Cuba rejected this Thursday as “mendacious and unfounded” the information published in the United States press about an alleged agreement between Beijing and Havana to install a Chinese spy base on the island.
“The American newspaper The Wall Street Journal published on June 8 totally false and unfounded information according to which there is an agreement between Cuba and China on military matters for the installation of a supposed spy base,” said the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, in a statement read to the press.
According to that newspaper, citing anonymous US sources, a secret agreement provides for the installation of a wiretapping station on the Caribbean island, some 200 km from the Florida coast, where important US military bases are located.
The White House claimed that the information published by the newspaper was not “accurate.”
“I’ve seen that newspaper article. It’s not accurate,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told MSNBC.
Fernández de Cossío stressed that as a signatory country of the Declaration of Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace signed in 2014, Cuba “rejects all foreign military presence” in this region, “including the numerous bases and military personnel of the USA”.
He stressed that “slanders of this type have frequently been fabricated by United States officials apparently familiar with intelligence information.”
He mentioned as an example the “alleged acoustic attacks against US diplomatic personnel” in Havana that led in 2017 to the withdrawal of almost all the personnel of his embassy in this capital, despite the fact that they could never be proven.
He also cited “the falsehood about a non-existent Cuban military presence in Venezuela.”
The Cuban official said that these “fallacies” are promoted with the “perfidious intention of justifying the unprecedented intensification of the (US) blockade, destabilization and aggression against Cuba.”
During the Cold War, the Soviets had electronic espionage facilities in communist Cuba.