OPINION:
While many Americans remain concerned about Venezuela’s impact on the immigration crisis at the southwestern border, there are more grave problems of global dimensions presenting an imminent threat to the United States 90 miles south of the Florida Keys on the island of Cuba.
As recent events have revealed, China is adopting the Soviet Union’s Khrushchev-era Latin America strategy, fitting the Caribbean island of Cuba into the so-called global terror network.
The infamous terror network, which blossomed in Europe in the 1970s with killings and kidnappings, including the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981, has shifted to far more sophisticated operations that involve economic warfare, coercive diplomacy, cyberattacks, intelligence gathering, sabotage, disinformation, and biomedical and psychological warfare.
While the network still operates worldwide in places such as the Balkans, Europe, and the Middle and Far East, Cuba is a valuable asset to China because it already has at least three Soviet-era military installations there — Lourdes near Havana, Santiago and, especially since 1992, Bejucal.
The latter has the potential to pose a grave threat to the national security of the United States since it can track the movements of three U.S. military installations (Doral, Key West and Homestead), all of which are central to future U.S. Pacific operations for Taiwan.
To address this critical issue, Sen. Bob Menendez, New Jersey Democrat, and Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican, recently launched a bipartisan initiative calling for an intelligence briefing on the matter.
While It comes as no surprise to us that the Cuban regime and China are working together to undermine U.S. national security, the establishment of intelligence facilities and expansion of military ties this close to U.S. territory is a significant, escalatory step that deeply concerns all Americans and affects global security as a whole.
This is a Chinese-led global design in which the Cuban regime plays a leading role by allying with countries like Iran and North Korea.
In a phone call to Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev, who reported the exchange on his Telegram channel, former Cuban President Raul Castro said he supported the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine and assured him that he was certain that Moscow would achieve victory over Kyiv.
In late May, Cuban Interior Minister Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casas, whom the U.S. has sanctioned for human rights abuses, met with his Vietnamese and Chinese counterparts and Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. Mr. Casas previously deepened Cuba-Russia ties with Mr. Patrushev in Havana this past March. The May meeting was also attended by Gerardo Hernandez, a field agent once outed as part of the notorious Wasp Network exposed for Cuban espionage operations in Florida in 1998.
Today, Mr. Hernandez runs the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, a series of state-sponsored street gangs that use harassment, intimidation and violence to retaliate against Cuban democracy activists.
Mr. Hernandez recently met with Mr. Casas and Russian Sen. Dmitry Kuzmin and Russian Gen. Viktor Zolotov, who acts as director of the Russian National Guard along with the Russian Security Council, all part of an effort to sign an agreement to purportedly fight transnational crime with greater efficiency. This purported subject matter, however, should not be trusted.
John Bolton, the former U.S. national security adviser, argued that Beijing’s interests in Venezuela’s oil and gas resources and other mining interests in Latin America could make Cuba the eye of China’s activities across the entire Western Hemisphere.
Europe is no stranger to Cuba’s clever covert operations. Many of the Cuban doctors were ‘leased’ by the communist regime into international indentured servitude in Western European countries such as Italy.
While these leases have benefited the medical communities of recipient European countries, it has also created an intelligence bridge for Havana to collect and share biomedical and neuroscience secrets that are passed on to Beijing and Moscow.
When Russian doctors were sent to Italy in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, former commander of the United Kingdom’s Joint CBRN Regiment and NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, said the military expedition had all the traits of a Russian intelligence operation.
In a private conversation regarding medical science from the island, Cuba scholar Maria Werlau said:
“The Cuban Communist regime’s interest in mind control, neurophysiology, and neuroscience dates to its very beginnings in 1959. A covert mental-control research program … was initiated early on at a newly-established Brain Institute in Havana, and its director, who had been trained at the Brain Institute in Moscow, advised then Interior Minister and founder of Cuba’s intelligence service, Ramiro Valdes, on scientific methods to torture political opponents at designated wards in psychiatric hospitals. Additional neuro-pathophysiologic, psychological, and psychiatric centers for mind-control studies were founded over time, covered up with legitimate scientific medical research.”
The results of some of these programs can be seen in the Soviet Union’s well-documented use of psychiatric incarceration against dissidents accused of engaging in anti-Soviet “agitation.”
While it may be an inconvenient truth to face, the secrets being learned by our Caribbean neighbors in Havana place America and Europe at risk — and those secrets are being passed on to our enemies in Beijing and the corridors of the Kremlin in Moscow.
We are facing an organic and structured global threat against Western civilization.
• Marco Rota is a strategic adviser and geopolitical analyst.
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