This comes at a time when Chinese leader Xi Jinping is keen to accelerate the expansion of security presence around the world.
A White House official said that China has been running a spy facility in Cuba for years and made improvements to it in 2019 in an attempt to strengthen its presence on the island. Speaking of the presence of Chinese intelligence on the island, the official stated, “This is well documented in the intelligence record.”
US media have reported in recent days that Beijing intends to establish a spy base in Cuba off the coast of the southeastern United States.
The official, who requested anonymity, added that when President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, “we were briefed on a number of sensitive endeavors of the People’s Republic of China around the world to expand overseas logistics, bases, and intelligence infrastructure globally.”
“These efforts included the presence of the People’s Republic of China’s intelligence-gathering facilities in Cuba,” he said. “The People’s Republic of China, in fact, modernized the intelligence-gathering facilities in Cuba in 2019.”
As for the Cuban government, which had previously denied the existence of a Chinese spy base on its territory, it criticized these statements. “Slanderous speculation continues, and it is clear that a number of media outlets are promoting it to harm and create anxiety, without respecting minimum standards of communication and without providing data or evidence to support” what is being published, Deputy Secretary of State Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said on Twitter.
This comes at a time when Chinese leader Xi Jinping is keen to accelerate the expansion of security presence around the world.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is scheduled to travel to China at the end of next week, after canceling a visit to him in February following the flight of a Chinese balloon over the United States.
A base in Cuba, located 150 km off the far south of Florida, would represent the most direct challenge so far to the continental United States.
On Friday, China warned the United States not to “interfere in Cuba’s internal affairs” in response to media reports about the alleged base.
In response to a question about the base at a regular press conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said he had “no knowledge” of the issue, before criticizing US policy towards Cuba.
“As we all know, spreading rumors and slander is a common and patented tactic of the United States to deliberately interfere in other countries’ internal affairs,” Wang said.
The US official said Saturday that the administration believes diplomatic efforts have “slowed down the People’s Republic of China” in developing its activities in Cuba. “We believe that the People’s Republic of China is not at the level it had hoped to be,” he added.
