The picture
AssessmentIn June 2026, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published satellite imagery analysis showing that a signals-intelligence station at Bejucal, in the hills south of Havana, had completed construction of a new 32-antenna circularly disposed array—a Cold War-era design rebuilt with modern equipment to intercept and geolocate radio transmissions across thousands of miles. U.S. officials have said China operates multiple intelligence facilities in Cuba, and CSIS assesses Bejucal is likely one of them, though no public evidence conclusively attributes the site to Beijing, and both governments deny such involvement.
Intelligence activity is only one part of a much broader Chinese presence in Cuba. For more than two decades, Chinese companies—many of them state-owned or state-linked, and several appearing on U.S. restricted lists—have supplied much of Cuba's telecommunications infrastructure, drilled many of its modern oil wells, equipped its laptop assembly line, supplied its buses, financed its ports, and, since 2024, helped expand its electrical grid with utility-scale solar projects. China is widely regarded as one of Cuba's largest bilateral creditors and one of its two largest trading partners. WireScreen's outbound investment ledger records 166 Chinese projects and deals in Cuba, from a $400 million multi-project credit package in 2001, through Eximbank financing for ports and buses, to $2.83 billion in debt forgiveness in 2016 and solar-panel grants in 2023. Its ownership graph also resolves thousands of corporate relationships involving Cuba-registered Chinese entities. In September 2025, Havana announced that its government debt to Beijing had been restructured, while negotiations over banking and commercial debt continued.
Cuba illustrates how extensive commercial engagement can overlap with infrastructure and security interests that policymakers increasingly view through a strategic lens. The same island hosts Huawei-built telecommunications networks, CNPC drilling operations, and signals-intelligence facilities that CSIS assesses are likely intended to collect intelligence against the United States. In May 2026, the Trump administration expanded sanctions on Cuba, citing the country's role in hosting foreign adversary intelligence and security facilities. The corporate registry tells a parallel story. WireScreen's entity resolution identifies a registered Havana representative office of China Precision Machinery Import & Export Corporation (CPMIEC)—Beijing's principal missile-export company, repeatedly sanctioned by the U.S. government for missile proliferation-related activities—with indirect ownership links back to the CASIC defense conglomerate. What follows maps the Chinese corporate footprint behind those strategic concerns.
The island, mapped
Interactive · Hover the markersWhat else makes Cuba strategically useful to Beijing
A collection window unavailable from home. CSIS assesses that Cuba offers China signals-intelligence access it cannot replicate from its own territory — proximity to military commands across the U.S. Southeast, space-launch activity, regional maritime traffic, and satellite communications.
A named candidate for PLA presence. The 2024 ODNI annual threat assessment, cited by CSIS, listed Cuba among the countries where China is looking to establish military installations.
A quarter-century of military exchanges. High-level contacts between the PLA and Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces date to the 1999 Chi Haotian visit and have continued since, CSIS notes, including an April 2024 meeting.
A suspicious shipment on the record. In 2015, Colombian authorities detained a Hong Kong-registered Chinese freighter allegedly carrying undeclared explosives and munitions bound for Cuba; Beijing denied wrongdoing. Not proof of an arms pipeline — but a data point risk screeners remember.
The operators
Entity register| Company | In Cuba since | Activity on the island |
|---|---|---|
华为技术有限公司 |
2000s | Core supplier to ETECSA, Cuba's telecom monopoly: network modernization, public Wi-Fi hotspots (from 2015), handsets sold in state stores. A 2017 Open Observatory of Network Interference analysis found ETECSA's Wi-Fi portal software was derived from Huawei code — evidence of the supply relationship's depth, not of implants. |
中兴通讯股份有限公司 |
2000s | Telecom equipment supplier to ETECSA alongside Huawei. U.S. intelligence tracked workers at Huawei and ZTE facilities in Cuba over suspicions the sites housed eavesdropping operations (WSJ, 2023). |
长城钻探工程有限公司 |
2005 | Cuba's principal drilling contractor since 2005, in venture with state firm CUPET — ~160 staff and four rigs per 2019 Xinhua reporting; offshore directional drilling from 2019. Completed Cuba's longest horizontal well (8,047 m, "Varadero 1012") in 2024. New onshore oil-and-gas assessment launched 2026. |
郑州宇通客车股份有限公司 |
2005 | Supplied Cuba's national bus fleet for two decades, financed in part by a $156.4M China Eximbank seller's credit (2007, per WireScreen deal records). In 2025 shipped engines, tires, and batteries that returned 100+ sidelined Havana buses to service. Maintains a registered Cuba office; feeds the VEDCA EV-assembly joint venture. |
