Havana (EFE).- Cuba described as a “falsehood” and “a new disinformation operation” the affirmations of the US Government about the presence of a Chinese spy center on the island.
“The affirmations of the Secretary of State of the United States (Antony Blinken) about the presence of a Chinese spy base in Cuba constitute a falsehood,” said the Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodríguez, in a statement released in his Twitter account and official media.
The head of Cuban diplomacy pointed out that “Cuba’s position on this issue is clear and categorical.” He asserted that Blinken’s statements “are without merit.”
“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,” stressed the Cuban foreign minister.
It also considered that the US statements have the purpose of “serving as a pretext to maintain the economic blockade against Cuba and the maximum pressure measures that have reinforced it in recent years.”
Countering Chinese espionage in Cuba
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a press conference that the government has “a strategy” to counter Chinese espionage in Cuba. And in other countries it is giving results.
On Saturday, the US government declassified information from its intelligence services. They claim that China has had “intelligence collection facilities” since 2019, or even earlier. A term that can include everything from centers with dozens of spies to a simple listening post equipped with an antenna.
According to these reports, when US President Joe Biden arrived at the White House in January 2021, he received information that China was trying to expand its intelligence services around the world by creating spy centers in Latin America, the Middle East , Asia and Africa.
Cuba says it is “unfounded information”
Blinken’s statements also come days after The Wall Street Journal published 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 a principle of “inaccurate”.
The Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, assured that what was published by the New York newspaper was “unfounded information”. “Slander” and “fallacies” to justify the US sanctions against Cuba and destabilize the island.
For its part, the Chinese government accused the United States of “spreading rumors and slander.”
One of the White House spokesmen, John Kirby, responded at a press conference to questions from EFE about whether there had been any communication with the Cuban Executive on this issue: “We have made our concerns clear.”