RIP: Rolando Cubela, Revolutionary Hero Turned CIA Agent

He was plotting to kill Castro on the day JFK was struck down

(This story first appeared in SpyTalk. It was published the same day in JFK Facts with some additional commentary from Alberto Muller, a Miami-based author who was a friend and rival of Cubela in revolutionary Cuba.)

Rolando Cubela, a Cuban revolutionary who plotted with the CIA to kill Fidel Castro, died in Miami in August, his passing unnoticed in the English-language U.S. press. While the U.K. Telegraph ran a (paywalled) obituary, neither the New York Times or the Washington Post has reported the death of a man whose rise and fall once convulsed the governments of Cuba and the United States and generated headlines worldwide. Rolando Cubela Secades was 89 years old.

I heard about Cubela’s death independently from three friends in Miami who heard the news from his family. He was living in a Miami nursing home until he passed, they said. Cubacute, a Spanish language news site in Miami, quoted Cubela’s sister saying he had died of a respiratory infection. 

The son of a tailor from the pro…