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You'd be surprised at the benefits of something as mundane as proximity in espionage. Especially for a country like China or Russia which is very far away from mainland USA. Tracking troop movements at lower latency, tracking comms on unsecured networks, monitoring satellite launches happening from Florida, etc.

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What espionage equipment could China put in Cuba that they could not put inside the US?

For starters, actual spy stations away from the US, inside the borders of a friendly country? Mar-a-Lago is just next door to Cuba.

Setting up reliable and fully controlled spy networks within the borders of a hostile country is hard. Like casting Idris Elba as James Bond (to borrow Trevor Noah's quote).

With a few in Cuba, they've got proximity to develop HUMINT, gather OSINT and SIGINT, with potential tracking of US military movements in the Caribbean and Atlantic at super-low latency.

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