September 2007

A military ceremony was held a the General Antonio Maceo Inter-Arms School of the Revolutionary Armed Forces to inaugurate the beginning of the instruction year for this student center that is characterized by its formation of professional officers.

According to the school director, Brigadier General Julio Pérez Hernández, students count on a good material base of study. During the ceremony several officials and civil workers were honored with medals in recognition for their distinguished work throughout the previous instruction year.

The rest of military study centers also commenced the year and thousands of students pledged to professionally prepare themselves for the defense of the island.

Source: Juventud Rebelde

[Photo: Juventud Rebelde]

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One of the most challenging difficulties facing Cubans daily is transporting themselves throughout the island nation.  David Adams of the St. Petersburg Times reports on such transportation challenges:

Maricel Alvarez, a 25-year-old nurse, commutes 20 miles to work at a nursing home in eastern Cuba. Like most Cubans, she doesn’t have a car. There’s no bus service either. So she has to hitch a ride. Sometimes a truck driver will stop, and she piles in the open back with other hitchhikers. If she’s lucky, a Cuban driving a private car will pick her up. “I love my job,” says Alvarez. “The only problem is transport.” Hers is a lament heard all across Cuba. Of all the shortcomings of Cuba’s state-run socialist economy, public transport is perhaps the nation’s No. 1 headache.

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Cuba has been upgrading its military arsenal since President Fidel Castro fell ill 13 months ago, to defend itself against a possible U.S. invasion, senior officers told Trabajadores weekly on August 27.

“In the irregular combat we would face in Cuba in case of an invasion, the engineering, infantry and artillery systems we produce and repair here are of vital importance, because they’re designed for the aggressor’s direct assault,” said Lt. Col. Pascual Machado, chief coordinator of Cuba’s Military Industrial Firm (Empresa Militar Industrial Ernesto Che Guevara, EMI).

EMI director Col. Arturo Torres, told the weekly that the facilities he runs “have increased their production level since 1998 more than four-fold.”

Weapon systems that have been upgraded in precision targeting and destructive capabilities include munitions, grenades, land mines and anti-tank rockets, Trabajadores said.

As an example, the weekly said a laser-guided targeting system called VLMA has boosted the AK-M automatic rifle’s precision by 80 percent to 90 percent, regardless of the shooter’s skill level.

Source: Trabajadores & AFP via Defense News

[Photo: Trabajadores]

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Last week’s The Economist focused on Vladimir Putin’s political power over the Russian state with a collective of ex-KGB spooks. Might there be parallel similarities of such a power system in a post-Raul Cuba?

When Mr Putin was plucked from obscurity to become first Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister and later his successor as Russia’s president, few in the West had heard of this former KGB officer, who had briefly been head of the FSB, the KGB’s post-Soviet successor. Just before he became president, Mr Putin told his colleagues that a group of FSB operatives, “dispatched under cover to work in the government of the Russian federation”, was successfully fulfilling its task. It was probably a joke. Yet during his two terms since then, men from the FSB and its sister outfits have indeed grabbed control of the government, economy and security forces. Three out of four senior Russian officials today were once affiliated to the KGB and other security and military organisations.

[…]

Over the two terms of Mr Putin’s presidency, that “group of FSB operatives” has consolidated its political power and built a new sort of corporate state in the process. Men from the FSB and its sister organisations control the Kremlin, the government, the media and large parts of the economy—as well as the military and security forces. According to research by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, a quarter of the country’s senior bureaucrats are siloviki—a Russian word meaning, roughly, “power guys”, which includes members of the armed forces and other security services, not just the FSB. The proportion rises to three-quarters if people simply affiliated to the security services are included. These people represent a psychologically homogeneous group, loyal to roots that go back to the Bolsheviks’ first political police, the Cheka. As Mr Putin says repeatedly, “There is no such thing as a former Chekist.”

The turn of political and economic power from Russian oligarchs to spooks does fortell what Cuba might look like once its future political/economic system goes through its own structuring post-Raul.

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