Fact-checking Marco Rubio’s Claims on Cuba’s “Security Threat”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week once again repeated unsubstantiated accusations that Cuba is hosting foreign spy bases.

“These people in charge aren’t just economically incompetent,” he said on Fox News. “They have rolled out the welcome mat to adversaries of the United States to operate within Cuban territory against our national interests with impunity. We are not going to have a foreign military or intelligence or security apparatus operating with impunity 90 miles off the shores of the United States.”

Rubio has been making this claim for decades — without any credible evidence and without any pushback by reporters from major media outlets.

In January, the executive order justified the oil blockade by claiming that “Cuba hosts Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility.” Cuba did host a Russian base but it was shuttered more than two decades ago. There is no evidence such a base still exists.

The accusation seemed to come out of nowhere since Rubio and other politicians had previously accused Cuba of hosting Chinese — not Russian — bases.

Belly of the Beast has investigated the claims about "China spy bases," but found no evidence of their existence.

“There’s no evidence that the Chinese are present there,” former CIA analyst Fulton Armstrong told us, describing a report by a D.C. think tank claiming the existence of the bases as “an interesting compilation of rumors and old speculation.” 

Rubio's claims about spy bases are not the only falsehoods he has used to justify hard-line policies toward Cuba.

He has also insisted that the U.S. has done “nothing punitive” to Cuba and that the island lacks fuel because it “wants it for free” — not because of the oil blockade the Trump administration imposed.