Black Berets Coming: Communist China Now Training Cuban Special Forces

“The Chinese Communist Party is sending paramilitary trainers to Cuba. ADN Cuba, a Spanish-language media platform focusing on Cuba, obtained exclusive photos showing a Chinese military officer training Cuba’s black beret unit,” NTD News’ David Zhang reports.

“The Chinese military is working with the Cuban regime, training them in a special unit … called the black berets [that] seems to have been deployed against the protestors in Cuba recently. Upon close examination, [the beret’s] tactics and deployment styles are very similar to what the Chinese secret police used during the 2019 Hong Kong protests … deploy[ing] various riot tools against the protestors. [This] includes officers from China’s top internal security forces … the People’s Armed Police (PAP),” Zhang said.

During his interview with Gelet Martinez Fragela, the director of ADN Cuba, and Orlando Gutierrez Boronat, an exiled Cuban author, Zhang obtained vital information exposing the repression of Cuban protestors at the hands of the black beret unit, formally called the National Special Brigade.

Fragela collaborated with two other Cuban journalists to expose the black berets. Photos of the organization began circulating in February 2021, she said, adding, “[This] is exactly around the same time that the Cuban State Press published a story about how the Chinese military was modernizing and it was going to become … a real military force and they praised the Chinese military.”

Although Fragela and her team don’t know the exact date the photos were taken, it appears the Cuban regime and authorities have been preparing for a long time, she said. She thinks China’s PAP has been training special forces in Cuba on “how to repress and how to respond to the uprisings … The Cuban regime itself was telling the Cuban people that they were expecting an uprising …”

Fragela also said, “[A] technique of disguising and mixing with the crowd to create chaos and then blame it on the peaceful protestors has been a recurring practice in the past by many repressive regimes.

“I think these [communist] regimes share a common operational protocol for dealing with popular uprisings … [Like the PAP], the black berets, at first, were not used during the day, they were used at night,” Boronat said. “They didn’t confront the massive demonstration, they identified protestors and they did house by house searches and raids to pull them from their homes and arrest them. [W]here they’re taking [arrested] protestors has not been publicly revealed.”

Boronat said the relationship between Cuba and China “has been long and rocky.” Only in recent years have the regimes grown closer in alliance. He thinks the Chinese Communist Party is the Cuban regime’s main supporter, paying up to six billion dollars to absolve the regime’s debts. “[The CCP] consistently expresses political support for the [Cuban] regime … [using] Cuba as a base to extend Chinese influence … to the rest of Latin America.”

Very few reports on Cuba’s special forces have surfaced in the United States as mainstream media remains silent on this issue.{eoa}

For more than a decade, Tiffany Benson‘s passion for writing has exceeded most of her other interests. When she’s not catching up on politics or watching documentaries, she enjoys journaling, fiction and contributing to her blog bigviewsmallwindow.com. Find her on Facebook as well.

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