US President Joe Biden “instructed us to meet this challenge and we did. We executed this strategy quietly, with care, but in our view with good results,” Blinken said at a news conference. conference in Washington with Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani.
These statements come after the US daily Wall Street Journal published on June 8 that China and Cuba had agreed to build a major spy center on the island, information that the government of Havana categorically denied and which Casa Branca described as “inaccurate”. classified.
Blinken explained that when Biden’s presidential term began in January 2021, the administration found that China had been expanding its espionage activities around the world for some time, and had in fact expanded its service facilities in Cuba in 2019.
According to the Secretary of State, the administration of Joe Biden’s predecessor, Republican tycoon Donald Trump (2017-2021), failed to make “sufficient progress” to stop this espionage, so ordered Biden to adopt “a more direct strategy” to fit.
The official declined to provide further details about this plan, citing only that it was based on “diplomacy” and that the United States had contacted governments suspected of harboring Chinese spy centers.
“Experts believe that our diplomatic action has stopped these efforts by China, which we are closely monitoring,” Blinken said.
After the publication of the Wall Street Journal article, the White House withdrew the classification of classified information confirming that Beijing already had a spy center in Cuba in 2019, and a senior official assured that it is an “inherited” problem from the Trump administration.
Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, assured that the US daily published “unfounded information”, “slander” and “misconceptions” to justify the sanctions Washington had imposed on Havana to destabilize the island, while the Chinese government accused Washington of “spreading rumors and slander”.
Source: DN
