Simply 90 miles from Florida, Cuba’s power disaster has metastasized from an financial disaster right into a nationwide safety vulnerability. Though Havana struggles to take care of the lights, Beijing and Moscow have come to Cuba’s help not as charitable donors however as strategic opportunists searching for to increase their intelligence-collection capabilities.
The State Division warned simply at some point after the newest outage that “scheduled energy cuts happen each day, and unscheduled outages persist all through Cuba.” The island’s thermoelectric vegetation, many relationship again a long time, now function at barely 34 % of their capability. In February, 5 of eight Turkish-leased floating energy vegetation departed Cuban ports after Havana failed to fulfill fee obligations.
The disaster has intensified dramatically as Cuba’s oil lifelines have been severed. Following the U.S. seizure of management over Venezuelan oil operations in early January, Mexico had change into Cuba’s main provider, delivery practically 20,000 barrels per day by means of September 2025. But, below mounting strain from the Trump administration, which threatened tariffs on any nation supplying Cuba with oil, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum introduced in late January that shipments had been not less than quickly halted.
The determine had already plummeted to about 7,000 barrels per day, leaving Cuba primarily with out oil imports for the primary time in years.
The breakdown has created a gap that America’s strategic rivals are exploiting with alarming sophistication. From this vantage level, intelligence providers can monitor U.S. army installations throughout the Southeast, observe Area Drive launches from Cape Canaveral, intercept communications from Southern Command headquarters in Florida, and observe naval actions all through the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
For Beijing and Moscow, Cuba’s desperation has change into an vital windfall.
Beijing’s Digital Footprint Expands
China’s presence in Cuba has grown exponentially, notably in telecommunications and digital infrastructure. In testimony earlier than Congress final Might, nationwide safety analysts confirmed that satellite tv for pc imagery identifies not less than 4 Chinese language-linked alerts intelligence services throughout Cuba — Bejucal, Wajay, and Calabazar close to Havana, plus a newly constructed website at El Salao close to Santiago de Cuba.
“Cuba’s proximity to the homeland continues to make the island a sexy intelligence platform for U.S. adversaries,” Connor Pfeiffer, senior director of presidency relations at Basis for the Protection of Democracies Motion, tells The Cipher Transient. “Inside 400 miles of Havana sit the headquarters of the U.S. combatant instructions for Latin America and the Center East, U.S. Particular Operations Command, and air bases that usually host superior U.S. fighter plane.”
Want a each day dose of actuality on nationwide and world safety points? Subscriber to The Cipher Transient’s Nightcap publication, delivering professional insights on right this moment’s occasions – proper to your inbox. Join free right this moment.
As Cuban telecommunications firms wrestle with outdated Soviet-era tools and power energy failures, Chinese language companies, notably Huawei and ZTE, have positioned themselves as the one viable resolution. These firms aren’t merely promoting {hardware}; they’re putting in the very networks by means of which Cuba’s restricted web site visitors flows.
“Due to this proximity, intelligence outposts in Cuba present alerts intelligence and different capabilities which can be invaluable to Beijing and Moscow,” Pfeiffer explains.
The El Salao website encompasses a circularly disposed antenna array, a configuration extremely efficient at figuring out the origin and path of incoming high-frequency alerts. These installations can observe alerts as much as 9,300 miles, offering Beijing with unprecedented visibility into U.S. army communications and operations.
In the meantime, MacDill Air Drive Base in Tampa, house to U.S. Central Command and Particular Operations Command, sits lower than 300 miles from Cuban shores. Naval Station Mayport in Jacksonville, Naval Air Station Key West, and dozens of different delicate army installations throughout Florida, Georgia, and Alabama all function inside simple vary. The benefit over satellite tv for pc surveillance is stark.
“Against this to what will be obtained from overhead satellite tv for pc photographs and different assortment from satellites in low earth orbit whose time passing overhead will be anticipated, the ELINT services in Cuba are a continuing presence with line of sight to key U.S. services,” Evan Ellis, analysis professor of Latin American Research on the U.S. Military Warfare School Strategic Research Institute, tells The Cipher Transient.
The infrastructure disaster has made Cuba extra depending on Chinese language technical experience. In February 2025, Chinese language Ambassador Hua Xin and Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel introduced China would assemble 55 photo voltaic vegetation by the top of 2025, with a further 37 deliberate by 2028. If accomplished, the community would add over 2,000 megawatts of capability. Nonetheless, this dependency offers Chinese language intelligence providers unprecedented entry to Cuban authorities communications, army installations, and infrastructure programs.
“Throughout the current U.S. army operations within the Caribbean, and in a future U.S. battle within the Indopacific involving U.S. deployment from bases on the Atlantic seaboard and transit by means of the Caribbean, the Chinese language digital intelligence gathering services in Cuba are effectively positioned to seize not solely issues like radio transmissions, however the emissions from U.S. services, and the signatures of U.S. ships and different forces,” Ellis underscores.
In easier phrases: China’s Cuban listening posts can intercept not simply what U.S. forces talk, however the digital fingerprints of their tools, from radar emissions to communications arrays and ship propulsion programs. Through the use of these signatures, adversaries can determine particular vessels and plane, observe their actions, and doubtlessly develop countermeasures to defeat U.S. army know-how.
Moscow’s Renewed Army Presence
Russia’s intelligence footprint in Cuba by no means solely disappeared after the Chilly Warfare, but Moscow’s actions have intensified dramatically. In March 2025, Russia and Cuba signed a army cooperation settlement that Russian lawmakers ratified in October. Ukrainian intelligence estimates that between 6,000 and seven,000 Cubans are at present preventing as mercenaries in Russia’s battle towards Ukraine — the second-largest international contingent after North Korea’s roughly 12,000 troops.
