China and Cuba are negotiating to establish a new joint military training facility on the island, sparking alarm in Washington that it could lead to the stationing of Chinese troops and other security and intelligence operations just 100 miles off Florida’s coast, according to current and former U.S. officials.
According to the WSJ, Discussions for the facility on Cuba’s northern coast are at an advanced stage but not concluded, U.S. intelligence reports suggest. The Biden administration has contacted Cuban officials to try to forestall the deal, seeking to tap in to what it thinks might be Cuban concerns about ceding sovereignty.
Beijing’s effort to establish a military training facility in Cuba hasn’t been previously reported. The White House declined to comment. The heightened anxiety in Washington over China’s ambitions in the Caribbean and Latin America comes as the administration is seeking to tamp down broader tensions with Beijing that have been stoked by a host of other issues, including U.S. support for Taiwan.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken was on a high-profile visit to China these past few days, meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The trip appeared to halt a downward spiral in relations. But Blinken failed to secure China’s agreement to a U.S. proposal that the two countries resume military-to-military communications to avoid misunderstandings.
He also raised U.S. concerns about Chinese intelligence activities in Cuba, according to a State Department statement.
U.S. officials said reference to the proposed new training facility in Cuba is contained in highly classified new U.S. intelligence, which they described as convincing but fragmentary. It is being interpreted with different levels of alarm among policy makers and intelligence analysts.
The Wall Street Journal reported on June 8 that China and Cuba had reached an agreement in principle for a new eavesdropping site in Cuba; the White House characterized that reporting as inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.
Two days later, the White House declassified intelligence to confirm publicly that Chinese intelligence collection facilities have existed in Cuba since at least 2019.
Current and former U.S. officials said a new military facility could provide China with a platform to potentially house troops permanently on the island and broaden its intelligence gathering, including electronic eavesdropping, against the U.S.
Most worrying for the U.S.: The planned facility is part of China’s “Project 141,” an initiative by the People’s Liberation Army to expand its global military base and logistical support network, one current and one former U.S. official said.
China and Cuba already jointly run four eavesdropping stations on the island, according to U.S. officials. That network underwent a significant upgrade around 2019, when a single station expanded to a network of four sites that are operated jointly, and Chinese involvement deepened, according to the officials.
There also are signs of changes in the arrangement for those facilities that officials say could signal greater Chinese involvement, though the details are scant. A U.S. intelligence report earlier this year referred to the “centralization” of the management of the four joint sites, but what precisely that entails isn’t clear.
