Cuba planning to host clandestine Chinese spy base: Report

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - Authorities in Cuba have agreed to allow China to establish a secretive spy base that Beijing plans to use to surveil the US, according to a report published Thursday.

Cuban and Chinese officials have reached an agreement in principle that includes the establishment of a facility to conduct what is known as signals intelligence collection, the Wall Street Journal newspaper reported. In exchange, China would pay the impoverished island nation billions of dollars.

The listening station would fundamentally allow China to carry out electronic eavesdropping of the US just 100 miles (160 km) away from Florida, it said. The base would allow China to gather communications throughout the southeastern US where several sensitive military bases are located, and monitor shipping traffic.

The Journal's report comes amid increasingly strained ties between Washington and Beijing with US officials sounding the alarm that China poses the pre-eminent threat to Washington's standing worldwide.

Officials from both countries have been working to mend relations after the discovery and subsequent downing of what the Biden administration says was a clandestine Chinese spy balloon over the continental US.

It is unclear whether those efforts will continue in the wake of the Journal's report, but a decades-old effort to station Soviet nuclear weapons on Cuban soil led to a major crisis in 1962 that continues to reverberate today. Over 60 years later, Washington has continued to impose a near-total embargo on Havana.

Also unclear is what steps the Biden administration could take against Cuba in retaliation for the base. While President Joe Biden has stopped well short of the diplomatic push with Havana seen under the Obama administration, he has loosened some restrictions imposed under ex-President Donald Trump.