial Reveals Duplicity of Writers, Activists - *** MEXICO CITY, April 23 -- Vladimiro Roca, fresh from five years in prison for criticizing Fidel Castro's government, was invited to talk about his experience last May at the home of Vicki Huddleston, then the top U.S. diplomat in Havana.
Roca recalled that Manuel David Orrio, a gregarious and accomplished dissident journalist, stood up to thank Huddleston for hosting and encouraging peaceful opposition to Castro's authoritarian rule.
"He was very well-spoken, talkative and well-educated, and seemed very convinced of what he was saying," said Roca, the son of a Cuban revolutionary hero who split with Castro years ago, in a telephone interview from Havana. "It never occurred to me that he was a spy."
Roca and 50 others gathered that day didn't know that their friend Orrio had another name, too. To his secret bosses in the Cuban military, he was known as "Agent Miguel," one of at least a dozen government spies who had infiltrated the ranks of the journalists, human rights activists, economists, librarians and others espousing democratic reforms in Cuba.
Orrio's spying was revealed in a Havana courtroom earlier this month. He was one of the key witnesses against 75 dissidents rounded up and arrested in what human rights activists have condemned as Cuba's most harsh crackdown on opposition leaders in a generation.***