As I was preparing the 30th edition of The Latin American Report, an article published in The Wall Street Journal suggested that Cuba and China had reached an agreement to install on the island a spy base aimed at the United States. The first thing to do here was to take a breath and calmly analyze the matter. If we go to the recent past, the last interesting move in the field of intelligence related to Cuba was the "revelation" of some so-called "attacks" using some "covert sonic device" against officials of the U.S. embassy in Havana, which would have resulted in certain neurological disorders in several cases. Since then, a narrative was promoted that coincidentally contributed to a strengthening of the sanctions regime against the island and a drastic reduction of necessary consular services, without any evidence at hand except "intuition". More than six years have passed and so far zero facts. The most recent information officially released —last March— is a declassified assessment of the U.S. intelligence community stating mostly that it was "very unlikely" the involvement of an external adversary —including Cuba but also implicitly China or Russia in this category— in the drift of the health condition of the affected officials.
Fact-checking a "breaking" news
The hours have passed and first the White House itself but also the Pentagon pointed out in press releases that the report was "inaccurate", being emphatic in the latter case that they did not know the alleged joint effort. Later on, the Cuban Foreign Ministry also strongly refuted the report, which when one reviews it with the classic "show me the facts" approach —so necessary in post-truth times— realizes its shortcomings in both the logical and informative order (but misinformation advances faster than referred official statements, it is very difficult to counteract its scope once it takes flight, and many actors who usually stoke the Cuban conflict will continue to generate illegitimate political dividends with the "news"). I am not conclusively ruling out that there is some truth in what WSJ described —the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí used to say that "in politics what is real is what is not seen"—, but for now I will stick to the facts.
Firstly, it seems very difficult to me that in this type of agreement at such a high level, if they are to be "secret", the rigorous compartmentalization to which they should be subject could be broken, no matter how effective counterintelligence may be. Furthermore, apart from affirming that Cuba and China have agreed on the installation of a secret eavesdropping base on the island, what prevails in the statements that WSJ said it obtained from U.S. officials is what would allow this type of facility, but what the agreement would specifically contain is never mentioned. Even in what for me is one of the critical parts of the text, the journalists say that there is an agreement "in principle", i.e. that there was nothing definitive yet, in case there was something on the way.
However, the truth is that it is extremely difficult for the Cuban government to accept something like this since the discourse on peace is one of its banners in the diplomatic sphere. The time and the context in which Fidel Castro accepted the installation of Russian eavesdropping technology here are very far from nowadays (recently, I heard a sort of Cuban influencer in the United States suggest that, with the strengthening of relations between Havana and Moscow, young recruits of the Cuban Military Service could end up in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine —gross nonsense—).
There is no way to defend a dynamic such as the one exposed in the WSJ article from the Cuban side —not even raising the argument of how serious the nation's financial situation is—, and whoever has followed Cuban foreign policy will know that we are talking about one of the more seasoned areas in the development of the Cuban political system. And the country must have learned the lesson of being a supporting actor in an elephant fight, having been left out of the fundamental decisions during the Missile Crisis or the withdrawal of the Lourdes base (by the way, the WSJ report ends by suggesting that there is no clarity on whether Russia has reactivated this facility, and all I can say is that I graduated from the university that Fidel Castro himself brought to life from its "ashes", oriented to computer sciences, and here I continue now as a professor).
Before closing, I would point out that the WSJ reproduced later on Thursday another article, in this case, an opinion piece, signed by a well-known analyst who defends Washington's hard line towards the Island. It cleverly continues to talk about the "agreement" as if it were a fact, it talks about the denial of the Cuban deputy foreign minister, but does not refer to the doubts expressed by the White House itself; moreover, it devotes almost all the space to recalling stories of the Cold War. So, it seems that the popular newspaper has been ordered to immolate itself with this thesis; it has been ordered not to let it die.
This was the Lourdes facility (source), where now stands up the University of Informatic Sciences (see the new disposition of the place here via Google Maps).
Note: I have edited this post once to improve readability.
Edited with Canva.