Sources: during the Trump administration, the US tracked Huawei and ZTE workers in Cuba, suspecting the companies were helping China expand its spying abilities
Intelligence bolstered suspicions telecom giants might be playing role in expansion of China's capabilities on island
Context & Ripple Effects
This report extends a decade-long arc of US counterintelligence scrutiny of Huawei that began with Reuters' 2012 reporting and included years of airport screenings of Huawei executives. The CIA had already told allies Huawei received funding from Chinese security agencies and the People's Liberation Army (that 2019 intelligence sharing), and by 2022 the concern had moved to cell-tower gear near US missile silos and military bases.
Cuba is a new theater in the same investigation: rather than auditing equipment, US intelligence tracked Huawei and ZTE personnel on the island itself, suspecting the vendors were helping China expand its spying capabilities there. It echoes the earlier finding that Huawei technicians personally helped African governments surveil political opponents — the pattern being vendor staff as an intelligence asset, not just vendor hardware.
First-order effects
- Huawei and ZTE workers in Cuba were under US surveillance during the Trump administration, meaning their movements and activities became intelligence targets in their own right.
- The finding gives Washington a concrete, source-backed basis for treating the two vendors' Caribbean presence as an extension of Chinese intelligence activity rather than commercial telecom work.
Second-order effects
- Governments weighing Huawei and ZTE network buildouts — particularly in Latin America — face added pressure as US scrutiny shifts from equipment audits to on-the-ground personnel, tightening the vendors' room to operate near US interests.
- The Cuba findings reinforce the enforcement posture behind the Trump-era export ban that US chipmakers like Intel and Micron worked around, giving regulators more justification to close those resale channels.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Chinese telecom vendors' overseas staff deployments become a standing counterintelligence concern, pushing countries to choose between vendors on geopolitical alignment rather than price and coverage.
- The tracking of workers — not just gear — signals that telecom infrastructure competition is now treated as an espionage surface, a frame likely to shape future US restrictions on Chinese vendors well beyond the original equipment bans.
The trend: US intelligence is widening its scrutiny of Huawei and ZTE from equipment and funding to the vendors' personnel abroad, treating their overseas telecom deployments as a direct extension of Chinese spying capability.