Cuba Is Not a Sideshow. It's a Front-Row Seat.

An illustrated map highlighting the proximity of Cuba to Florida, with key text about Cuba's role in intelligence as the U.S. engages with Iran. The image features satellite dishes and the Cuban government buildings in the background, along with flags representing China, Russia, and Iran.

While the U.S. fights Iran, Havana’s intelligence infrastructure is watching — and Washington may be running out of patience.

By Michael Phillips | Riptide Analysis

When President Trump declared a national emergency over Cuba on January 29, 2026, the executive order ran through a list of adversaries the Havana regime had invited onto the island: Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah. Most headlines that day focused on the sanctions. Few stopped to examine what the framing itself implied — that in the administration’s view, Cuba was not simply an isolated rogue state enduring its worst economic crisis in sixty years. It was infrastructure.

Three weeks later, U.S. and Israeli forces launched Operation Epic Fury. The war with Iran began.

The two events were not coincidental in their timing, and they are not unrelated in their logic. Understanding why requires looking at what Cuba actually represents in the current strategic environment — not as a Cold War artifact, but as an active intelligence platform 90 miles from Florida, running simultaneous collection operations for multiple U.S. adversaries, during a war involving one of them.

The Island That Never Stopped Listening

Map illustrating Cuba's intelligence geography, showing locations of U.S. military installations, active SIGINT facility, and estimated collection range, with labels for nearby Florida and key military bases.

The Soviet signals intelligence complex at Lourdes, outside Havana, was shuttered in 2001. At its peak, it had housed an estimated 1,500 operatives and supplied the USSR with 75 percent of its military intelligence on the United States. When the Russians left, the Cuban intelligence services and the physical infrastructure largely stayed behind.

What filled the void, according to open-source analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was China.

CSIS identified four active signals intelligence facilities across Cuba: three clustered around Havana — Bejucal, El Wajay, and Calabazar — and a fourth, previously unreported site under construction since 2021 near Santiago de Cuba, just east of a neighborhood called El Salao. The El Salao site is two miles from a Chinese-financed port expansion project and, notably, just 40 miles from the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay.

The Bejucal facility, which gained notoriety during the Cuban Missile Crisis for housing Soviet nuclear warheads, appears to have been significantly upgraded. Satellite imagery reviewed by CSIS shows antennas being repositioned — active collection — and new construction consistent with a large circular disposed antenna array, the same configuration the Soviets operated at nearly the same spot decades ago. These arrays are built for one purpose: determining the origin and direction of high-frequency signals across enormous distances.

“These sites are optimized not for espionage theater but for passive collection: satellite communications, tactical data links, airborne and maritime command-and-control traffic and timing patterns that reveal far more than content alone ever could,” said L.J. Eads, a former Air Force space network warfare and SIGINT analyst, in congressional testimony cited by the Washington Times in January. Eads made a pointed observation about what the Chinese collection posture in Cuba likely captured in real time during the January U.S. special operations raid on Venezuela that killed Cuban Black Wasp officers and captured Nicolas Maduro: “Beijing had a front-row seat to observe the way the U.S.” conducts joint operations — how it integrates communications, airborne assets, maritime elements, and cyber coordination across coalition partners simultaneously.

That was Venezuela. The Iran conflict is an order of magnitude larger.

What Iran Has to Do With It

Iran and Cuba are not natural allies in the conventional sense. They share no border, no language, no religion, and no significant trade history. What they share is structural: both are under severe U.S. economic pressure, both are formally aligned against American influence as an organizing principle of their foreign policy, and both have found in each other a useful node in a broader network of adversarial states.

In January 2026, Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, and Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, held a phone call to discuss, in diplomatic language, “existing capacities for expanding relations” and “strengthening coordination within international organizations.” Iran condemned what it called U.S. military aggression against Venezuela. Cuba, per its standard posture, condemned alongside.

The relationship has deeper institutional roots. In May 2025, Tehran and Havana signed strategic agreements specifically providing for the use of Cuban naval infrastructure to serve South American partners — with Venezuela named explicitly as an emphasis. Cuba signed a separate contract with the Iranian company Wagon Pars for railroad components. In February 2025, the two countries held their 19th Commission on Iran-Cuba Economic Cooperation in Havana. Iran has maintained annual credit lines to Cuba in the range of $200 million to $500 million over the past decade.

