An Iranian-made Shahed drone strike on theBritish Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri, Cyprus, is among thefirst signs that the U.S.-Iran conflict may no longer be contained to the Middle East. This development brings us to a note wepublishedone month ago on Cuba.
On Feb. 3, we cited a report from the Russian military-focused Telegram channel Rybar that offered a very scary reality for the US southern front facing the Gulf of America and Caribbean that "Russia may deploy Geranium strike drones in Cuba, a move that could reshape deterrence and force Trump to reconsider his options."
Rybar posted the combat radius of Russian Gernaium drones on U.S. high-value assets, from oil and gas infrastructure to military installations to data centers, airbases, and other critical infrastructure. To note, there are no indications that these drones have been deployed in Cuba or anywhere else in the Caribbean.
Russian-made Geranium drones are a family of long-range loitering munitions, most commonly referring to the Geran-2, which is a version of Iran's Shahed-136. We have detailed how Russia has established domestic manufacturing plants to ramp up production, as well as the next iteration of these drones (read here).
The Geran-2 has a range of roughly 940 to 1,250 miles, carries up to 110 pound high-explosive warhead, and is cheaper to produce than cruise missiles. One distinctive signature that Ukrainians have learned to recognize is its sound: the drones sound like lawn mowers in the sky.
There is good news because the U.S. military had spent many months securing the Western Hemisphere well before Operation Epic Fury even began: first by staging warships and troops in the Caribbean region, then toppling the Maduro regime and pressuring Cuba into paralysis. One week before strikes began in Tehran, Mexican special forces, aided by the U.S. intelligence community, launched a successful decapitation strike against the top Mexican drug cartel.
X user Ian Ellis posted the latest available snapshot, as of March 1, of the U.S. Navy's global fleet distribution, showing notable U.S. warship activity in the Gulf of America, Caribbean, and U.S. East Coast.
It is increasingly evident, particularly after the Iranian drone strike on Cyprus and attacks on other Gulf states, that the conflict is at risk of broadening and raises the likelihood of flare-ups well beyond the Middle East.
Hezbollah opened a new front in the broadening U.S.-Israeli war with Iran overnight, launching a barrage of missiles and kamikaze drone swarms at an Israeli military base in northern Israel.
Footage of one of those missile launches posted on X by the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) shows what appears to be some of those Hezbollah missiles prematurely exploding moments after launch.
IPBC explained that the apparent misfires were due to the "Interception of the Rocket from Lebanon Carried Out Using the "Iron Beam" Laser System."
We reported last fall that Israel Defense Forces rolled out its new high-powered laser defense system, known as the "Iron Beam."
The laser-based air defense system was developed by Rafael and built to complement the Iron Dome missile defense shield. Instead of launching expensive interceptor missiles, it uses a high-energy laser to destroy short-range threats such as rockets, mortar rounds, and drones.
The footage likely shows the 100 kW-class Iron Beam in action, able to neutralize incoming projectiles for only a few dollars per shot, versus roughly $100,000 for a traditional interceptor rocket.
One of the major problems for U.S. and Israeli forces is that the cost per counter-missile and drone is extraordinarily expensive and uneconomical if the war dragged on for a prolonged period of time.
But there is a big caveat, per the Times of Israel: "The main downside of a laser system is that it does not function well in low visibility, including heavy cloud cover or other inclement weather."
The ouster of Peru’s president began with a secret late-night dinner. A series of clandestine encounters followed—dark glasses at one meeting, a hood over his face at another.
Then videos leaked. Amid a nationwide uproar, three-quarters of Peru’s lawmakers voted to censure the initially popular José Jerí, just four months into his presidency. He was the country’s seventh leader in 10 years.
“We ask to end this agony so we can truly create the transition citizens are hoping for,” said Ruth Luque, one of 75 lawmakers who voted to oust Jerí. “Not a transition with hidden interests, influence-peddling, secret meetings, and hooded figures. We don’t want that sort of transition.”
The man meeting with Jerí was Chinese restaurant and wholesale store owner Yang Zhihua, who is behind several major Chinese infrastructure deals in the country.
Dubbed “Chifagate,” a nod to fusion Peruvian-Chinese cuisine, the scandal has thrown another wrinkle into an already strained relationship between the two countries.
Currently, Lima is fighting to regain oversight over a major China-controlled port at Chancay, which has become a symbol of China’s footprint in Latin America.
