China-Cuba expanded military ties threaten U.S. bases

FPI / July 15, 2024

Geostrategy-Direct

By Richard Fisher

In 2024 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is demonstrating increasing boldness in its capacity to execute aggression and to position itself for warfare with the United States.

Since 2017 its People’s Liberation Army has been conducting actual exercises around Taiwan to prepare for a war to crush that democracy, that for the last three years has included almost daily deployments of aircraft and ships to terrorize Taiwan.

Since its illegal buildup of new island military bases in the South China Sea in the early 2010s the PLA has been harassing Philippine naval forces and preparing for attacks to take Second Thomas Shoal or even to invade the larger nearby Philippine island of Palawan.

Now that the United States is gathering itself, producing and deploying new weapons, especially new long-range missiles to Asia, it should be expected that the CCP will use these U.S. moves as an excuse to build military advantage on the U.S. doorstep, meaning Latin America, and especially in Cuba.

Cuba-China military cooperation is longstanding, having become active during the 1990s as the former Soviet Union could not afford the upkeep for its electronic (ELINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT) bases built up during the 1960s following the aborted Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles following the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

China could have become a significant supplier of weapons to the Cuban Communist regime, now one of the few Communist states, hugely valued by the CCP as fellow Commiunist comrade, but it chose to stress intelligence cooperation, most likely to avoid triggering an extreme U.S. reaction.

That may now be changing, and China could be on a path to significantly expanding its military cooperation with Cuba, starting with building up its intelligence gathering and monitoring facilities.

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