The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, affirmed this Monday that the Joe Biden government has a strategy to counteract Chinese espionage in Cuba and in other countries that is yielding good results.
“The president instructed us to address this challenge and that is what we have done. We have executed this strategy quietly, carefully, but in our opinion with results,” Blinken said at a news conference in Washington with Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani.
These statements come after The Wall Street Journal published last Thursday that China and Cuba had agreed to build a large spy center on the island, information that the Havana government categorically denied and that the White House described as “inaccurate.” .
Blinken explained that when the Biden Administration started in January 2021, it discovered that China had been expanding its espionage activities around the world for some time and that, in fact, it had expanded its intelligence facilities in Cuba in 2019.
According to the Secretary of State, the Government of Donald Trump (2017-2021) did not make “sufficient progress” to counter this espionage, so Biden ordered the application of “a more direct strategy.”
The US diplomacy leader said he did not want to give many details about this plan, but explained that it has been based on “diplomacy” and that they have contacted governments that are considering hosting Chinese spy centers.
“Experts believe that our diplomatic activity has slowed down these efforts by China, which we are monitoring very closely,” Blinken said.
After the publication of The Wall Street Journal article, the White House declassified information confirming that China already had a spy center in Cuba in 2019 and a senior official assured that this is a problem “inherited” from Trump.
The Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, assured that what was published by the newspaper was “unfounded information”, “slander” and “fallacies” to justify the United States sanctions against Cuba and destabilize the island. For its part, the Chinese government accused the United States of “spreading rumors and slander.”