海尔集团公司 |
2016 | Technology partner behind Cuba's first laptop and tablet plant, inaugurated on the outskirts of Havana in December 2016 and operated by state firm GEDEME — Haier supplies components, equipment, and training under a technology-transfer agreement (120,000-unit annual capacity, per Granma and Xinhua). Longtime appliance supplier under earlier interest-free Chinese credit lines. |
上海电气集团股份有限公司 |
2019 | Built the 62 MW Mariel Solar park in the Mariel Special Development Zone with UK-based Hive Energy; grid-connected 2021. Chinese suppliers now anchor the 92-park, ~2 GW national solar program. |
百泰生物药业有限公司 |
2004 | Founded in 2000 in the Beijing development zone as a China–Cuba joint venture with CIMAB S.A., BPL industrialized nimotuzumab — China's first humanized monoclonal antibody, built on Cuban IP and now in the national medical insurance catalogue. It is one node of a wider transfer channel: ChangHeber in Jilin, whose Chinese shareholder is a Sinopharm vaccine institute and whose founding accompanied Jiang Zemin's 2001 state visit; Shandong Lukang Heber, 60 percent held by a subsidiary of Shanghai-listed Lukang Pharmaceutical; and Hubei China-Cuba Biopharmaceutical in Wuhan. Fifteen further biotech agreements were reported signed in April 2025. |
中国五矿集团有限公司 |
2005 | WireScreen's deal ledger records a $500M greenfield deal with state oil firm CUPET in 2005 — the largest single corporate transaction on the Cuba books. Long-running interest in Cuban nickel (world's third-largest reserves); a separate ~$600M JV proposal at Las Camariocas was never concluded. |
中国交通建设股份有限公司 |
2015 | Won the $120M Port of Santiago de Cuba modernization contract (2015), financed by China Eximbank loans of $120M and $133M (2014). Maintains a registered branch in the Mariel zone — "Cuba Marel Branch," as registered. |
中国精密机械进出口有限责任公司 |
n/d | Maintains a registered representative office in Cuba. CPMIEC is China's principal missile-systems exporter, repeatedly sanctioned by the U.S. State Department under nonproliferation statutes. WireScreen resolves indirect ownership links from the office back to CASIC's Launch Technology Institute and Sixth Academy (percentages undisclosed). |
浪潮集团有限公司 |
n/d | China's largest server maker and a leading government-cloud provider maintains a registered "Inspur Group Cuba Office" (浪潮集团古巴办事处), per WireScreen entity records; its activity on the island is not detailed in public reporting. BIS added the parent to the Entity List in 2023 and, in March 2025, six named subsidiaries — explicitly closing what it called a loophole that had left Inspur's corporate family free to acquire restricted U.S. technology, citing military supercomputing. The Cuba office is not individually named on any U.S. list, but Washington's posture treats the Inspur family, not just the parent, as the restricted unit — and Cuba began opening ETECSA data centers to foreign investment in 2026, the layer Inspur's core business occupies. |
The digital layer
Huawei isn't simply selling routers. Chinese vendors have supplied Cuba's backbone telecommunications, mobile infrastructure, and successive rounds of internet modernization; congressional correspondence and press reporting have also linked Chinese equipment to surveillance-related capabilities on the island; and Chinese partners support Cuba's digital-government initiatives.
For Beijing, telecommunications infrastructure offers value beyond commerce. Modern mobile and internet networks create long-term technical relationships — software updates, equipment replacement, cybersecurity support, and operational expertise — that persist for the life of the network.
The Cuban counterparty: GAESA
Sooner or later, commerce on this island runs through the same Cuban counterparty. GAESA (Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.), the Cuban military's business conglomerate — a "state within a state," in Secretary of State Marco Rubio's phrase, estimated by the State Department to control between 40 and 70 percent of the economy — has sat astride the chokepoints Chinese commerce passes through. Its subsidiary Almacenes Universales controlled container traffic at the Mariel zone, where CCCC keeps its registered branch; its financial arm RAFIN holds a stake in ETECSA, the Huawei- and ZTE-supplied telecom monopoly; and Banco Financiero Internacional, which GAESA absorbed in 2016, has handled the vast majority of foreign companies' transactions in Cuba.
No published contract names GAESA and a Chinese state firm as counterparties — the deal-level paper is not public, and this report does not treat the inference as record. But the architecture leaves little room for anything else, and Washington has made the question commercial: GAESA was designated under Executive Order 14404 in May 2026; Almacenes Universales, RAFIN, and BFI followed on June 23, with a warning that foreign companies servicing them must freeze those activities; and within days the Mariel terminal's assets were "sold" to a newly created Transport Ministry vehicle, a restructuring analysts describe as sanctions evasion. For any Chinese firm operating in Cuba, the Cuban counterparty is now a secondary-sanctions question.
