The United States has accused China of operating three intelligence-gathering facilities in Cuba and sharply expanding its personnel on the island, portraying Havana as a strategic platform for Beijing to monitor American military activity.
A State Department report released this week said China maintained a “persistent intelligence-gathering presence” in Cuba, whose location gives Beijing potential access to electronic communications, military installations and maritime activity in the southeastern United States.
The report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism”, said China “actively runs” three of 18 known signals-intelligence facilities on the island. It also said China and Russia had reportedly tripled their intelligence personnel at Cuban facilities since 2023.
Some Chinese and Russian facilities were assessed as jointly operated with Cuba, the report said, citing prior reporting by The Wall Street Journal.
Citing an unnamed senior US official, the report said Beijing and Moscow regarded their Cuba-based sites as among their “most critical foreign listening posts”.
The report did not identify the three facilities it said were operated by China, nor did it provide new intelligence to support its assessment.
Several of its central claims were attributed to previous media reports and research by the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement accompanying the report. “The American people deserve to know.”
The Chinese embassy in Washington said it was “not familiar with the specific situation” but accused the United States of promoting “fabricated narratives and smearing” to justify its policies towards Cuba.
“China’s cooperation with Cuba is there for all to see,” an embassy spokesperson said.
“China will firmly support Cuba in safeguarding its national sovereignty and security, and calls on the US to immediately stop its blockade, sanctions and any other forms of coercion and pressure on Cuba.”
The spokesperson did not directly address whether China operated intelligence facilities or had increased its intelligence personnel on the island.
The Cuban embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Beijing and Havana have previously rejected US allegations that China operates an espionage base in Cuba.
Report highlights US’ rising worries about Chinese influence on Cuba
The State Department document represents an unusually forceful official articulation of Washington’s concerns about the Chinese presence on Cuba, an island about 145km (90 miles) from Florida.
It described Cuba as a “force multiplier” for a broader coalition of US adversaries and a staging ground from which China, Russia and Iran could conduct intelligence and influence operations against the United States.
The document said Chinese intelligence operations in Cuba presented an “acute risk” to US military security, particularly to military bases, combatant commands, space-launch centres and other sensitive sites in the region. The US Southern Command is based in south Florida.
“US air space and maritime activity in the region” could also be vulnerable to surveillance from the island, it said.
In 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that Beijing and Havana had reached a secret agreement to establish a Chinese signals-intelligence facility in Cuba in exchange for several billion dollars.
The Biden administration later said China had maintained an intelligence operation on the island since at least 2019 and had upgraded its facilities there, although it disputed parts of the initial report.
The latest State Department document also cited satellite-imagery analysis published by CSIS in 2024 that identified four active or developing intelligence sites at Wajay, Calabazar, El Salao and Bejucal.
Bejucal, about 16km (10 miles) from Havana, previously served as a Soviet nuclear-warhead storage site during the Cold War.
A subsequent CSIS analysis found major upgrades at several sites, according to the report, including what appeared to be a large circular antenna array at Bejucal capable of monitoring signals thousands of kilometres away.
State Department raises prospect of future Chinese military presence in Cuba
The State Department also raised the possibility of a future Chinese military presence in Cuba, referring to a 2024 US intelligence assessment that said the island was among the locations Beijing had considered for a People’s Liberation Army facility.
It offered no indication that such a facility had been approved or constructed.
The report placed the allegations within a much broader account of Cuba’s role in revolutionary movements, espionage and terrorism over more than six decades.
The report’s release comes as the Trump administration intensifies pressure on Havana. Washington has recently imposed sanctions on several Cuban state entities, including the military-controlled conglomerate GAESA, and threatened penalties against countries supplying oil to the energy-starved island.
Written in unusually ideological language for a State Department publication, the report characterised Cuba as the centre of a global anti-American network connecting foreign adversaries with radical political movements inside the United States.
It concluded that Cuba had outlasted the Soviet Union by attaching itself to successive US adversaries and now served as a location where “the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge”. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
