Who’s Really Spying on Whom? U.S. Intensifies Surveillance Near Cuba
While the Trump administration has alleged — without evidence — that U.S. adversaries are using Cuba to spy on the United States, a recent CNN analysis shows that the U.S. may be the one doing the spying.
Since early February, the U.S. military has intensified intelligence-gathering flights operating provocatively close to Cuba’s coastline, with at least 25 flights identified so far. Both manned aircraft and high altitude surveillance drones flew as close as 40 miles off Cuba’s coast, repeatedly circling near Havana and Santiago de Cuba, the island’s two largest cities.
The U.S. Air Force and Navy’s P-8A Poseidon patrol aircraft and MQ-4C Triton drone circling Cuba are the same military hardware used to monitor the war in Ukraine. They were also deployed ahead of recent U.S. military operations in Iran and Venezuela.
Former U.S. Navy commander José Adán Gutiérrez told the New York Times that the visibility of the surveillance flights was unusual, noting that "the fact that these flights were purposely made public basically indicates that there is a message."
Chris Simmons, a former Defense Intelligence Agency counterintelligence officer specializing in Cuba, added that such measures were unnecessary against a country with limited naval capabilities, describing the flights as more a “demonstration of force than anything else.”
Marco Rubio has repeatedly accused Cuba of hosting foreign spy bases. For years, he claimed China was operating spy bases on the island.
More recently, Trump justified his executive order imposing an oil blockade on Cuba by alleging that the island “hosts Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility, which tries to steal sensitive national security information from the United States.”
Cuba’s Soviet-era Lourdes signals intelligence facility was closed in 2002, and has since been converted into the University for Information Sciences. The elusive Chinese spy bases, meanwhile, remain as difficult to locate as the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.