The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in March, named Iran alongside China and Russia as nations “seeking to sustain economic, political and military engagement with Latin America,” with Russia specifically flagged as wanting to “expand its current security and diplomatic ties with Cuba.” Iran’s missile production facilities had by that point been heavily struck by Operation Epic Fury, and the assessment noted that determining the full impact on Iran’s long-range missile capability — including technology that could be adapted toward an ICBM before 2035 — was still ongoing.

That assessment was written while the United States was actively at war with Iran. The SIGINT infrastructure in Cuba was active during the same period. The question of whether Iranian-linked actors have access to any portion of what Cuba’s intelligence apparatus collects — or whether Iran benefits from what China and Russia collect there — is not a question that has been answered publicly.

It is, however, a question that the new National Defense Authorization Act explicitly required someone to answer. The NDAA mandated a report from the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence on Chinese and Russian intelligence capabilities in Cuba, including an assessment of counterintelligence risks and Pentagon resources available to counter them. The report was due by June 2026.

As of this writing, it has not been released.

The Architecture of Access

Cuba’s value as an intelligence platform is not primarily about what Cuba itself collects. It’s about geography and access — and about what it enables others to do.

The southeastern seaboard of the United States is one of the most intelligence-rich strips of territory on earth. MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, home to U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command. Kennedy Space Center. Eglin Air Force Base. The naval installations at Pensacola, Mayport, and Kings Bay. Patrick Space Force Base. The satellite ground stations and defense testing ranges spread across Florida and the Gulf Coast. From a facility at Bejucal or El Salao, a properly configured antenna array can observe communications traffic, radar signatures, tactical data links, and timing patterns across a vast swath of this infrastructure — not necessarily the content, but the patterns, which can be equally revealing.

“Cuba’s proximity to the southern United States and the Caribbean makes it a prime location for collecting signals intelligence on the region,” CSIS noted in its analysis. “For Beijing, having access to SIGINT capabilities in Cuba would open a significant intelligence window inaccessible from within Chinese territory.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been more direct. Speaking from the State Department, Rubio declared: “We will not allow any foreign military, intelligence, or security apparatus to operate with impunity just 90 miles off the U.S. coast. This will not happen under Donald Trump’s presidency.” He characterized Cuba as having “invited U.S. adversaries to operate within Cuban territory against our national interests, with complete impunity.”

The word “adversaries” in that sentence is doing significant work. The White House’s January executive order listed Iran by name alongside Russia and China. During the current conflict, Iran has demonstrated — through Chinese-enabled targeting networks and electronic warfare support — an increasingly sophisticated ability to integrate outside intelligence into its own operations. The Small Wars Journal, analyzing Chinese-Iranian intelligence cooperation during Epic Fury, noted that Iranian forces were using telecommunications networks and digital infrastructure to relay targeting information in real time, with Chinese technical expertise potentially enhancing their ability to resist GPS jamming and disrupt enemy radar systems.

None of that originated in Cuba. But Cuba sits inside the collection perimeter for the command-and-control infrastructure that is running the war.

The Pentagon’s Two-Front Problem

Timeline illustrating key events related to Cuba and Iran from January to May 2026, highlighting military and intelligence developments.

For U.S. military planners, the Cuban SIGINT question during an active Iran conflict creates a specific and uncomfortable problem: it is not possible to fully compartmentalize Caribbean collection from Middle Eastern operations.

U.S. Central Command, headquartered at MacDill, is running Operation Epic Fury and the Hormuz blockade. The communications traffic, satellite uplinks, command-and-control protocols, and operational patterns flowing through that headquarters don’t disappear because a conflict is occurring on the other side of the world. They become more intense, more frequent, and more revealing — the kind of traffic that a passive collection facility near Havana is designed to absorb.

This is not a hypothetical. When the U.S. conducted Operation Absolute Resolve in January — the Delta Force raid that captured Maduro in Caracas — the after-action intelligence assessment, as reported by the Washington Times, indicated that Chinese SIGINT assets in Cuba had almost certainly observed U.S. joint warfare signatures in real time. What that collection looked like during a months-long conflict is a different question in scale if not in kind.

Former Air Force SIGINT analyst Eads put it plainly: modern warfare is “driven by weapons powered by networks, data links, command processes and communication protocols.” Passive collection of those signals, over time, builds a picture of how American forces fight — not just in Venezuela, but everywhere.

