Suspected Chinese spy bases in Cuba are growing, including one near a US naval base: report

Meanwhile, in Wajay, a compound has “gradually” expanded over the past two decades, from just one antenna and several small buildings in 2002 to 12 antennas of various sizes and orientations, significant operations and support facilities, and even a small solar farm, it said.

Calabazar, a small Cuban military complex, now has two visible pole antenna arrays and more than a dozen dish antennas of various sizes dispersed across a gated area, images suggest.

“These are active locations with an evolving mission set,” Matthew Funaiole, a senior fellow at the China Power Project at CSIS and the report’s chief author, told The Wall Street Journal.

A strategic location for spycraft

Some of the systems supposedly set up in Cuba, notably antennas, can gather intelligence by intercepting signals — a practice known in the defense community as signals intelligence, or SIGINT.

These systems’ capacities and functions are determined by their size, quantity, orientation, and arrangement, per the CSIS report.

Cuba’s proximity to the US provides China with a “significant” intelligence window that is inaccessible from Chinese territory, the CSIS report said.

The White House and the Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to provide a statement.