Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez denied recent statements by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the existence of an alleged Chinese espionage base on the island.
“The U.S. Secretary of State’s affirmations about the presence of a Chinese espionage base in Cuba constitute a falsehood. Cuba’s position on this issue is clear and categorical. These statements are unsubstantiated,” Rodríguez said this Monday.
Las afirmaciones del Secretario de Estado de los Estados Unidos sobre la presencia de una base de espionaje de China en Cuba constituyen una falsedad.
La posición de #Cuba sobre este tema es clara y categórica.
Esas declaraciones carecen de sustento. pic.twitter.com/RQvXVtTpM3
— Bruno Rodríguez P (@BrunoRguezP) June 12, 2023
Blinken affirmed this same 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 abroad its operations of this type.
“Cuba is not a threat”
The Cuban foreign minister stressed that the purpose of the accusations is to serve as a pretext to maintain 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, “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.”
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Bruno Rodríguez pointed 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…it has imposed and has dozens of military bases in our region, and it also maintains, against the will of the Cuban people, a military base in territory that it illegally occupies in the province of Guantánamo,” he added.
Foreign Ministry statements
Last Thursday and Sunday, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Fernández de Cossío denounced the “slanderous speculation” related to the alleged Chinese espionage base, based on statements released by various U.S. 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.”
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 “gave instructions to address this challenge.”
“We have executed this strategy quietly, carefully, but in our opinion with results,” said the senior official at a press conference in Washington together with his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani.