The Pentagon drafting military contingency plans for Cuba, as reported by multiple outlets including Zeteo and USA Today in April, may be driven by factors beyond economic coercion of the Díaz-Canel government. Planners who understand what’s happening at Bejucal and El Salao have reason to think about those facilities in terms that go beyond embarrassment to active operational risk — particularly while CENTCOM is running a live war.

The Congressional Gap

There is a significant oversight gap here, and it has not been filled.

The NDAA-mandated Pentagon report on Chinese and Russian SIGINT capabilities in Cuba has not been released publicly. The report was specifically required to include an assessment of “counterintelligence risks” and Pentagon “capabilities and resources” to counter the electronic surveillance. Congress required it because, by January 2026, enough had accumulated in the classified and open-source record that lawmakers felt the executive branch needed to formally account for what it knew and what it was doing about it.

Iran’s relationship with the Cuban intelligence infrastructure is a separate question that the mandated report may or may not address — the legislative language specified China and Russia. Given that the White House’s own executive order named Iran as a party to Cuba’s adversarial alignment, the absence of Iran from the NDAA’s reporting requirement is notable. Whether that reflects a deliberate scoping decision or an oversight in the drafting is unclear.

A diagram illustrating Cuba's adversarial alignment as of January 29, 2026, depicting connections with various countries and organizations, including Russia, Iran, China, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Op. Epic Fury conflict.

Senator Tim Kaine, one of the few members of Congress to publicly challenge the legal basis of potential Cuba military action, has framed the oil blockade itself as potentially constituting an act of war under international law — arguing that the administration is conducting what amounts to armed coercion without congressional authorization. The Senate voted in April to reject a Democratic amendment that would have required a congressional vote before military action against Cuba could be taken.

That vote resolved the near-term political question. It did not resolve the underlying strategic one.

What Comes After Iran

Trump has said, in language that was not subtle, that the United States will “immediately take control of Cuba” following the conclusion of the Iran conflict. The USS Abraham Lincoln — currently leading operations in the Hormuz theater — was specifically named as the carrier he would position off the Cuban coast.

Whether that represents a genuine operational plan or a negotiating posture directed at Havana is a matter of ongoing debate among analysts. What is not in debate is that the administration has escalated its Cuba policy in direct parallel with the Iran conflict: the January executive order, the oil blockade, the sanctions targeting Cuban regime officials and their families, the Pentagon planning directive leaked in April. The trajectory is not ambiguous.

For those watching from a national security perspective, the Cuba question was never simply about regime change or the emigration crisis or even the narcotics flows that the Justice Department has used to justify federal charges against Cuban officials. It is also, and perhaps primarily, about infrastructure — about who is listening, and what they hear.

The Soviets figured this out sixty years ago. They built Lourdes. They staffed it with 1,500 people. They collected 75 percent of their American military intelligence from a facility 90 miles from Florida.

China apparently figured it out, too. Russia never stopped. And Iran, which signed agreements with Cuba for naval infrastructure access in 2025, which received credit lines through Havana for decades, and which the White House’s own emergency declaration cited by name as a beneficiary of Cuba’s adversarial alignment — Iran was watching Operation Epic Fury from a country that, in terms of signals intelligence geography, has a better view of CENTCOM headquarters than most of America does.

The mandated Pentagon report is due in June. The Iran conflict is ongoing. Cuba is 90 miles away.

These facts are not unrelated.

Sources and methodology: Primary sourcing for this article draws on the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ July 2024 report Secret Signals: Decoding China’s Intelligence Activities in Cuba and CSIS’s May 2025 follow-up analysis At the Doorstep: A Snapshot of New Activity at Cuban Spy Sites, both of which are based on commercial satellite imagery analysis. Additional sourcing includes the White House Executive Order 14380 (January 29, 2026); the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Annual Threat Assessment 2026 (March 2026); congressional testimony by former Air Force SIGINT analyst L.J. Eads, as cited in reporting by the Washington Times; Iran-Cuba diplomatic communications as reported by Iranian state media and regional outlets; the May 2025 Iran-Cuba strategic agreements on naval infrastructure; and public reporting on Operation Epic Fury and U.S. Cuba policy escalation from Zeteo, USA Today, and Reuters. The National Defense Authorization Act reporting requirement referenced in this article is drawn from the enacted FY2026 NDAA. Distance figures for El Salao to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay reflect CSIS’s own language of approximately 40 miles, as stated in the May 2025 follow-up report.