The Wall Street Journal reported this month that the People’s Republic of China has heavily invested in a cash-strapped Cuba in exchange for access to an electronic intelligence collection (ELINT) facility, and negotiated an agreement to train Chinese soldiers on the north side of the island.
These developments have been met with great concern in Washington, particularly due to the strategic threat that the PRC’s presence in the region poses.
China’s history of US intelligence collection through Cuba can be traced back to 1999 when Cuba granted the PRC access to facilities at Bejucal, a city just south of the capital, previously operated by the Soviet Union, to collect intelligence on the United States.
More recently, the Biden administration’s response to the WSJ’s report confirmed that the Chinese had indeed been operating an intelligence facility in Cuba for some time, and had only upgraded it in 2019. This ran counter to presidential spokesman John Kirby’s characterization of the reports of China’s “building” of the base.
However, the dialogue left unclear exactly how much money the PRC has invested towards the 2019 upgrade and whether or not it was included as part of the debt restructuring and investment credits awarded by the PRC to Cuba this past November.
By contrast, the possible rotation of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military personnel through the island for training crosses a small, if important, threshold with respect to an enduring Chinese military presence close to the US mainland.
Regardless of the minutiae involved, both developments showcase an increased disposition by both Cuba and the PRC to take risks through explicitly US-focused military initiatives, in ways that suggest it’s willing to take similar risks in other areas as well.
This has significant implications for the United States, necessitating an appropriate, and carefully crafted response from Washington to both current and future events involving both parties.
In the case of Cuba, the government’s willingness to host military threats to the United States has remained consistent since the 1962 missile crisis.
That being said, the regime’s willingness to permit PRC military operations on the island, with the added risk that they might be discovered by US counterintelligence, more greatly highlights the regime’s current desperation for resources amid increasingly severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine – which have prompted a growing exodus of refugees from the island and inspired scattered protests that led the government to temporarily shut down the internet.