China and Cuba have a longstanding important bilateral relationship that has recently caught public attention in the United States. How do Sino-Cuban relations look from Havana? How did the United States and the Soviet Union manage their relations as they pertained to Cuba during the Cold War? The fraught character of Sino-Cuban relations and Cold War lessons are pertinent now. Sino-Cuban relations are complex, tense on some issues. The U.S.-Soviet Cold War experience illustrates paths forward drawn from remarkably similar cases.

In June 2023, The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuba-to-host-secret-chinese-spy-base-focusing-on-u-s-b2fed0e0 reported on the military and intelligence-gathering relations between Cuba and the People’s Republic of China, highlighting perspectives from Beijing and Washington, not at all from Cuba.

Sino-Cuban relations deteriorated markedly in the mid-1960s and remained poor until the early 1990s, when these two extant communist regimes saw greater value in cooperation than on sustaining grudges; the Soviet Union and European communist regimes had collapsed. During the 1990s, Cuban and Chinese leaders visited each other, trade and some investment picked up, and toward the decade’s end China gained access to a signals intelligence facility at Bejucal, south of the City of Havana, which once served the Soviet Union. This facility was upgraded in 2019 https://pacforum.org/publication/pacnet-49-chinas-military-engagements-with-cuba-implications-of-a-strategic-advance-in-latin-america.

Sino-Cuban relations remain difficult because China tells foot-dragging Cuban leaders to accelerate and deepen market-economic openings. Moreover, Cuba has failed to pay for much of what it imports from China and has accumulated large bilateral debts.

From 2018, when Miguel Díaz-Canel became Cuban president, to 2021 (the most recent evidence), Cuba’s imports from China fell 37 percent, my calculations show C:\Users\jidoming\Downloads\08_sector_externo_0.rar\ . The wider pattern of Sino-Cuban trade and debt relations highlights converging ideological, political, and economic explanations. From 2011 to 2016, Cuban exports to China fell 67 percent while its imports from China rose 82 percent; their bilateral commercial deficit leapt from 39 percent to 89 percent of Cuban imports in 2016. China approved of Cuba’s new economic reform program launched in 2010 and supported it by accepting higher Cuban debt to finance this growing deficit https://www.reuters.com/article/negocios-economia-cuba-china-idLTASIE6BM0WO20101223 .

However, in 2016 the Cuban communist party adopted a market-counterreform program. China disapproved; it also demanded trade-debt payments. In 2016-2021. Cuban exports to China rose 62 percent while its imports from China fell 58 percent. The bilateral deficit dropped to 57 percent of Cuban imports. Over half of Cuba’s trade-deficit originated debt is owed to Venezuela and China. China has agreed to postpone Cuba’s debt payments through 2027 but it has not cancelled any part of its debt, a much less generous stance than the Paris Club market-economy governments agreed to with Cuba in 2015-2020 https://revistas.uh.cu/plugins/generic/pdfJsViewer/pdf.js/web/viewer.html?file=https%3A%2F%2Frevistas.uh.cu%2Frcei%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F3652%2F3193%2F3766 .

In 2019, Trump administration policies toward Cuba and China reminded their respective governments that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The U.S. applied tariff and other trade penalties to China while it activated long dormant clauses of the Helms-Burton Act to hinder international investment in Cuba and impede the flow of Cuban trade. US-China air and naval confrontations increased in the South China Sea while US military threats against Cuba’s ally, Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, and Cuba itself increased the value of Sino-Cuban cooperation on intelligence gathering. The signals facility was upgraded thereby, also in 2019; China pays for its use as the USSR once had for its intelligence facilities.

How did the United States and the Soviet Union handle similar problems during the Cold War? In 1979, the U.S. “discovered” a Soviet ground force in Cuba. In fact, since the 1962 missile crisis the U.S. had lost track of this residual continuous Soviet troop presence in Cuba. The news of this (re)discovery emerged amidst an attempt to improve U.S.-Soviet relations. The Soviet and Cuban governments insisted that it was not a combat brigade but a training center, and that its functions or size had not changed since the early 1960s.

The settlement followed a pattern first established at the end of the 1962 missile crisis: each side promised not to do what the other found most objectionable. The Soviets promised not introduce combat troops in Cuba in the future, nor to turn the existing unit into a self-sufficient combat force. This unilateral Soviet concession exceeded the scope of the 1962 U.S.-Soviet understandings. In turn, the United States promised to continue to abide by the amended understandings between the governments in place since 1962 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674893252 . The United States did not invade Cuba. Soviet forces left Cuba only in the early 1990s following the USSR’s collapse.

The Soviet Union long operated signal intelligence facilities in Cuba. There is no public evidence that its long-time existence ever came under the terms of U.S.-Soviet security understandings. It was business-as-usual that major powers spy on each other. The last such facility closed in 2002.

There is nothing simple or seamless about Sino-Cuban relations and assuming so is a mistake. Thus, addressing the existence of a Chinese signals intelligence facility in Cuba should be manageable, learning from the same type of relationship once evident between the UUSR and the U.S. It would address signals intelligence or a hypothetical military training center in Cuba. With tripartite consent, it would govern relations regarding China, Cuba, and the United States. Each side would forego what the other finds most objectionable.