The Wall Street Journal ran a story June 8 alleging the governments of Cuba and China had made a secret agreement to install a Chinese espionage facility on the island in a new “challenge by Beijing to the U.S.” This is the latest assault by the U.S. rulers against the Cuban government and revolution. The charge was vigorously denied by Havana.
The Journal said its sources are “U.S. officials with highly classified intelligence” who claimed Beijing had agreed to pay Cuba “several billion dollars to allow it to build the eavesdropping station.”
“Slanders such as these have been fabricated frequently by U.S. officials,” including ones about “supposed sonic attacks against United States diplomatic personnel, the falsehood about the nonexistent Cuban military presence in Venezuela and the lie about the imaginary existence of biological weapons laboratories” in Cuba, Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío responded the same day.
“All of these are lies with the malicious intention to justify the unprecedented intensification of the blockade, destabilization and aggression against Cuba and to deceive public opinion in the United States and the world,” Fernández de Cossío said.
Washington has waged an economic war against Cuba for over 60 years in a nonstop effort to punish the Cuban people for overthrowing the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship and opening a socialist revolution.
Havana is a signatory to the 2014 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States declaration that the region is a “zone of peace,” the deputy foreign minister noted. “We reject any foreign military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the numerous bases and military personnel from the United States, especially the military base that illegally occupies” part of Guantánamo.
The Joseph Biden administration initially said the claims in the Journal report were “inaccurate.” Then another anonymous White House “source” charged June 11 that China has been operating a spy base in Cuba since at least 2019, when Donald Trump was in office.
The U.S. assertions “about the presence of a Chinese spy base in Cuba are false, totally false,” Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said in a June 13 statement. “Cuba is not a threat to the United States or any other country.”
The revolutionary government of Cuba has had previous experience with governments that wanted to use the island as a bargaining chip with U.S. imperialism and is not interested in repeating that.
In 1962 the Cuban government agreed to the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, not to defend Cuba, but as an act of international solidarity with the USSR, which was being ringed by U.S. strategic nuclear arms.
Washington took the world to the brink of nuclear war after it spotted the missile sites. Without even consulting the Cuban government, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made a secret deal with President John F. Kennedy to withdraw the missiles in exchange for Washington withdrawing its nuclear missiles from Turkey. The deal didn’t include any guarantees against U.S. aggression targeting Cuba.
In a 1992 NBC interview Maria Shriver asked Cuban leader Fidel Castro if he would accept the missiles again under similar circumstances. Castro “said looking back he never would have” given the Soviets the OK, Shriver reported.
On June 20 the Wall Street Journal published a new slander, once again from anonymous “current and former U.S. officials,” claiming “China and Cuba are negotiating to establish a new joint military training facility on the island.”