By Randy Alonso Falcón on July 4, 2023
The issue of the existence of one or several Chinese bases in Cuba has become a recurring motif these days for the most retrograde forces in the empire. It is the new way to attack the emerging power, the small rebellious country and the forces of the Democratic Party with the same shot, in the midst of an early election campaign.
Former US President Donald Trump is the most recent champion of the campaign. At his most recent rallies he has vociferated that under his presidency, China would have to pull out its alleged bases or draconian tariff sanctions would come down like a hammer. The promoter of more than 240 sanctioning measures against Cuba, proclaimed himself proud of his relationship with the Cuban right wing in Miami and of having received the “Bay of Pigs” distinction (an allusion to the invading mercenary force that in 1961 barely resisted for 70 hours against the revolutionary forces at Playa Giron).
It was the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the economic elites, which dropped the bombshell of an alleged spy base that China was setting up in Cuba, in the days prior to an announced trip to the giant Asian country by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
Then the Hispanic American right-wing media such as Infobae, Diario de las Americas or Univision lined up, alluding to an anonymous Biden administration official who claimed that the Chinese had been spying on the United States from Cuba for four years. The alleged revelation would find echo in all the agencies and main stream media of the world.
Later, anti-Cuban Senator Marco Rubio and his ventriloquist in the House of Representatives, Maria Elvira Salazar, would jump in to try to make the problem bigger and raise the media hype. This would be joined by other known promoters of anti-Cuban policies in the U.S. Congress.
“The United States must respond to China’s continued and brazen attacks on our nation’s security. We must make clear that it would be unacceptable for China to establish an intelligence facility within 100 miles of Florida and the United States, in an area also populated by key military installations and extensive maritime traffic,” Rubio and Mark Warner, leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
It is the classic media operation that is activated in the empire every time one of the political wings tries to impose a turn in foreign policy or seeks a target for its missiles. Noam Chomsky has described it well in his works: “Today, the only way for the United States to attack a much weaker enemy is to build a huge propaganda offensive that exposes it as the absolute evil, and even as a threat to our very survival. That was the scenario that Washington set up in the case of Iraq”.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla pointed out on June 12 that “we are facing a new disinformation operation, like many others that have been generated by the United States in its long history of hostility against our country”.
Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, said: “As we all know, spreading rumors and slander is a common tactic of the United States, and gratuitously interfering in the internal affairs of other countries is its patent”.
The specter of Chinese bases in Cuba has been raised again and again in the empire in recent years. Different reports have placed them in Guantanamo, Baracoa, Las Tunas, Bejucal. A whole Chinese military reign in Cuba.
It is neither casual nor gratuitous that the same forces behind this new campaign, are the ones that promoted in 2017 that of the so-called “sonic attacks” in Havana, whose existence was recently denied by U.S. intelligence agencies, long after based on lies, the Trump administration destroyed all the progress achieved in bilateral relations during the end of the Obama period.
It is the same stratagem of John Bolton, at the beginning of this century, when in the midst of the so-called War on Terrorism he accused Cuba of producing biological weapons in the same laboratories of the CIGB where excellent medicines and the life-saving vaccines against COVID-19 have been produced.
What it is all about is to avoid at all costs, using the Chinese threat, any rapprochement or small step that the Biden administration may take in relation to Cuba, even not with the government, but with the private sector.
Rubio and the U.S. ultra-right want to suffocate the Cuban people at all costs. They do not want Russian or Chinese investment and trade with Cuba, nor do they want the slightest gesture of U.S. reasonableness. Their visceral hatred against Cuba consumes them.
At the same time, they want to put fear in the region about the Chinese presence, given the growing Chinese trade and investments in Latin America, which have made it the main origin and destination of foreign trade of important nations in this part of the world.
Marco Rubio wrote from 2022 in the right-wing portal Breibart: “We simply cannot afford to allow the Chinese Communist Party to expand its influence and absorb Latin America and the Caribbean into its private political-economic bloc. That would leave our country worse off and trap the people of Latin America and the Caribbean in a generation of suffering and repression.”
Now more recently, following The Wall Street Journal article, Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, representative of the “anti-Cuban industry” on Capitol Hill, wrote on her Twitter account: “The Chinese are invading our Hemisphere and the Biden Administration doesn’t seem to care. It’s not just bridges, roads, soccer stadiums and space facilities. A base to spy and train military 90 miles from the U.S.?”.
In Cuba, there are many memes circulating in the networks mocking the story of the Chinese bases.
But what is not humorous is that the Biden administration is bowing to the electoral pressures of its adversaries and its Secretary of State has come out to declare that China’s efforts in Cuba were part of an overall effort by Beijing to expand its presence abroad, and that US actions to address this since President Joe Biden came to power in January 2021 have produced results, without specifying which ones.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez’s immediate response was blunt: “The US Secretary of State’s claims about the presence of a Chinese spy base in Cuba constitute a falsehood.
“Cuba’s position on this issue is clear and categorical. Those statements lack support.”
“Their purpose is to serve as a pretext to maintain the economic blockade against Cuba and the measures of maximum pressure that have reinforced it in recent years, and which are the object 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. Cuba is not a threat to the United States, nor to any country.
What does constitute a threat and an affront to the Cuban people is that, for more than a century, the United States has had a Naval Base in the Cuban territory of Guantanamo Bay, which remains there against the will of the Cuban nation, and where atrocious tortures have been committed in the last two decades against prisoners of Muslim origin.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US