B. Shamlo / Global Look Press
What is the fear of the United States, which surrounds the whole world with barbed wire of its military bases.
On June 8, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a sensational exposé: Beijing will pay Havana billions of dollars to host "a secret Chinese spy base about 100 miles from Florida. This was reported to the newspaper by unnamed officials "familiar with the matter." No concrete evidence, much less any documents were provided. This is understandable: Since the Spanish-American war over Cuba in 1898, the "leaking machine" – the American media – has worked entirely to create conflicts, including deadly ones, in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).
The New York Times immediately found and quoted "a Biden administration official" as saying that the base has been in operation since at least 2019, and that it is about modernization and expansion.
For four years, wrapped in a cocoon of covid, the U.S. intelligence agencies knew and kept silent? All of a sudden, it's happening. What is this about?
The Cuban and Chinese governments denied the reports.
Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said the WSJ story is full of "totally false and unfounded information" and Cuba "rejects the presence of foreign military personnel throughout LAC."
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused Washington of "spreading rumors and slander" and recommended "to think about themselves and stop interfering in the internal affairs of Havana." Read – and China.
Finally, even Biden's National Security Council (NSC) issued a denial. "This news is inaccurate," said NSC White House Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby, who, understandably, did not go into detail.
But the "leaking machine" had already started to work. In Congress, as expected, the hysteria began. United on this occasion, Democrats and Republicans, congressmen and congresswomen demanded a hearing on this issue and called on President Joe Biden to do something "nice" in his old age as part of Washington's long-standing botched policy toward Cuba and the failures of the anti-China confrontation.
Let us note in the margin that all this fuss is taking place during the intense "combat" preparation for the upcoming presidential elections in the United States. When Republicans are trying to score political points by discrediting the Biden administration, which, according to their pre-election views, has lost the power to act with force in its old age. And the Democrats, on the other hand, are verbally striving to take a "tough stance on China and Cuba." Both are using the holey and decayed banner of the long discredited Monroe Doctrine, under which Washington proclaimed the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence.
Another fuss in the U.S. media is not a repeat of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the danger of atomic war was at stake.
And not the Soviet radio-electronic center in Lourdes, which effectively operated in Cuba from the 1960s to the early 2000s and was dismantled by Russia in favor of American interests.
Not even with the U.S. military base in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay, where after the September 11, 2001 attacks a prison was set up to house suspected foreign terrorists, but from there continued to conduct stealthy radio reconnaissance against the Freedom Island.
And certainly not at all comparable to the launch pads for missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads deployed by the Pentagon on NATO's eastern borders against the Russian Federation.
And here we come to the real situation.
The U.S. has about 750 foreign military bases in 80 countries around the world! America's NATO ally, Great Britain, has "only" 145 of them. Russia has "as many as" three dozen, and China has only five bases. This means that the U.S. has three times as many bases as all other countries combined.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States built a large military base on Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean. For reasons of Anglo-Saxon solidarity, the entire indigenous Chagossian people were forcibly evicted with the help of the British government and deported 1,200 miles away, leaving the people to fend for themselves in poverty, without any compensation, without providing them with everything they needed, including shelter, in their new habitat.
What is this but a crime against humanity? The question is rhetorical.
The commandos stationed on Diego Garcia have played, and continue to play, a key role in all U.S. wars in the Middle East.
• U.S. Central Command estimates that there are between 45,000 and 65,000 U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf.
• The U.S. European Command estimates that there are about 33,000 U.S. troops in Germany.
• The Indo-Pacific Command estimates that there are 50,000 to 55,000 U.S. troops in Japan and about 26,000 troops in South Korea.
However, the exact number of troops deployed abroad has not been publicly disclosed.
"Officials familiar with the matter" are careful not to fool the American and world public with this "trifle". Nor do they remind us that the United States has one of the most extensive and sophisticated intelligence networks of the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency around the world.
U.S. intelligence agencies have conducted and continue to conduct numerous spying operations not only against foreign rivals, but, as recently revealed, also against their NATO allies. Covert and overt operations involving conspiracies, blackmail, and assassinations have been documented by former NSA official Edward Snowden.
According to three again "anonymous U.S. officials" allegedly familiar with the Beijing-Havana agreement, U.S. authorities are "concerned about China's plans to build facilities in Cuba" that could be used to spy on the United States by intercepting electronic signals from nearby military and commercial facilities.
However, Cuba is just an episode of the "jealousy" that the White House feels towards the Chinese, who are coming on the heels of the Americans in the whole territory of LAC.
No less so than Cuba, this is true of Panama and the Panama Canal, which has always been of great military-political and commercial value to the United States.
It was once the home of the U.S. Southern Command, which "resisted the spread of communism" in the southern "underbelly" of North America. But under pressure from the progressive government of President Omar Torrijos, U.S. President Jimmy Carter transferred the Canal Zone with its 14 military bases to Panama in 1977.
12 years later, the Pentagon avenged the Panamanians with a military invasion of their country and the arrest of President Manuel Noriega.
Now, in this "holy place," according to the fantasy of Gerald Flurry, the military expert of the American publication The Trumpet, as the years go by, who do you think can "freely deploy their military bases and move their troops and marines and equipment"? China.
Against this background, completely unnoticed by the U.S. media and congressmen during the same week as the WSJ report on the Chinese "spy base" in Cuba, NBC reported: "President Joe Biden's administration is pressuring the Pentagon to deploy American military personnel in the Darien jungle between Colombia and Panama" supposedly to combat drug smuggling, human trafficking and illegal immigration. Notice, pressuring the Pentagon without asking the opinion of sovereign Panama.
And already, without request, U.S. troops are deploying a "humanitarian operations force" in the Panamanian countryside, landing from Chinook helicopters with a force comparable to a battalion of airborne troops.
Major Felipe Camargo, a former serviceman in the Panamanian Defense Force, on the website La Estrella de Panama, described the NBC report as a "targeted" effort by "gringos to influence the Panamanian government's position on the growing presence of the Asian giant in Latin America."
Panama, says Camargo, is only part of a geostrategic coverage of the world that includes "wars being prepared in the Indo-Pacific and European theaters of war."
The United States struck a deal with the Philippines to expand its military presence to four additional bases, as part of the Pentagon's multi-year buildup of its forces in the Asia-Pacific region.
According to David Wein, professor of political anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., the bases in the Philippines, coupled with a military build-up in Okinawa, Australia, Guam "will allow the United States to expand access to the South China Sea and Taiwan as tensions between Washington and Beijing increase."
So who is or will be spying on whom? Who surrounds or has already surrounded whom with numerous military bases, ready to receive and use nuclear weapons in case of escalating tensions?
China, Russia, or the United States?
Let me remind those who don't understand: the Pentagon has about 750 bases in 80 countries around the world, Russia and China have fewer than 40, and none under Uncle Sam's nose.
And this Uncle Sam, having put the whole world behind the barbed wire of his naval, air and land bases, crapped his pants and went into hysterics at the mere mention of a small "spy base" on a small but proud island.