CUBA: Intense Preparations for Military Parade

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Dec 1 2006 (IPS) - Part of the military arsenal that Cuba was forced to reconvert in order to adapt to new circumstances after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the island nation’s main supplier, will be exhibited on Revolutionary Armed Forces Day Saturday, in Havana.

The military parade will include amphibious vehicles, motorised infantry brigades, artillery, and even helicopters and planes, along with special troops, army and coast guard personnel, and “milicianos” (kind of a combination national guard and reserve army), to judge by the preparations that have been going on for the past few weeks.

Defence Minister “Raúl (Castro) is detail-oriented, he likes everything to be perfect,” an older man dressed as a miliciano told IPS. He was watching the dress rehearsal for the military parade last Monday in the Plaza de la Revolución, the site of regular mass demonstrations in support of Cuba’s socialist government.

Local residents along the Paseo avenue, which runs into the Plaza, said the only time in the last ten years that they remembered such intense activity here was when Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in January 1998.

The pontiff, who died last year, celebrated mass in front of an enormous crowd headed by President Fidel Castro, which filled the Plaza.

It is not yet known whether Castro, still recovering from emergency intestinal surgery four months ago, will appear at the military parade, the first held in over a decade. After his operation in July, the president temporarily ceded power to his brother Raúl.

Castro put off his Aug. 13 birthday celebrations to Dec. 2. But the events marking his 80th birthday began on Nov. 29 with an international colloquium on Castro’s legacy, which he was unable to attend, on doctor’s orders.

According to official reports, 300,000 Havana residents will also take part in the giant parade Saturday, as an expression of “the unity between the Communist Party of Cuba, the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the people.”

Cuba’s defence strategy is based on the concept of the “people’s war”, with land troops as the decisive force, and using experience from both guerrilla and conventional warfare in Cuba and other countries.

This doctrine puts special importance on the civilian population’s participation in resisting a potential foreign attack. An estimated one million men and women in this country of 11.2 million are “milicianos” and receive periodic military training.

Some three and a half million workers are also organised in “production and defence brigades”, to defend specific small areas, produce food and guarantee services in case of war.

“The people’s war is far from being simply a theoretical conception. It is a reality present at a daily level in every task aimed at strengthening the defence of the country,” Raúl Castro said last June.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces were the continuation of the rebel army that Castro led in the Sierra Maestra mountains against dictator Fulgencio Batista after landing on Cuban shores on Dec. 2, 1956 in the ship Granma.

Defeated by the revolutionary forces, Batista fled the country on Jan. 1, 1959.

Added to the experience of guerrilla warfare was the experience gained in wars abroad, mainly in Africa. More than 300,000 Cubans participated in Angola’s independence struggle and the subsequent civil war, for example, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cubans received military aid from Moscow, including donations of weapons and purchases of trucks, helicopters, transport planes and spare parts at convenient prices.

According to official estimates, the Soviet military equipment received by Cuba over the space of three decades of military cooperation was worth some 10 billion dollars at prices of the time.

The rules of the game changed under the impact of the economic crisis that hit Cuba after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist bloc. Havana no longer received weapons donations and purchases were at market price.

In one of the few public mentions of the issue, Raúl Castro admitted in 1993 that during that period, available resources had to be used in a rational manner, and military personnel had to be creative to “produce parts and preserve techniques.”

The president’s younger brother also acknowledged this year, in an interview with the Mexican newspaper El Sol, that the Revolutionary Armed Forces were overly large and costly during that period.

“The ABC’s of any military doctrine or military science is that this potential depends on the country’s level of economic development,” a principle that was “altered” in three decades of Soviet military aid, said Raúl Castro.

An agreement on technical-military cooperation signed last September, during Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov’s visit to Havana appears to be aimed at reviving relations between the two countries in that sphere, although no details were made public.

Cuba currently produces the Mambi heavy rifle used against helicopters and the Alejandro sniper’s rifle designed for infantry combat, which can penetrate bullet-proof vests. (Alejandro was Fidel Castro’s nom de guerre). It also manufactures the highly maneuverable Fiero combat vehicle, used by the Revolutionary Armed Forces special troops, and the Flecha coast guard vessel.

A report by the Cuban parliament states that in the 2006 budget, the military received “the necessary resources for maintaining and developing the combat capacity and the material reserves to guarantee the requirements for the country’s defence and the preservation of domestic order.”

The December 2005 report did not indicate the portion of gross domestic product (GDP) earmarked this year for military spending, but justified the expenditure by the “worsening of the U.S. government’s policy of aggression and threats.”