US SHOULD OCCUPY CUBA TO PREVENT IT FROM BECOMING A CHINESE MILITARY BASE
China Has Had a Spy Base in Cuba for Years, U.S. Official Says
The Senate Intelligence Committee is disturbed by the cooperation of Beijing and Havana.Credit...Yander Zamora/EPA, via Shutterstock
A recent report in the Wall Street Journal says Chinese troops could soon be on the US doorstep, if they aren't already. According to the report, it's all part of a deal for China to build a military base there, making the US worry that Chinese troops will be stationed there. In this episode of China Uncensored, we discuss why China wants a base in Cuba, what the US response has been, and what other plans for bases China has.
A Chinese spy base or facilities in Cuba that could intercept electronic signals from nearby U.S. military and commercial buildings have been up and running since before 2019, when they were upgraded, according to a Biden administration official.
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence, said the spy base was an issue that the Biden administration had inherited from former President Donald J. Trump. After Mr. Biden took office, his administration was briefed about the base in Cuba as well as plans China was considering to build similar facilities across the globe, the official said.
The existence of an agreement to build a Chinese spy facility in Cuba, first reported on Thursday by The Wall Street Journal and also reported by The New York Times and other news outlets, prompted a forceful response from Capitol Hill. In a joint statement, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the panel’s top Republican, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, said they were “deeply disturbed by reports that Havana and Beijing are working together to target the United States and our people.”
John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, denied the reports at the time, saying they were “not accurate.” He added that “we have had real concerns about China’s relationship with Cuba, and we have been concerned since Day 1 of the administration about China’s activities in our hemisphere and around the world.”
But a U.S. official familiar with the intelligence cited in Thursday’s reports insisted that China and Cuba had struck an accord to enhance existing spy capabilities.
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Carlos F. de Cossio, a deputy foreign minister of Cuba, wrote on Twitter on Saturday that the latest reports on spying facilities were “slanderous speculation.”
Some of the Biden administration’s critics in Congress questioned the motives for the administration’s response.
“Why did the Biden administration previously deny these reports of a C.C.P. spy base in Cuba? Why did they downplay the ‘silly’ C.C.P. spy balloon?” Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the House select committee looking into strategic competition with China, said in a statement Saturday, referring to the Chinese Communist Party by its initials.
The Biden administration has been working to counter China’s continued efforts to gain a foothold in the region and elsewhere, an administration official said, chiefly by engaging diplomatically with nations that China was pursuing as potential hosts for such bases. The official added that the administration had slowed China’s plans but declined to give specifics.
While Beijing’s global efforts to build military bases and listening outposts have been documented previously, the reports detailed the extent to which China is bringing its intelligence-gathering operations into ever-closer proximity with the United States. Cuba’s coastline is less than 100 miles from the nearest part of Florida, a close enough distance to enhance China’s technological ability to conduct signals intelligence, by monitoring the electronic communications across the U.S. southeast, which is home to several military bases.
China and the United States routinely spy on one another’s activities, and Cuba proximity has long made it a strategically valuable foothold for U.S. adversaries, perhaps most famously during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union attempted to store nuclear missiles on the island nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, said Friday in response to the reports, “The U.S. is the global champion of hacking and superpower of surveillance.”
The reports also surfaced at an awkward moment for the Biden administration, which has been trying to normalize relations with China after a protracted period of heightened tensions. Last year, several diplomatic, military and climate engagements between the two countries were frozen after Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan over objections from Beijing, which considers the self-governing island part of its territory.
High-level meetings, including an official trip by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, were canceled again earlier this year, after a Chinese spy balloon was seen crossing the United States by people on the ground, and tracked hovering near sensitive military sites.
Mr. Blinken is now scheduled to travel to Beijing for meetings that begin June 18, and it is unclear if revelations of a Chinese spy facility so close to U.S. territory could complicate those plans. Other issues hover over the trip, including growing calls for China to release Yuyu Dong, a prominent journalist who has been detained since February last year and is awaiting trial on charges of espionage that his family members say are false. Mr. Dong, a former Nieman fellow at Harvard, met for years in a transparent manner with American and Japanese diplomats and journalists in Beijing.
US can't do much to stop Chinese spy base in Cuba, expert says
Reports have surfaced over the last week about Chinese spy operations based in Cuba, only about 90 miles from Key West, Florida.
One expert notes the “confusion” surrounding the reports, but he says the realization that the Chinese are using Cuba to conduct surveillance shouldn’t come as a shock.
“I think it would be more of a news story if there wasn't a Chinese spy base on Cuba and there’s no spying operations there,” said Michael A. Allen, a political science professor at Boise State University, “because spying is a normal course of international relations. The U.S. does a ton of it, as well. And it's par for the course.”
Cuba hosted Soviet spy operations during the Cold War, he said. Now, it appears Cuba is hosting Chinese spy operations.
Chinese and Cuban officials have denied any such operations.
“What is true can never be false, and what is false can never be true,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Wang Wenbin said Monday. “No matter how the U.S. tries with slanders and smears, it will not succeed in driving a wedge between two true friends, China and Cuba, nor can it cover up its deplorable track record of indiscriminate mass spying around the world.”
The “secret agreement” for an “electronic eavesdropping facility” in Cuba came to light with a Wall Street Journal report last week.
A Cuban flag hangs on Parque Central Hotel in Havana, Cuba, early Monday, July 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Ismael Francisco)
The report cited U.S. officials familiar with highly classified intelligence.
The Biden administration denied the report initially.
“I’ve seen that press report, it’s not accurate,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told MSNBC. “What I can tell you is that we have been concerned since day one of this administration about China’s influence activities around the world. Certainly, in this hemisphere and in this region, we’re watching this very, very closely.”
But, over the weekend, the White House confirmed to the Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press that China has operated a spy base in Cuba since at least 2019. Neither outlet named a specific administration official in providing the confirmation, and the White House hasn’t issued an official statement.
“There's some mix-up in the reporting here that suggests that there might be two different levels happening, the existence of operations already versus a newer deal that might be going on,” said Allen, who is an expert in international relations.
The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee put out a joint statement that seemed to frame the spy base news as something they didn’t already know about.
“We are deeply disturbed by reports that Havana and Beijing are working together to target the United States and our people. The United States must respond to China’s ongoing and brazen attacks on our nation’s security,” reads the statement from Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
The U.S. is likely to bring this up in talks with China. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reportedly planning to travel to China in the coming weeks after his trip there was canceled in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon incident.
But Allen said the U.S. really isn’t in the position to pressure either China or Cuba to shutter the reported surveillance operation. The U.S. doesn’t want to give up its spy operations as an incentive for China, and our relationship is too bad with Cuba to coax cooperation from the island nation.
Allen said the timing of this report is curious. If it’s all about a preexisting base, then why did it come to light now?
Still, Allen called this a “minor blip so far” in the already-strained China-U.S. relations.
“It's not ‘spy-balloon level,’” he said.
The U.S. and China have been in a trade war since 2018, with tariffs, retaliatory tariffs, and other export controls put in place.
And then there’s risk surrounding U.S. relations with Taiwan, over which China stakes claim.
The last two House speakers, Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy, have met with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, drawing rebukes from China and sparking military exercises in the region as a sort of warning from China.
