China would be ready to build an electronic espionage base in Cuba, 150 kilometers from the coast of the United States, in order to capture signals and steal military secrets from the American superpower, as The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday citing officials privy to “highly classified†intelligence reports. The White House, however, indicated that the newspaper’s report was “inaccurate.”
In exchange for allowing the use of territory, according to the Journal’s version, the Cuban State would collect billions of dollars from the eastern giant at a particularly delicate moment for the island’s economy.
Beijing has already reached an “agreement in principle†to build the spying facility, which would allow Chinese intelligence services to monitor US military bases in the south and the passage of its ships through the Florida Straits.
The pact would constitute an element of escalation in the new open cold war between Washington and Beijing, until now centered on the South China Sea, for the control of this part of the Pacific, and amid growing tensions around Taiwan. In February, the discovery of a Chinese hot air balloon that flew over American airspace caused the cancellation of a trip that the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was supposed to make to Beijing.
White House National Security spokesman John Kirby told MSNBC that the Wall Street Journal report was inaccurate, although he did not specify in what sense. And in statements to this television and to the same newspaper, he indicated, however, that the Joe Biden Administration observes with concern China’s “efforts to invest in infrastructure around the world with possible military purposes, even in this hemisphere”.
“We are watching this very closely. We monitor it, we take measures to counter it, and we are confident that we can meet all of our security commitments at home, in the region and around the world,†Kirby said.
Washington considers Beijing its number one enemy, ahead of Russia; both for its powerful armed forces and its booming economy and aggressive business practices.
Cuba hastened to deny the information just yesterday. “Regardless of the sovereign rights that Cuba has in matters of defense, our country is a signatory to the declaration of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, signed in Havana in January 2014,” a note said of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“Slanders of this kind have been frequently fabricated by US officials, apparently familiar with intelligence information, such as those referring to alleged acoustic attacks against US diplomatic personnel, the falsehood about a non-existent presence Cuban military in Venezuela and the lie about the imaginary existence of biological weapons laboratories”, added the note, signed by Minister Carlos Fernández de CossÃo.
