Wagner Moura wears a Rolex GMT-Master

Juan Pablo Roque staged his defection from Cuba in 1992. He swam the three and a half miles to the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, declared himself an enemy of Fidel Castro, and started over in Miami, where the exile community took a handsome former fighter pilot to be a hero. He flew for Brothers to the Rescue, the group that searched the Florida Straits for rafters. He was also a Cuban spy, part of the ring the FBI would later break as the Wasp Network, and a paid FBI informant besides. Olivier Assayas tells that story in Wasp Network, the 2020 Netflix film, with Wagner Moura as Roque and Ana de Armas as the Miami woman he married.

What did not fit was the money. In the film, his new wife wonders aloud how a man living on a book advance could afford a new Rolex. Years later, talking to an investigative reporter, his real ex-wife said almost exactly the same thing. "I never understood how he was able to go and buy a Rolex," she said. "Later I realized he bought it with the money the FBI had given him to be an informant."

The Rolex he actually wore was a GMT-Master II, the watch Rolex built in the 1950s with help from Pan Am so pilots could read a second time zone. It suited a man who had learned to fly MiGs in the Soviet Union. The watch on screen is harder to pin down. The one published writeup of the film reads it as a GMT-Master in the red-and-blue "Pepsi" bezel, though it is not sure the prop is a real Rolex rather than a Tudor, and the film's own dialogue calls it a Submariner. The brand is clear; the exact reference is not.

Roque slipped back to Havana in February 1996, the day before Cuban MiGs shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes and killed four men. He has lived in obscurity there ever since. The film's epilogue says that, out of money, he sold the Rolex on eBay, and the real account is not far off: when a reporter found him in Havana in 2012, broke, he was trying to sell a GMT-Master II, noting that used ones went for about forty-five hundred dollars on eBay and hoping his would bring more. He thought it might appeal to an American collector, someone who likes James Bond.