The State Department’s “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” report and the independent assessment by resilience and resistance interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Robert Burrell both address important but differing views. The State Department examines how Havana converted limited conventional power into a durable system of espionage, ideological influence, proxy relationships, and political subversion. Burrell examines why the Cuban regime continues to survive economic decline, sanctions, demographic pressure, and public unrest. One follows the outward projection of power, the other measures the internal foundations of authoritarian durability. Together, they offer a useful composite picture. Yet both stop short of the assessing what is most necessary, whether Cuba has contemporary value as a strategic access platform for Russia, China, and Iran. 

First is that Cuba has transitioned from a revolutionary exporter to an enabling platform. Cuba no longer needs to export revolution on the scale of the 1960s to remain strategically consequential. Instead, it can leverage geography, diplomatic cover, intelligence tradecraft, Spanish-language credibility, telecommunications access, port facilities, and a tightly controlled operating environment ninety miles from Florida. These activities connect to the modern cognitive warfare apparatus. NATO defines cognitive warfare as synchronized activity intended to influence, protect, or disrupt cognition to affect attitudes and behavior. Through that lens, Cuba is more than a messenger. It can serve as an intermediary that helps foreign narratives acquire regional identity, historical legitimacy, and attributional distance. 

Russia’s Cuban provision is one of proximity, access, and narrative localization. Russian information operations in Latin America benefit when themes originating in Moscow are restated through Cuban institutions, sympathetic regional outlets, diplomatic networks, or established anti-imperialist frames. These themes can appear less like foreign intervention and more like an indigenous critique of U.S. power. The 2025 U.S. Southern Command statement described Russian, Chinese, and Iranian cyber espionage and information operations across the region and discussed the 2024 Russian naval visit to Havana. That activity did not establish an imminent attack, but demonstrated how access, intelligence collection, and messaging can be leveraged. 

China’s Cuban provision is more infrastructural, known as cognitive infrastructure: the telecommunications, data, sensing, media, and analytical systems through which perceptions can be studied and influence delivered. CSIS satellite-imagery assessments have identified Cuban facilities containing equipment potentially capable of signals-intelligence collection while appropriately treating Chinese involvement as a possibility requiring continued evaluation rather than a conclusively established fact. 

At first glance, many access points Cuba provides to China may appear innocuous. They are simply telecommunications upgrades, academic exchanges, commercial partnerships, port visits, research cooperations, media engagements, or technical assistance. Individually, these activities can be explained as routine state-to-state transactional relations. Their strategic significance emerges through accumulation. Each interaction creates another opportunity to observe institutional routines, social networks, political reactions, military patterns, and regional audience vulnerabilities. Over time, persistent collection can transform ordinary access into a developing exploitation infrastructure. 

Cuba’s value in this process is not limited to geography. Its controlled political environment, security institutions, regional relationships, and proximity to the U.S. can provide China with a discreet platform from which engagements may gradually support intelligence partnerships, narrative targeting, and future cognitive influence. 

Iran’s Cuban provision is wholly different. It is built around sanctions solidarity, diplomatic reach, technical cooperation, and hemispheric access. Evidence does not indicate a substantial Iranian combat presence in Cuba.  

Iranian Spanish-language messaging, resistance narratives, and anti-sanction’s themes can reinforce Cuban and Russian accounts without requiring a single integrated command structure. The three states can repeat complementary claims portraying the U.S. as coercive, destabilizing, culturally hostile, or economically predatory. Repetition across separate national and media sources can produce narrative convergence, giving audiences the impression that multiple independent observers have reached the same conclusion. 

Second is the separation of Cuban regime resilience from external influence capacity. Intelligence services, security institutions, elite cohesion, and foreign assistance do not merely explain Cuban survival. They also make Cuba useful to foreign actors by protecting personnel, concealing sensitive agreements, disciplining state media, and preserving long-duration access. Economic weakness may therefore increase Havana’s willingness to exchange infrastructure access, intelligence cooperation, political support, or technological privileges for energy, credit, and regime security. 

Third is the absence of a Cuban campaign continuum. Cuba-enabled competition could progress from commercial investment, diplomatic exchanges, media partnerships, and technical assistance into secure facilities, persistent foreign personnel, expanded data access, port familiarity, intelligence sharing, cyber staging, and coordinated crisis narratives. Visible military deployment might appear only at the far end. By then, much of the cognitive preparation could already be complete. U.S. audiences may become divided over attribution. Regional governments may become reluctant to cooperate. And policymakers will become uncertain whether responding to a limited provocation would produce escalation. 

Fourth is the institutional perception risk inside the U.S. Cuba’s intelligence success has never depended solely on stealing secrets. Long-duration penetration can also shape what institutions believe is important, which warning indicators they discount, and how threats are categorized. The conviction of former U.S. ambassador and National Security Council official Victor Manuel Rocha for secretly acting for Cuba over decades demonstrates the patience and access Cuban intelligence can achieve. The cognitive effect of penetration is therefore larger than the information removed. 

CONCLUSION 

The State Department report and the Cuban independent assessment are useful, but each risks treating Cuba as an isolated problem rather than as a strategic access point for larger adversarial powers. Cuba is better understood as a strategic doorway, an authoritarian platform whose value increases when connected to the resources of larger powers. Russia can use it to localize narratives and signal proximity. China can use it to gain access to data, sensing, and infrastructure. Iran can use it to extend diplomatic and informational reach into the hemisphere. 

The missed threat is therefore not a Cuban conventional assault. It is the gradual construction of an ecosystem in which foreign collection, political access, information laundering, cyber opportunity, and cognitive pressure converge near the American homeland. Cuba’s economy may be failing; its strategic utility is not. 