Across the region, a deeply entrenched web of Chinese influence is enabling the communist regime to redefine dynamics in America’s backyard.
Starting with near-negligible investment levels in 2000, China has become a dominant force in Latin America and the Caribbean, with trade exceeding $500 billion in 2024. For many individual nations, such as Brazil and Peru, China has overtaken the United States as a key trading partner.
Along the way, Beijing has built enormous leverage, said Ding Hung-bin, associate dean at Loyola University Maryland’s Sellinger School of Business and Management.
“The Chinese Communist Party is playing the long game in Latin America,” he told The Epoch Times.
With the money pouring in, Ding said, Beijing reaps political influence, biding its time to challenge the U.S.-led world order. After two decades, he said, “the fire has reached the U.S. doorstep.”
Washington is now making clear that this can’t continue. In its national security strategy released in November, the Trump administration made the region its top priority, describing a “great American strategic mistake of recent decades” in allowing “non-Hemispheric competitors” to take hold in the Western Hemisphere.
The past inaction, the document reads, has cost the United States both “economically in the present” and “strategically in the future.”
Within weeks of the strategy being released, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and brought that country’s courtship with China to a halt.
Just hours before his capture, Maduro hosted a Chinese envoy at the presidential palace. He accepted a porcelain vase and posed for photos with the Chinese delegates, then proclaimed on social media that the meeting reaffirmed the two countries’ “strong bonds of brotherhood” through “thick and thin.”
In September, Maduro proudly showed off a foldable red-colored Huawei phone that he used daily—a gift from Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Maduro hailed it as the “best phone in the world.”
“Americans can’t hack it,” he told reporters.
To China, it was a validating moment in the regime’s battle for technological supremacy, with Huawei leading the way.
Blacklisted in the United States, the Chinese telecom provider has been deepening its foothold in other parts of the Americas. It spearheads the Digital Silk Road, a core element of Beijing’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative aimed at stretching the regime’s power and influence around the globe.
Huawei’s data storage platform now covers every Latin American country, boasting the fastest business growth among telecoms. The significance of that sank in when Brazil sought to block Huawei from its 5G networks on national security grounds in 2020. Huawei’s technology was already embedded in the country’s telecom architecture; replacing it would have cost billions of dollars.
In 2022, Huawei signed a deal to turn Curitiba in southern Brazil into a 5G-powered smart city, integrating artificial intelligence and big data into urban life, from medical surgeries to public security. Its website now features an interview with the city’s mayor, who touted Curitiba as a “smart city that works for its citizens.”
And Huawei isn’t the only Chinese entity expanding in the region. Market research data from Canalys show that Chinese phone brands now command more than 60 percent of the Latin American market.
In Ecuador, the China-made ECU911 system powers up surveillance cameras nationwide that feed real-time footage to a thousands-strong police unit, which deals with everything from traffic to national security. Touting its scale of impact, Xi once called it a “calling card for China–Latin America’s high tech collaboration.”
By law, Chinese companies have no choice but to hand over whatever they have if the Chinese Communist Party asks. And that makes their ubiquitousness problematic, said Evan Ellis, Latin American studies research professor at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.
With all the data coming out of corporate boardrooms, factory floors, and people’s homes, the key question is where they get offloaded, he told The Epoch Times. Chinese technologies’ presence in federal agencies across the region, he said, “opens up government officials to blackmail.”
‘Predatory’ Investments
Beijing has a phrase for its vision: the “China–Latin America community with a shared future.”
Xi was the first to evoke the term. Addressing Brazil’s National Congress in 2014, he compared the China–Latin America relationship with wine—something that “grows better as it ages.”
The idea here is to “rebuild from the roots, pulling the 33 Latin America and Caribbean nations together with China while keeping America out,” Florencia Huang, a professor specializing in Latin American studies at Taiwan’s Tamkang University, told The Epoch Times.
Under that banner, China attracted more than 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries to join the Belt and Road partnerships. Hundreds of infrastructure projects followed.
Chancay Port, a $1.3 billion project nearly 50 miles from Lima, is at the top of that list. The deepwater port, covering about 445 acres of Peruvian territory, is the primary Chinese logistics hub on the Pacific side of Latin America. Its strategic positioning directly links South America to China, cutting shipping time by nearly half while facilitating Beijing’s access to minerals critical to its industrial demand.
