China will not ignore Latin America and the Caribbean forever and Cuba is a logical place to start.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an ambitious, long-term, global investment and development program. It was launched in 2013 with a focus on infrastructure—roads, railroads, pipelines, undersea cables and ports. Since then China has invested $80 billion and signed 173 BRI agreements with 125 countries and 29 international organizations.

DSR IT infrastructure projects as of 12/2018 (source).

Building a Digital Silk Road (DSR) is a BRI subgoal. The DSR was added in 2015 under the name “Information Silk Road” with the goals of improving international communications connectivity and fostering the internationalization of China’s rapidly growing tech companies. The DSR plan addresses technologies like security, machine learning, 5G wireless, chip design and manufacturing and applications in areas like e-commerce, e-government, and smart cities. It also encompasses infrastructure in space—the BeiDou satellite navigation system, the Hongyun low-earth orbit broadband Internet project and the Digital Belt and Road Earth observation program.

Huawei’s Caribbean cables (source).China Unicom and Camcom installed an undersea cable between Cameroon and Brazil with Huawei doing the engineering and installation. Previously, Huawei had installed the underwater cables shown here, but the DSR project has focused primarily on Eurasia and Africa. However, China will not ignore Latin America and the Caribbean forever and Cuba is a logical place to start.

Cuban delegates attended the thematic-forum on the DSR at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in April and Cuba’s digital ties to China date back many years:

• Huawei contracted to build a fiber optic backbone in 2000 and their office is in the same complex as ETECSA’s.
• Shanghai Bell was a partner in the joint venture that installed Cuba’s undersea cable.
• China may have provided a loan to finance Cuba’s undersea cable.
• Cuba had difficulty paying their Chinese debt and China forgave six billion dollars in 2011.
• China offers Cuba favorable financing on consumer and infrastructure telecommunication equipment.
• China and Cuba recently signed economic cooperation agreements.
• Chinese laptops and tablets are assembled in Cuba.
• Cuban professors receive Chinese laptops.
• ETECSA sells and services Huawei phones.
• Huawei equipment is used in Cuba’s backbone, home DSL and public WiFi networks.

(Breitbart reported that Cuba has agreed to bring the BRI to the west, but I am not sure if that is evidence that they will or they won’t :-)

Cuba’s first connection to the Internet was subsidized by the US National Science Foundation and used Cisco equipment, but it’s been downhill ever since. President Obama made a sustained effort to establish a connection with Cuba, but little has come of that and Trump’s policies on trade, immigration and Cuba have moved us further from many Latin American and Caribbean nations, creating an opening for China and the DSR.