End of the Empire is a twice-monthly feature on all news relating to the transition from the unipolar world of the US Empire to a multipolar world.

A report from the Wall Street Journal featured an unnamed US official claiming that Cuba and China are in the advanced stages of an agreement to place a joint military training facility on the island, seeing it as parity with the US’ belligerence in arming and stationing troops in Taiwan.

As well as being anonymous, the source’s claims were not verified by the Journal, which they described as “convincing but fragmentary”. Nevertheless, it’s a delicious reminder of the extent to which American world dominance has fallen.

Of the litany of American strategic doctrines, the Monroe Doctrine is among the oldest. It states that no competing power can be tolerated to have a military presence in the whole Western Hemisphere. As the US entered the 20th century, this expanded to forbid overly-close economic ties as well, and nearly every Latin American nation was ravaged by US-organized coup d’etats and civil wars that followed them.

Indeed, up until the Trump Administration and Biden right after him, the US has viewed Latin America as her backyard, freely abusing and favoring whomever she wished, epitomized by the former’s attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela, and the latter’s embarrassment at the Summit of the Americas after denying invitations to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

The United States government has maintained a punishing sanctions campaign on Cuba for more than half a century following the last time that island used its geographical location to aid its comrades in Eurasia, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

China has opted for a gentler method. Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean, wrote Walter Russel Mead “rocketed from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion 20 years later and is projected to reach $700 billion by 2035”.

However, the Chinese Communist Party have denied allegations—going all the way back to 2019—that they were establishing a spy base on Cuba. What the unnamed US official in the Journal’s report stated is that “Beijing sees its actions in Cuba as a geographical response to the US relationship with Taiwan: The US invests heavily in arming and training the self-governing island that sits off mainland China and that Beijing sees as its own”.

Opponents of the fanatics in Congress trying to “arm Taiwan to the teeth” often use the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of how we would feel and respond if a hostile foreign superpower began to arm a neighboring country to the teeth. Well now these opponents no longer need point to hypotheticals, they need only point out what will follow from this leak.

White House officials are allegedly trying to pressure Cuba to stop the agreement. It’s a good move for Cuba, if the report is correct—they have been pressured without reason for 60 years; what can the US do now to scare them out of signing such an agreement, sanction them harder?