Chinese shipping giant COSCO has 30 years of exclusive operating rights to the port. The Peruvian port authority blamed this on an “administrative error” in 2024. But its bid to void the terms quickly fizzled out; the country’s congress approved changes that legalized the COSCO deal.
In a further win for COSCO, a Peruvian court on Jan. 29 restricted state oversight of the terminal’s operations. The United States warned that Peru could lose sovereignty of “critical infrastructure in its own territory” to “predatory Chinese owners.”
“Let this be a cautionary tale for the region and the world: cheap Chinese money costs sovereignty,” the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs wrote in a February statement.
“Predatory” is also what Ellis calls development projects such as Chancay, one of around 40 ports with Chinese investment in Latin America. Similar Chinese dominance repeats in sectors such as critical mineral extraction, logistics, and renewable energy.
A common pattern here, according to Ellis, is to first secure market access in strategic sectors, then control the supply chain.
“If you want access to the cheapest, fastest route, you need to cooperate with the Chinese,” Ellis said. “It gives them leverage.”
Then little by little, he said, they can push other shipping alliances out of business and capture the most important trans-Pacific routes for themselves.
As a state-owned enterprise, COSCO has worked closely with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), providing logistical support in both Lebanon and Yemen in the 2010s.
In the event of a military crisis—say a conflict with the United States in the Indo-Pacific—COSCO’s officials would “use their exclusive control over that port in any way they could to resupply PLA warships,” said Ellis.
In the heart of Argentina’s Patagonian desert, behind an eight-foot barbed-wire fence, a Chinese entity subordinate to the PLA’s strategic support force runs a seclusive space station. Access to outsiders is by appointment only.
Within roughly 100 miles south of the Florida shore, four strategically located Cuban sites alleged to have ties with China hold antennas and other gear that can collect intelligence on the United States, according to satellite imagery analysis. Of them, at least one underwent new upgrades in 2025 that could significantly enhance its surveillance capabilities, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said.
Covert intelligence gathering and dual-use facilities are far from the sole avenues for China in building an edge. More prominent—and apparently successful—are the regime’s broad overtures to foster ties on a personal level.
China’s senior military leaders have visited the region hundreds of times in the past two decades, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Concurrent with these activities were a stream of military exchanges, joint drills, and arms sales.
Beijing also heaped on incentives, offering Latin American military officers free training, business-class travel, and five-star hotel stays in China, the RAND think tank wrote in a 2022 Pentagon-sponsored research.
Through a state-directed program called “Bridge of the Future,” Beijing brought more than 1,000 Latin political dignitaries and “young leaders” on China trips, Chinese government records show.
Wang Yi, Chinese foreign minister, said in May 2025 that Beijing intended to invite 300 Latin American delegates in each of the following three years.
And such efforts have paid off.
A Honduran congressional staffer, during a 2023 trip to a Party “red tourism” village, gushed to Chinese state media about China’s poverty alleviation campaign, saying the regime had created a “miracle in human history.”
Other testimonials from Latin American officials abound, with an Argentinian colonel praising the Belt and Road Initiative and a major general crediting the regime’s COVID-19 control measures with “buying the West time.”
For a clue as to how much the regime values these programs, look no further than the Chinese white paper that dovetailed the U.S. National Security Strategy. Reading the document, Ellis said it amazed him “how many different programs there are for people at all levels.”
“The Chinese cast their fishing nets very broadly,” he said.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it killed Adham Adnan al-Othman, nicknamed Abu Hamza, commander for the Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), in a strike in Beirut.
In a statement, the army said he had led the group’s operations in the Lebanon sector for years and oversaw attacks against Israeli forces and civilians.
The Quds Brigades earlier said al-Othman died the previous night.
The United Arab Emirates' Ministry of Defence said the nation's air defences are engaging a fresh batch of ballistic missiles launched from Iran, with forces fully prepared "to safeguard the country’s territory and ensure the safety of citizens and residents," according to a ministry statement.
The renewed barrage comes after Iran fired hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at Dubai and Abu Dhabi over the weekend, striking airports and other civilian sites and killing at least three people.
The United States Embassy in Riyadh was targeted by two drones, causing a small fire and minor damage to the building, according to a statement by the Saudi Defense Ministry spokesman.
The embassy was empty at the time of the strike, Fox News reported, citing officials.
The attack came after the US issued a shelter‑in‑place order after explosions were reported in the diplomatic quarter of Riyadh.
