(Tribune News Service) — Chen Yixin, the Chinese minister of state security who has alarmed the West with his large-scale espionage offensive, promised his Cuban counterpart to increase intelligence sharing and security cooperation during a meeting in Beijing.

The Chinese minister told Lieutenant Gen. Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas, the head of Cuba’s Interior Ministry, that China is ready to work on the “understandings” reached by President Xi Jinping and Cuban leader Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermúdez at a meeting in May in Moscow, the South China Morning Post reported.

Yixin added that Chiuna wants to “further strengthen cooperation in the field of intelligence and security, safeguard the national security and social stability of the two countries and make new progress in building a China-Cuba community with a shared future,” the report said, citing a social media post by the Chinese sate security ministry on Monday.

The agreement comes after intense scrutiny over China’s intelligence operations in Cuba, after earlier reports in 2023 that Beijing and Havana might have inked a deal to build a new eavesdropping site. Last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, reported the construction of a new facility intended to collect signals intelligence, a reference to the interception of electronic communications, near Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second-largest city. The U.S. naval station in Guantanamo Bay is just about 50 miles east of the city. The center said at the time the site was one of four signal intelligence facilities in Cuba that might be supporting China’s efforts to spy on the United States.

Álvarez Casas’s visit and Yixin’s statements have a two-fold purpose, said Ryan C. Berg, the director for the center’s Americas Program. “First, to show continued support for this regime, but also to show that even as a lot of these sites that the Chinese are likely using for (signals intelligence) collection are exposed publicly by CSIS and others, they intend to continue this form of cooperation, likely because it’s highly strategic and important for the Chinese to have this information,” he said.

China’s powerful spy agency, the ministry of state security has expanded under Yixin and is in charge of domestic surveillance, intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence activities, including cyber-operations. Western officials have expressed concerns about expanded Chinese counterintelligence and economic espionage, and countering them is currently one of the FBI’s top priorities.

Cuba’s Interior Ministry oversees the police, state security and intelligence.

Álvarez Casas also met with China’s head of police, Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong on Friday. The Chinese senior official said China was prepared to work with Cuba to “enhance personnel exchanges and law enforcement capacity building” and “deepen practical cooperation in law enforcement and security,” the minister said, according to the Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

“Álvarez Casas expressed Cuba’s willingness to further enhance coordination and cooperation with China in order to jointly address security risks and challenges,” the Cuban Communist Party’s newspaper Granma said in a one-graph report. Cuban state media did not report Álvarez Casas’s meeting with Yixin.

After a congressional hearing last year to discuss China’s intelligence operations in Cuba, a group of lawmakers requested that the Department of Homeland Security conduct a “comprehensive threat assessment” on the “expanding intelligence and security collaboration” between the governments of China and Cuba. The lawmakers expressed worry that China is using Cuba to spy on the United States.

In its report last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies analyzed satellite data and concluded that the new site near Santiago de Cuba had been under construction since 2021 and that its equipment would be capable of tracking U.S. air and maritime military movements, providing China a strategic site from which to spy on the United States.

However, more recent imagery from April 18, 2025, reveals that work at that site seemed to have ceased, the Center reported in May. Instead, the new satellite images show new construction underway at Bejucal, Cuba’s largest spy base.

Biden administration officials said China has had a spy base in Cuba since at least 2019. Still, a former top U.S. counterintelligence official told the Herald that China has been using Bejucal to spy on the U.S. since the early 1990s.

“The best thing that Cuba has for China is its location, rather proximate to the U.S.,” Berg said. “It’s just a perfect platform for China to get a better sense of U.S. capabilities, and in particular, looking at a lot of these military bases and installations that the U.S. has in Florida, in particular, but also commercial space flight in places like Cape Canaveral, as that has become an increasingly important part of great power competition with China.”

Cuba has vigorously denied the existence of a Chinese spy base on the island, and China has denied it as well.

In recent years, Cuba’s military has increased its grip on the country and state security has expanded its reach to monitor even citizens criticizing government officials on social media, with the help of Chinese surveillance technology.

Álvarez Casas, at the top of the agency that also led the crackdown on antigovernment protesters on July 2021, has been on the rise. In a ceremony presided by Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old retired general still ruling over the island, he was recently promoted to General of the Army Corps, a rank similar to that of a Lieutenant General, or three-star generals in the U.S. Army.

Under his tenure, the Interior Ministry has pursued strengthening ties with political allies like China and Russia, and he has traveled at least on three different occasions to Russia. There is a previous documented visit to China, also to meet with Xiaohong, the police’s top chief.

Casas was the first Cuban official to have been sanctioned by the United States under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act in 2021, in the last days of the first Trump administration. The Treasury Department also sanctioned him at the time. Then last month, the State Department imposed additional visa sanctions on him for what it called his involvement in “gross violations of human rights.”

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