Cuban army called key in any post-Castro scenario http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-08-15T214806Z_01_N15383489_RTRUKOC_0_US-CUBA-ARMY.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsHome-C1-topNews-11
Tue Aug 15, 2006
By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba's armed forces, a one-time guerrilla outfit that became the communist country's most efficient and business-savvy institution, will play a crucial role whatever happens after Fidel Castro, experts on Cuba say.
With their commander, Defense Minister Raul Castro, now taking over at least temporarily from his brother Fidel Castro as president, the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) are virtually running the country, they said. "We have the head of the armed forces as the head of state," said Hal Klepak, a professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada and author of a book on the FAR.
"The message is very clear -- there will not be disorder because it won't be permitted."
Fidel Castro on Sunday spent his 80th birthday in a hospital bed after surgery to stop intestinal bleeding around two weeks earlier. Cuba on Monday evening issued video footage of him being visited by his main leftist ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, putting paid to speculation that he might in fact have died. But Castro looked frail.
Klepak said it was the armed forces and not the Communist Party that wielded real power in Cuba today, especially with Castro momentarily sidelined. Born of the rag-tag force that the Castro brothers assembled in the Sierra Maestra mountains to oust dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1959 revolution, the FAR is seen as one of the best-trained armies in Latin America. Its ranks have shrunk to 60,000 regular troops, one fifth of the force that existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged Cuba into dire straits in 1991, Klepak said.
But it has reserves of 30,000 soldiers, a disciplined force of 70,000 young Cuban recruits who work on its farms and a territorial militia of some 700,000 people capable of firing AK-47 semi-automatic rifles. Bloodied and hardened by wars fought in Africa, the FAR has been trained primarily to resist a U.S. invasion.
Its most critical role, however, in a Cuba without Fidel Castro will not be to resist attack or enforce internal order, but to manage the state, Cuba experts say.
"Without doubt, the FAR is the most efficient, best-trained and most cohesive institution in Cuba," a European diplomat said. "Take MINFAR (Armed Forces Ministry) out of the equation and you don't have a state."
ARMY AS ENTREPRENEUR
The armed forces were the first institution to introduce capitalist business practices in Cuba when fuel was so scarce in the 1990s that MiG fighters had to be hauled into parking slots by horses. Now MINFAR's business operations generate billions of dollars in annual revenues.
The FAR controls industries, technology and computing firms, vast farms and citrus plantations, beach resort hotels, car rentals, an airline and a fleet of buses. It also owns one of the largest retail chains in the country. Generals runs Cuba's sugar industry, administer the ports and direct the lucrative cigar industry.
Its core of trained managers may also prove useful to Raul Castro if he decides to open up Cuba's economy along Chinese lines, as some analysts expect.
"He is probably the only person in Cuba capable of convincing the hard-liners to open up the economy," the European diplomat said. The FAR is also popular, unlike most Latin American militaries. It is an article of faith that the army cannot fire on the people, Klepak said.
"Tiananmen Square is the greatest nightmare the armed forces have. When Cuban military officers saw Chinese armor moving against civilians they said 'No way'," he said.
The other nightmare for Cuba's leadership is that East European armies were "not willing to risk a fingernail" in the defense of communism when the Soviet Union fell apart, he said. The Cuban authorities expect otherwise from the FAR.
Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.