Russia has resumed the activities of the Soviet spy center "Lourdes" in Cuba. Under the guise of diplomats, intelligence officers (GRU) and graduates of specialties related to rocket engineering, computing and exact mathematics are sent to the island.
The Insider writes about it.
Journalists managed to learn this, in particular, thanks to students at the embassy school, since their parents were most often not diplomats, but personnel officers of special services of electronic intelligence and related fields.
Russian President Putin officially closed Lourdes in 2001. At that time, the Cubans were dissatisfied with such a decision and chanted "Traitors!" to the GRU employees who were leaving the island, because their treasury lost $200 million a year.
However, in July 2014, there were reports of new secret agreements between Cuba and Russia: the Lourdes radio-electronic center (REC) in the suburbs of Havana, which is capable of intercepting data from American communication satellites, telephone conversations and messages from the NASA Flight Control Center in Florida. The number of military personnel there once numbered about three thousand people.
In the same 2014, Putin came to Cuba and wrote off 90% of the Cuban debt in the amount of $35 billion. Then Dmitry Medvedev, Sergey Shoigu, Sergey Lavrov, Mykola Patrushev and others visited the island.
Now Cuba is under US sanctions. It lives on supplies of food, oil, equipment and financial infusions from other countries. Because of this, Havana maintains ties with Russia and China. It allows you to build espionage facilities in exchange for multi-billion dollar subsidies and loans.
- The Wall Street Journal recently reported that China and Cuba are negotiating to open a new joint military training center on the island. Washington is concerned that this could lead to the deployment of Chinese troops and, subsequently, intelligence operations a hundred miles off the coast of Florida. However, China denies this.