Cuba 'spy base' scare out of Cold War fiction: China Daily editorial

The Cold War was at its height during US President Joe Biden's formative years. That perhaps explains why he is so eager to turn back the clock to the days of his childhood, and recreate a "threat from the reds" that must have thrilled him as a kid.

Having rightly denied a Wall Street Journal report about China having an "eavesdropping station" in Cuba as "inaccurate", his administration has wrongly claimed China has a "spy base" there.

It alleges that China has been conducting "espionage activities" in Cuba targeting the United States for some time and upgraded its intelligence collection facilities in the country in 2019.

It should perhaps be pointed out in passing, lest it has escaped anyone's attention or memory, that the US is notorious for its hacking and eavesdropping on presumed foes, rivals and friends alike. When it comes to spying, the US is nonpareil.

But to return to the paranoidly threatening world that so many US politicians now seem to inhabit, the claim that China has been partnering with Cuba to undermine US security has naturally been hyped up by US media outlets. Having found there was a huge public appetite for their sensationalizing of a wayward Chinese research blimp, the media are not going to miss the opportunity to try to cash in on the administration's re-evoking of the Cuban missile crisis fears.

Since the US has victimized and vilified its Caribbean neighbor for decades, the Biden administration feels no qualms about pouring more dirty water on the country. But it is Beijing, not Havana, that the administration has in its retro-sights.

Shaping China in the mold of the Soviet Union to define its popular perception in the US is not a light-bulb moment for the current occupant of the White House or his administration; it is a bipartisan effort in Washington. Whether from conviction or opportunism, the US political circle is enthusiastically playing the role of Cold War warrior en masse.

The sum of all this is to show how imaginatively impoverished Washington is in envisioning the future. Unlike Beijing which has proposed a series of transformative initiatives that seek to secure global peace and stability, foster harmony among peoples and countries, and facilitate shared development, Washington is bankrupt in terms of new thinking and fresh ideas that are befitting to address the challenges facing the world today.

As a result, although it is 32 years since the Soviet Union collapsed and 60 since the Cuban missile crisis was peacefully resolved, many in Washington have cacooned themselves within a Cold War mindset. The US media outlets are only too happy to play along, since fiction sells better than facts. In this way the fiction becomes a self-perpetuating narrative as the two US political parties compete to be the toughest on China.