Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Beijing will pay Cuba billions of dollars in exchange for hosting what the story’s headline called a “Secret Chinese Spy Base” focusing on the United States. The Cuban and Chinese governments denied the report, and the U.S. government said that elements of the story are incorrect. But multiple other U.S. media outlets confirmed the basic gist of the original reporting with their own sources. The New York Times even cited one Biden administration official as saying the base has already been in operation since at least 2019, and that the deal in question is to upgrade and expand it, which the White House confirmed Saturday. Needless to say, members of Congress reacted with fury and concern, demanding hearings on the issue and calling for President Joe Biden to do something.
Unfortunately, the issue sits at the perfect intersection of the hot topic of the moment in Washington—geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China—and the multi-decade stupidity that is U.S. policy on Cuba. And it has taken center stage just as the U.S. presidential campaign is beginning to ramp up. Those three factors mean a public debate in Congress and the media about China’s efforts to build or expand a surveillance base in Cuba is not something that the U.S. political system will handle with particular nuance.
This is the sort of issue that requires a careful balance between legitimately protecting U.S. national security and national interests on one hand, and acknowledging the limits to effective action and the risk of blowback on the other. Instead, it is likely to fuel hysterical debates over pseudo-imperialism and the long-discredited Monroe Doctrine, whereby Washington claimed the Western Hemisphere as a U.S. sphere of influence. Republicans will aim to score political points by painting the Biden administration as being unwilling to act forcefully. Democrats will strive to counter that narrative by adopting a “tough on China” posture. And the domestic politics of Cuba policy will complicate things even further by reviving the stagnant debate about U.S. sanctions against Havana.
But all the rhetorical sparring will be about politics more than policy, because it’s difficult to identify any viable U.S. options for taking action that would successfully block the Chinese and Cubans from cooperating without sparking a much wider conflict.
That said, having a spy base operating just off the U.S. coast is a threat the Biden administration cannot simply ignore and should even take seriously. It would offer Beijing an enhanced ability to monitor communications within the U.S., including some radio frequencies that can’t be monitored from the other side of the globe. But to get a better debate over what the U.S. should do, it helps to start with the correct historical analogy for what is happening today.
To begin with, this isn’t the Cuban Missile Crisis redux, as numerous media articles about the spy base controversy have suggested by referencing the events of October 1962 in their reporting. That showdown, in which then-President John F. Kennedy ordered the U.S. Navy to block a Soviet shipment of weapons to Cuba after it was discovered Moscow was installing nuclear-capable missiles and launch sites on the island, was likely the closest the world has come to a global nuclear conflict. To compare today’s developments to that crisis is an enormous overreach, inviting a level of panic and demand for instant action that isn’t warranted. A Chinese site for spying, even one that could have potential dual-use capabilities that extend to electronic warfare, isn’t remotely comparable to launch sites for nuclear-capable missiles, and the threats this Chinese effort could hypothetically present to U.S. national security are not severe enough to provoke a global conflict.
To address China’s expanding footprint in Latin America, the U.S. should work with regional governments to treat all security cooperation more transparently and equally, regardless of which outside country is involved.
Instead of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a better analogy would be the listening station that the Soviet Union and then Russia operated in Cuba for decades. That facility, known as Lourdes Signal Intelligence station, was one of the largest foreign intelligence facilities operated by Moscow during and after the Cold War. Located just outside of Havana, the station operated from the 1960s until the early 2000s, and Moscow paid Cuba hundreds of millions of dollars per year—adjusted for inflation—for its use. The facility allowed the Soviets to intercept a wide range of U.S. radio and telecommunications signals, providing them with critical intelligence. It covered 28 square miles and at its peak employed over 1,000 personnel. The Lourdes station was a cornerstone of Soviet and later Russian signal intelligence, and its closure represented a significant loss for both Moscow, in terms of intelligence-gathering capabilities, and Havana, in terms of revenue and leverage over Washington.
Another potential analogy is the Chinese space-monitoring platform in Argentina, which is run by the Chinese military and is widely believed to have some covert espionage functions. The China Satellite Launch and Tracking Control General operates the station, which is located in Argentina’s remote Patagonia region. Officially, the facility is dedicated to the peaceful exploration of space, aiding in missions to the moon, Mars and beyond. However, the fact that the agency managing the site is under the People’s Liberation Army jurisdiction, combined with the lack of transparency around the facility’s operations and capabilities, have fueled speculation about its potential for dual-use capabilities. These could include intercepting signals, cyberespionage and even potential involvement in operations to disable other countries’ satellites.
As both of those analogies make clear, the current situation presents a threat that is worth monitoring and attempting to counter, but not worth provoking open conflict to prevent.
For the U.S., an important first step is to get Latin America to care about the issue. But in doing so, Washington must also address its own intelligence-gathering operations and show how and why they are different. Plenty of politicians across Latin America who lean reflexively against the U.S. will happily highlight the fact that the U.S. maintains a military presence and flies spy planes across the region, often under the rubric of counternarcotics missions. They can and probably will paint U.S. criticism of China’s operations in Cuba as hypocrisy, and they would have a point, depending on how Washington criticizes those operations.
However, it’s also hypocritical for Latin America to criticize the U.S. intelligence presence across the region and turn a blind eye to China’s efforts to expand its own presence there. The region’s democracies should keep a close eye on both the U.S. and China, without picking sides or criticizing one while giving the other a free pass. So one of the best ways the U.S. can address China’s current approach is to work with regional governments to treat all military and intelligence cooperation more transparently and equally, regardless of which outside country is involved.
Getting this right should be an urgent priority, because more such controversies are on the way. The alleged spy base in Cuba follows the spy balloon incident from earlier this year, in which the high-profile overflight of U.S. territory overshadowed a similar violation of Latin American countries’ airspace. Whether the reports about Cuba are true or not, there is little doubt that China is using Latin America for espionage. So these sorts of controversies will continue for the foreseeable future. The U.S. needs a broader coherent response to China’s growing presence in Latin America, whether it comes to security cooperation or economic ties, not a whack-a-mole approach of panicking after each newly discovered incident. It also needs to accept that some cooperation is going to occur, rather than treating all cooperation as some sort of challenge, while being clear about potential threats that do arise.
In that long view, keeping lines of communication open is critical, both between the U.S. and China, as well as between the U.S. and its partners in the region. The spy balloon incident led U.S. Secretary of State Blinken to cancel a scheduled trip to China earlier this year. Blinken is reportedly planning to head to Beijing later this month as part of a gathering effort to resume high-level contacts and improve bilateral relations, which are at their worst since the U.S. formally recognized China in 1978. It would be awful if the news out of Cuba now torpedoes his trip again. And if every new controversy blocks dialogue, relations between the two countries will only worsen, with the potential for any incident to spiral into a broader conflict.
James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis and bespoke research in emerging and frontier markets. He has two decades of experience analyzing politics, economics and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.