It is the only communist nation in the Americas, it was the first in the Western Hemisphere to recognize the People's Republic of China and it is described by Beijing as a good brother, a good comrade and a good friend.
But despite their shared political heritage and what Washington sees as a history of Chinese espionage activities in Cuba, the island's economic collapse has damaged trade relations with China, just as Beijing's strategic rivalry is escalating with the Caribbean islands' archenemy, the United States.
Chinese trade with Latin America has increased tenfold over the past two decades and continues to grow: China has become the region's second largest trading partner, after the United States. But imports of Chinese goods to Cuba fell from $1.7 billion in 2017 to $1.1 billion in 2022, the latest year for which Cuban data is available.
The two countries do not publish data on Chinese investments in Cuba, but Cuban economist Omar Everleny said they represent a ridiculously small proportion of the roughly $160 billion invested by Beijing in Latin America and the Caribbean between 2005 and 2020.
Chinese companies involved in state-backed deals owed large sums to the Cuban state, people briefed on the debts said. All major state-owned companies like Huawei and Yutong each owe hundreds of millions of dollars, said a foreign businessman who trades with the island.
Raw material shortages and an unproductive economy leave little to export to China, while imports have declined in recent years as tougher U.S. sanctions have severely worsened Havana's chronic late payment problems and dried up credit lines.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, sugar production on the island, once a critical industry, has fallen to its lowest level in more than a century: there is barely enough sugar to cover national needs. This resulted in the abandonment of a long-standing agreement to export 400,000 tonnes of sugar per year to China.
China is not Cuba's sugar daddy, said Fulton Armstrong, former U.S. national intelligence officer for Latin America. Above all, it is a relationship of solidarity. It is not a strategic relationship for either country.
Today, Cuba is not even among China's main allies in Latin America. Beijing has what it calls comprehensive strategic partnerships with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, all major exporters of raw materials, but not with Cuba.
China publicly supports Cuba's right to choose its own path of economic development based on its national conditions, but privately, Chinese officials have long urged Cuban leaders to abandon their vertically planned economy and adopt something closer to Chinese model, according to economists and diplomats briefed on the situation.
Chinese officials are perplexed and frustrated by the reluctance of Cuban leaders to decisively implement a market-oriented reform agenda despite the blatant dysfunction of the status quo, the sources said.
The crumbling of trade ties contrasts sharply with recent decades. After more than a decade of extreme shortages following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the influx of imports in the early 2000s had such an impact that Chinese brands became part of the Cuban vernacular.
Taking the Yutong has become synonymous with taking the bus in Havana, while Cuban gallows humor experts have dubbed the hundreds of thousands of leaky Haier refrigerators imported as part of Fidel Castros' energy revolution to improve the energy efficiency under the name Drippys.
Cuba has been a member of China's Belt and Road global infrastructure development initiative since 2018 and China remains the island's second-largest trading partner after Venezuela, which sends it oil in exchange for Cuban doctors .
Beijing and Havana have an agreement on cybersecurity, and over the past two decades, Chinese groups Huawei, TP-Link and ZTE have installed fiber optic cables, WiFi hotspots and other digital infrastructure throughout the island.
But Chinese imports are down…overall, said a Western businessman based in Havana. Exporters are abandoning Sino-Cuban lines of credit and turning to the private sector.
Cuba continues to export nickel, zinc and luxury cigars to China, hire doctors in exchange for payment in hard currency and cooperate in biotechnology.
Cuban President Miguel Diz-Canel has visited Beijing twice and reported politically useful donations, including medical equipment during the pandemic, a $100 million donation last year and thousands of tons of rice This year. But it has failed to bring about greater economic integration.
The Chinese don't do a lot of charity, said William LeoGrande, a government professor at American University. Cubans currently find themselves in a situation where they need charity and have little to offer in return.
Beijing also maintains a much more discreet security relationship with Havana than Moscow, which openly focuses on Cuba's geopolitical value as a close neighbor of the United States. Russian naval flotillas have docked in Havana twice this year in a show of military force. Russian trade with Cuba has increased in recent years, driven by U.S. sanctions against the two countries and the war in Ukraine.
Some reports suggest that China has renewed its efforts to take advantage of Cuba's strategic location by installing wiretapping stations on the island.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in July that there were growing signs that China's economic and political influence could open doors to its military services and intelligence in Cuba. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last year that Chinese spying operations in Cuba were a serious concern.
But when asked about the CSIS report, a U.S. State Department official said the Biden administration believes its diplomatic efforts have slowed. [Chinas] efforts to project and maintain military power around the world.
LeoGrande said some in Florida and Washington were eager to create a Chinese scarecrow in Cuba. This serves the interests of conservative Cuban Americans, who are always looking for reasons not to improve U.S.-Cuban relations, and, in the broader political community, it serves the interests of those who believe China poses a global threat .
