'This is a piece of false information': China on allegations of Chinese spying in Cuba

Days after a report suggested that Cuba has agreed to allow China to construct a surveillance facility on the island, China on Monday said the allegations were false and it denounced the US government and media for releasing what it called inconsistent information.

A Biden administration official said on Saturday China had been spying from Cuba for some time and it had upgraded its intelligence collection facilities there in 2019.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that a new spying effort was underway on the island, citing US officials.

China will pay Cuba “several billion dollars” to be able to construct the facility, the journal said, citing unnamed US officials.

“On the alleged spy activities of China in Cuba, this is a piece of false information,” a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, told a regular press conference.

“Over the past two days, we have seen the U.S. government and media releasing a great deal of inconsistent information on the so-called allegation … This is a display of the ‘self-contradictory USA’,” Wang said.

The allegation about Cuba comes as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepares to visit China this week. The top U.S. diplomat scrapped a planned trip to Beijing in February after a suspected Chinese spy balloon flew over the United States.

Wang also said he had no information on Blinken’s visit, which would be the first to China by a US secretary of state in five years.

Cuba’s Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio dismissed the Journal report, calling it a US fabrication meant to justify a decades-old US economic embargo against the island nation. He said Cuba rejects all foreign military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The spokesperson for the White House National Security Council on Thursday said the Journal report was not accurate but added that Washington had “real concerns” about China’s relationship with Cuba and had been closely monitoring it.

Wang said the US “has no chance of driving a wedge between China and Cuba”.

“We are sincere friends,” he said.

Strained relations

The Journal report came amid strained relations between Washington and Beijing over a range of issues that include US support for self-ruled Taiwan, which China says it is determined to reunite with the mainland.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pushed a rapid expansion of the country’s security presence around the world, aiming to match the broad presence of the US military on all the continents.

A base in Cuba, which lies 90 miles (150 kilometers) off the southern tip of Florida, would present the most direct challenge yet to the continental United States.

The Soviet Union had electronic spying facilities in communist Cuba to monitor the United States.

But in 1962 when Moscow moved to base nuclear missiles on Cuba, the US declared a quarantine of the island in a crisis that threatened to bring the two superpowers to war, until Moscow backed down.

Washington then removed its nuclear-capable missiles from Turkey, which the Soviets viewed as a threat to them.

China sent what the US called a high-altitude surveillance balloon across the United States earlier this year. It floated from west to east above sensitive military installations before it was shot down just off the east coast by a US fighter jet.

With inputs from agencies

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