When Cuban fighter jets shot down two unarmed civilian aircraft and killed four men in 1996, other than family members who lost loved ones, perhaps no one was more intimately impacted by the incident than Ana Margarita Martinez.
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She was married to a man she thought was a Brothers to the Rescue hero, but turned out to be a Cuban spy. When federal officials announced the indictment against Raúl Castro and others allegedly involved in the shootdown incident, Martinez went to the event, despite having a broken foot.
“Wow, when they were talking about the Cuban spies, I wanted to yell, I was married to one of them!” Martinez said in an interview conducted at her home.
She had a four-year relationship with Juan Pablo Roque. He was one of two Cuban spies who infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue as volunteer pilots. Roque infamously disappeared the day before the shootdown, and then turned up in Cuba two days later as a hero to the regime.
“So prior to this, espionage for me was something you saw in the movies, you know? It wasn’t real, but it became very real,” Martinez said. “I was completely blindsided, I had absolutely no knowledge, I wasn’t prepared for that, it was the worst episode, the worst nightmare of my life.”
The betrayal was devastating for Martinez and her family, realizing her marriage was a sham.
“I think it helped his cover, I think that I was probably approved by Havana,” she said.
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The indictment says Cuban intelligence instructed Roque not to fly with Brothers to the Rescue on Feb. 24, 25, 26 and 27. Martinez said BTTR called to see if Roque could fly on the 24th, the day the shootdown happened.
“I answered the phone and passed it on to him, and he said that he would be on a business trip that weekend and obviously, he couldn’t fly,” Martinez said. “You know, you have to be a sociopath, you seriously have to be a sociopath and not have a conscience.”
Roque told her several times he was proud of the life-saving work he did by flying with Brothers to the Rescue, spotting desperate Cuban refugees floating on rafts who were trying to make it to America. Martinez has no idea if he was sincere about anything.
“I don’t know what to believe in that sense, it’s so difficult to believe that someone could be so extremely cold-hearted,” Martinez said. “And he could’ve saved four innocent lives, and to me, that’s the bottom line.”
Martinez points out that Roque knew what was going to happen to his colleagues at Brothers to the Rescue, and he chose not to alert them of the danger.
Roque died in Cuba last year. Martinez said when she found out, it did not phase her because, she says, he had already been dead to her for many years.