Roca is the son of Blas Roca Calderio, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Cuba. In 1961, at the age of 18, he was among the first batch of a young elite selected for training as fighter pilots in the Soviet Union. He served for ten years in the Cuban Armed Forces, and subsequently worked as an economist for the government. He became an active dissident in 1991, four years after his father's death. Roca and his father were close, though the son never had the same enthusiasm for Fidel Castro's 1959 socialist revolution. He was then fired from his state job.