The Cuban foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, denied the recent statements of the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, about the existence of an alleged Chinese espionage base on the island.
“The affirmations of the Secretary of State of the United States about the presence of a Chinese spy base in Cuba constitute a falsehood. Cuba’s position on this issue is clear and categorical. These statements are unsubstantiated,” Rodríguez said on Monday.
The affirmations of the Secretary of State of the United States about the presence of a Chinese spy base in Cuba constitute a falsehood.
The position of #Cuba on this subject is clear and categorical.
Those statements are unsubstantiated. pic.twitter.com/RQvXVtTpM3
— Bruno Rodríguez P (@BrunoRguezP) June 12, 2023
Blinken affirmed this Monday that in 2019 China had carried out an update of its intelligence facilities from Cuba, and that the Biden Administration was informed since January 2021 about a “series of sensitive efforts by Beijing around the world.” to expand its operations of this type abroad.
“Cuba is not a threat”
The Cuban foreign minister stressed that the purpose of the accusations is to serve as a pretext to sustain the “economic blockade that Washington has imposed on Cuba for more than six decades,” as well as the maximum pressure measures that have reinforced it in recent years, “for the purpose of of growing international rejection and also within the United States, which includes the demand to remove Cuba from the arbitrary list of State Sponsors of Terrorism”.
Bruno Rodríguez points out that Cuba is not a threat to the United States, nor to any country.
“The United States applies a policy that daily threatens and punishes the Cuban population as a whole (…) has imposed and has dozens of military bases in our region, and also maintains, against the will of the Cuban people, a base military in the territory that it illegally occupies in the province of Guantánamo”, he added.
Statements from the MINREX
Last Thursday and Sunday, the vice minister of foreign affairs, Carlos Fernández de Cossío denounced “slanderous speculation” related to the alleged Chinese espionage base, based on statements released by various US media and international press agencies.
According to Cossío, the purpose is “to cause damage and alarm without observing minimum communication patterns and without providing data or evidence to support what they disseminate.”
Cuba denies the existence of an alleged agreement with China to open an espionage center
Blinken assured this June 12 that the Biden Administration “has a strategy to counter Chinese espionage in Cuba and other countries” and that the Democrat “instructed to address this challenge.”
“We have executed this strategy quietly, carefully, but in our opinion with results,” the senior official said at a press conference in Washington together with his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani.
