China and Cuba are negotiating a new joint military training facility in Cuba, according to current and former U.S. officials, raising alarms in Washington because it could allow China to station troops and conduct military operations just 100 miles off the coast of Florida Other security and intelligence operations.
U.S. intelligence reports indicate that discussions about the facility on Cuba’s northern coast are at an advanced stage, but have not yet reached a conclusion. The Biden administration has reached out to Cuban officials to try to block the deal and to understand concerns it believes Cuba may have about ceding sovereignty. Beijing’s efforts to establish a military training facility in Cuba have not been previously reported.
China’s ambitions in the Caribbean and Latin America have fueled anxiety in Washington at a time when Washington is seeking to defuse U.S.-China tensions that have been exacerbated by a litany of other issues, such as U.S. support for Taiwan. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a high-profile visit to China in recent days, where he met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The visit appears set to stem a downward spiral in relations between the two countries. But Blinken failed to get China to agree to a U.S. proposal that the two countries restore communications between their militaries to avoid misunderstandings. Blinken also said the United States was concerned about Chinese intelligence activities in Cuba, according to a State Department statement.
New highly classified U.S. intelligence on proposed new training facilities in Cuba has been described as convincing but sporadic, U.S. officials said. Policymakers and intelligence analysts expressed varying degrees of concern in their interpretations.
“The Wall Street Journal” (The Wall Street Journal) reported on June 8 that China and Cuba have reached an agreement in principle on the establishment of new listening posts in Cuba. The White House said at the time that the report was inaccurate, but did not elaborate. Two days later, the White House declassified intelligence publicly confirming that Chinese intelligence-gathering facilities had 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 maintain a permanent presence on the island and expand its intelligence-gathering activities against the United States, including electronic eavesdropping.
What worries the United States most is that the planned facility is part of China’s “Project 141,” according to a current and a former U.S. official. Project 141 is a plan by the Chinese military to expand its network of military bases and logistical support around the world.
According to US officials, China and Cuba have jointly operated four wiretapping stations in Cuba. This eavesdropping network has undergone a major upgrade around 2019, when it was expanded from one eavesdropping station to four jointly operated stations, and China’s participation has also deepened.
There have also been signs of changes to the arrangements at the facilities, which officials say could signal a deepening of Chinese involvement, but details are scant. A US intelligence report earlier this year mentioned “centralized” management of the four combined sites, but what that meant was unclear.
Other sites involved in Project 141 include a Chinese naval outpost in Cambodia and a military installation in a port in the United Arab Emirates, the purpose of which is not yet known, a former U.S. official said. None of the previously known strongholds of Project 141 were in the Western Hemisphere.
Some of these facilities also have intelligence-gathering capabilities, including China’s Djibouti base in the Horn of Africa, China’s only military base outside the Pacific, where China has been working to build a signal intelligence facility.
An official at the Chinese embassy in Washington referred to a June 9 statement by a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman who said at the time that he had no knowledge of what the reporter said (of the agreement between China and Cuba), He also stated that spreading rumors and slander is a common tactic of the United States, and wanton interference in the internal affairs of other countries is the patent of the United States.
The Cuban embassy in the United States called the Wall Street Journal’s previous report “completely untrue and baseless.” The embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Tensions between the U.S. and China have flared up in recent months over a litany of issues, including the downing of a Chinese spy balloon by the U.S. military after flying over the United States and close encounters between warships and military aircraft of the two countries in the air and at sea meet.
Some intelligence officials say Beijing sees China’s actions in Cuba as a geographic response to U.S. relations with Taiwan: The U.S. is investing heavily in arming and training Taiwan’s military. Taiwan is a self-governing island that the Chinese government considers part of Chinese territory. The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States has deployed more than 100 troops to Taiwan to train Taiwan’s defense forces.
Taiwan is geographically about 100 miles from mainland China, roughly the distance between Cuba and Florida.
According to U.S. officials, China has no combat troops in Latin America. The United States has a large number of military bases throughout the Pacific region, and has stationed more than 350,000 soldiers in these military bases. Chinese officials have pointed to U.S. opposition to China’s military expansion beyond the Indo-Pacific.
Some U.S. officials cautioned that the details of China’s plans in Cuba were not yet fully understood and said the two countries would move cautiously in expanding security cooperation.
“In light of the fact that the intelligence community has assessed for several years that China plans to expand its influence around the world, it is premature to draw firm conclusions about recent information,” said a U.S. intelligence official. The official said: “At this stage, it doesn’t appear to be adding much to the overall capacity that exists.”
The U.S. intelligence official said any expansion of security cooperation between China and Cuba would proceed slowly.
Several officials said Cuba had reason to be careful not to provoke the United States at a time when its economy is struggling and seeking to ease economic sanctions and travel restrictions it has imposed.
The U.S. had already been tracking a planned visit by a senior Cuban defense official, which U.S. officials interpreted as a sign that negotiations on establishing a training facility in Cuba entered the next step. It was not immediately clear from the latest intelligence whether the visit had taken place, but U.S. officials said it reflected that plans were not far off.
The Biden administration contacted Cuban officials in Washington to express concerns about the planned facility, officials said.
“We have expressed our concerns to the Cuban government,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said earlier this month.
A White House official said Monday that the Chinese government “will continue to attempt to strengthen its presence in Cuba, and we will continue to work to thwart that effort.”
Senators Mark Warner, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a joint statement earlier this month that they were “responsible to reports that the Cuban and Chinese governments have teamed up to The reports against the United States and the American people are deeply disturbing.”
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