Relatively than working out of a single large facility just like the Soviet-era Lourdes complicated, Russian intelligence has embedded personnel and tools inside ostensibly civilian infrastructure initiatives. Russian engineers arrive every time Cuba’s energy grid requires emergency upkeep, bringing extra than simply technical expertise. When radar programs at Cuban air protection installations fail, Russian specialists present upgrades with built-in assortment capabilities.
Russia has additionally leveraged Cuba’s power disaster to deepen army cooperation by means of more and more frequent naval port calls in Havana; visits that permit Russian intelligence personnel to rotate out and in with out scrutiny.
Not everybody within the intelligence group shares the alarm. Critics argue the menace is being overblown by voices desperate to justify elevated protection spending or preserve hardline Cuba insurance policies which have failed for six a long time. Some coverage specialists argue the infrastructure disaster truly presents a possibility. If Washington eased sanctions and supplied help to Cuba’s power sector, Havana would have much less incentive to accommodate Chinese language and Russian intelligence necessities.
But Ellis rejects the notion that Cuba may credibly scale back its ties to Beijing and Moscow in trade for U.S. financial reduction.
“Though U.S. financial coercion, making the most of Diaz-Canel’s at present determined financial state, may facilitate a deal by which Cuba guarantees to scale back its Cuban or Russian presence, Cuba will promise to conform to the diploma that it might with out actually breaking these ties to China and Russia, which for it are each ideological allies and companions in its survival,” he continues.
The regime’s dependency, Ellis stresses, runs too deep.
“Not till there’s a sincerely democratic pro-US regime in Cuba will the U.S. be actually safe from the kind of extra-hemispheric threats that Cuba, like Venezuela, can host within the Caribbean,” he asserts.
The desperation-dependence cycle offers Beijing and Moscow leverage that extends past conventional espionage. Cuban officers usually are not able to demand transparency when Chinese language technicians set up new telecommunications tools. Furthermore, when Russian engineers service radar installations in Havana, the federal government lacks leverage to refuse requests for expanded intelligence cooperation.
“With out Venezuelan oil help, the Cuban regime faces acute power shortages and lowered inflows of much-needed international foreign money,” Pfeiffer says.
The Trump administration’s profitable strain on Mexico to halt oil shipments represents a calculated gamble—one which leverages Mexico’s vulnerability throughout upcoming commerce settlement negotiations. The entire severance may speed up the regime’s collapse—or drive it much more desperately into Chinese language and Russian arms.
Strategic Vulnerabilities
The intelligence implications lengthen far past passive eavesdropping.
“The info that could possibly be collected may permit the Chinese language to seize specific intelligence transmitted in an imperfectly safe or decipherable vogue, but additionally simply from the signatures, have an concept relating to the composition and state of exercise of U.S. forces, their location, and signatures that would permit them to extra successfully find and defeat U.S. programs in fight,” Ellis factors out.
The worst-case situations contain cyber weapons pre-positioned in crucial infrastructure, digital warfare programs that would intervene with U.S. army communications throughout a disaster, or intelligence networks that would help hostile operations on America’s doorstep. The geographic proximity compounds each vulnerability.
But not everybody views American intervention as the answer.
Leon Valencia, a former ELN insurgent commander and director of the Bogota-based suppose tank Fundación Paz y Reconciliación, gives a Colombian perspective that displays broader Latin American sentiment.
“We do see Cuba extra as a sufferer,” Valencia tells The Cipher Transient. “All through a number of peace negotiations, Cuba has been a vital half. For instance, the peace agreements with the FARC rebels, signed again in 2016, had been negotiated in Cuba. Cuba has all the time stored its doorways open in direction of us. We’re grateful to Cuba, however we would not become involved in army actions; there can be a protest.”
But Valencia and different regional analysts more and more imagine change in Cuba could also be inevitable. Enrique Serrano, a Colombian political analyst specializing in Latin American authoritarianism, sees the present disaster as doubtlessly terminal.
“It is not possible that the federal government in Cuba may survive this 12 months,” Serrano tells The Cipher Transient. “I feel lastly we will change, and particularly as a result of Venezuela failed too, and even I feel Nicaragua will fail to. These authoritarian governments like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, what they attempt to do in actual life is to realize time. They’ll disappear earlier or later.”
Washington’s Dilemma
The growth of Chinese language and Russian intelligence capabilities in Cuba presents Washington with a problem that defies simple options.
In response to Pfeiffer, “continued U.S. strain will make it tough for China or Russia to help the Cuban regime in getting out of this disaster of their very own making.”
The infrastructure disaster complicates any potential diplomatic opening. A authorities determined to maintain the lights on might show extra prepared to accommodate Chinese language and Russian intelligence necessities than it could below much less dire circumstances.
The intelligence assortment capabilities that Beijing and Moscow are establishing in Cuba will persist lengthy after the present blackouts finish. As soon as put in, telecommunications infrastructure operates for years or a long time. Each blackout pushes Havana nearer to Beijing, each grid failure necessitates Moscow’s assist; every represents an incremental growth of international intelligence capabilities on American soil.
“The alternatives stemming from Cuba’s army and political alignment with the PRC, longstanding working relationship with its army and different personnel, geographical proximity, and different advantages, each earlier than and through battle, are laborious to overstate,” Ellis provides.
The Cipher Transient is dedicated to publishing a spread of views on nationwide safety points submitted by deeply skilled nationwide safety professionals. Opinions expressed are these of the writer and don’t characterize the views or opinions of The Cipher Transient.
Have a perspective to share based mostly in your expertise within the nationwide safety area? Ship it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Learn extra expert-driven nationwide safety insights, perspective and evaluation in The Cipher Transient as a result of Nationwide Safety is Everybody’s Enterprise