Greg Sharpe is a Fellow and the director of Communications and Marketing for the National Institute for Deterrence Studies and the Managing Design Editor for the Global Security Review. He has 25+ years in marketing and communications with a focus on digital communications, organizational and institutional change, and analysis. The views of the author are his own. 

Cognitive Warfare at America’s Edge was originally published on Global Security Review.

One example is instructive. The rate at which aircraft locations are electronically manipulated, “spoofed,” increased 500 percent in the first three quarters of 2024. An average of 1,500 flights a day were impacted by the beginning of September. In a recent survey of almost 2,000 flight crew members, 70 percent described their concerns about the impact on aviation safety as either “very high” or “extreme.”

The world depends upon signals from GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) to underpin virtually every technology. Yet the essential positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) service they provide is incredibly vulnerable.

Weak and Vulnerable Signals

These signals from space are, of necessity, very weak. The sun shining produces stronger radio signals than a GPS satellite. Yet, through a miracle of technology, receivers on earth can find coded signals in the radio noise floor, decipher them, and tell Americans where they are and the exact time.

Exceptionally weak signals mean that almost any interference on the right frequency can prevent them from getting through. For less than ten dollars, delivery drivers looking to electronically hide from their employers, people worried about being tracked by their spouse or the government, and bad actors wanting to disable receivers can buy a GPS “jammer” from any number of internet vendors. Such sales are illegal in most countries, as is the use of such devices. However, enforcement is almost always lax or nonexistent.

Keep in mind, signal specifications were made public as part of GPS becoming America’s “gift to the world,” with the US government encouraging GPS’s broad use. Other GNSS operators did the same.

While incredibly successful in promoting the wide adoption of signals, it has also facilitated spoofing. Compounding the problem, advances in digital technology brought inexpensive software-defined transmitters into the world. Now, for a few hundred dollars, a reasonably sophisticated hobbyist can easily imitate GPS and other satellite navigation signals.

The necessity of PNT services for everyday life and over-reliance on GPS/GNSS for PNT makes the vulnerability of signals to denial and imitation a primary weapon in conflicts around the globe.

This impacts millions of those not involved in these conflicts because any receiver within line-of-sight of the interfering transmitter can be affected. Thus, cell phone systems in Finland are degraded by drone defenses in St. Petersburg. First responders across the Middle East must use paper maps because of ongoing conflicts. Ships and aircraft, hundreds of miles from military actions, lose their navigation and collision avoidance systems. Given the number of conflicts around the planet, many regions of the world are adversely affected.

To date, appeals by international maritime and aviation professional organizations have failed to make an impact on the problem. The same is true for resolutions by the United Nation’s International Maritime Organization and International Civil Aviation Organization. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which seems to have the principal jurisdiction for this, is proving similarly ineffective.

At its World Radio Conference in December 2023, ITU delegates approved what, at first glance, appears to be a strong resolution enjoining member states to refrain from interfering with GNSS signals. The only way the resolution could pass was with an exception allowing interference “for security or defense purposes.” It is hard to imagine any other reason for which a state would disrupt signals.

Despite the failures of international diplomacy to mitigate this growing problem, there is likely a path for it to be much more successful. Attacks on GPS and other GNSS signals are useful only because most nations and systems over-depend on them with few alternatives.

Fortunately, many countries are actively considering establishing robust and resilient terrestrial PNT systems to complement signals from space. These can provide GPS-like information, but do not have common vulnerabilities and failure modes with GNSS.

The US Department of Transportation, the lead in America for civil PNT issues, said that intelligently using a combination of independent signals from space, terrestrial broadcast, and fiber cable can be the foundation of a resilient national PNT architecture.

Establishing such a system of systems will not make the services invulnerable. However, it will make them hard enough to disrupt so that antagonists will look elsewhere for opportunities to create mischief. Some nations are already taking significant steps toward achieving such resilience.

South Korea and Saudi Arabia field high-power terrestrial systems that provide PNT. The United Kingdom fields a partial system and seems poised to expand it, as well as a deployable capability. Much of Russia is also served by such a system.

China has the world’s most complete and advanced resilient PNT architecture. It includes three constellations of satellites in different orbital planes, an extensive terrestrial broadcast system, and a 20,000-kilometer fiber timing network with 295 “timing stations.”

Yet much of the world remains vulnerable to disruption. Those who interfere are therefore incentivized.

International diplomacy, in the form of the United Nations, can help improve the inevitable transition to resilient PNT by encouraging states to implement sovereign terrestrial systems. These systems will complement and cooperate with GNSS, while also operating independently.

As part of this effort, international standards can be developed to ensure aircraft, ships, and vehicles are able to seamlessly transit between nations. Technical assistance can be provided to nations with little local expertise in the field.

These efforts will greatly reduce the incentive to interfere with GNSS, thereby making it safer and more reliable. It will also reinforce the sovereignty and security of every involved nation.

The alternative is to continue down the path of increasing interference and increasing risk to life and property. Safety margins are already impacted. Ships are already colliding, and passenger aircraft are nearly straying, unannounced, into hostile airspace, all because of spoofing. It is only a matter of time before the world witnesses an avoidable tragedy.

The international community, perhaps in the form of a United Nations task force, must intervene to protect these fragile signals from space and disincentivize future disruptions.

Safer and more reliable signals from space and resilient sovereign terrestrial PNT are in the long-term interest of every nation. Diplomatic efforts must illuminate that shared interest bring parties together and nurture progress for everyone’s benefit.

Dana A. Goward is President of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, www.RNTFnd.org, an educational and scientific charity. He is a member of the president’s National Space-based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board and formerly served as the maritime navigation authority for the United States. Views expressed in this article are the author’s own. 

How Diplomacy Can Save GPS was originally published on Global Security Review.