China's Growing Influence In The Caribbean

China Rising in the Caribbean

• About 55 miles east of Palm Beach, Florida on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.
  
  
• There are concerns that Hambantota will eventually become a Chinese naval base. Will the Pentagon have to contend with Chinese warships at Freeport?
  
  
• The Chinese military is already in the Caribbean, in Cuba, apparently to collect signals intelligence from the U.S. Washington splashes plenty of cash around the Middle East, for instance, but American policymakers need also to be concerned, urgently, about critical needy locations closer to home.
  
  

There's a "Red Storm Rising" just miles from America's shores. "In point of fact, the entire hemisphere is on fire," said Lou Dobbs on his widely watched Fox Business Network show on April 4. "China and Russia are engaging us in almost every quarter in this hemisphere. Russia and China in Venezuela, but China throughout the hemisphere and throughout the Caribbean."

Throughout the Caribbean, China's influence is growing fast. Trade and investment have made Beijing a power. Chinese motives are not solely commercial, however, and do not appear benign.

The Chinese military is already in the Caribbean, in Cuba. According to an October 2018 staff report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, China maintains physical presences at Soviet-era intelligence facilities at Lourdes, Bejucal, and Santiago de Cuba, apparently to collect signals intelligence from the U.S.

Of these locations, Bejucal, south of Havana, is of special concern. Satellite imagery shows a new radome protecting the radar there, and the installation could well be China's. China, after all, has been at Bejucal for some time. Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, in 2016 referred publicly to "this Chinese listening station in Bejucal."

Ellis, in a podcast with Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that Beijing views the Caribbean Sea in much the same way it perceives the South China Sea. This assessment goes a long way toward explaining China's otherwise unusual focus on the 13 island states and 17 "dependent territories" — what once were known as "colonies" — in the region.

Up to now, America has mostly left the Caribbean alone. As is often said, the Caribbean is "too democratic and not poor enough" to get U.S. attention. It is, however, correctly called America's "third border" and "soft underbelly."

This underbelly is now being remade with Chinese cash. For instance, five countries there — Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and the Dominican Republic — have joined Beijing's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure plan meant to tie global trade routes to China.