MINFAR

Dissident dies, tanks roll

January 20, 2012

Orlando Luis Pardo tweeted there was movement of tanks via rail from Via Blanca (Paso Superior) on the outskirts of Havana. Is this movement in response to yesterday’s death of dissident Wilman Villar Mendoza after his hunger strike? The same occurred when dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo death was announced in 2010.

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Female colonel is GAESA VP

January 3, 2012

Juventud Rebelde revealed in this article published last week that a female colonel, Ania Lastre Morera, is first vice-president of the Cuban military’s powerful business holding company, GAESA — Grupo de Administracion Empresarial S.A. (Enterprise Management Group Inc.). (Image: Military rank of Colonel, FAR.)

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Filming military history

January 2, 2012

Cuban state media provides a brief history in a recent article on the Sección Fílmica del Departamento de Instrucción de las FAR (Film Section of the Department of Instruction of the Cuban Armed Forces) created in 1967, which filmed the Cuban military’s missions in Algeria, Guinea, Syria, Angola, Nicaragua, and Vietnam for propaganda purposes. (See here for [...]

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Corruption probe in military-run business

December 13, 2011

Reuters reports: Cuba has detained top executives of the powerful military-run Tecnotex company, broadening a corruption investigation that has already shuttered three foreign firms, according to foreign business sources. Tecnotex’s director Fernando Noy was among those arrested, according to a foreign businessman who deals with the company. “They went right into the Tecnotex office and [...]

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New Cuban political elite

December 4, 2011

Eusebio Mujal-León, professor and former chair of the Department of Government at Georgetown University and the director of the Cuba XXI Project, has written an excellent article (published in the Journal of International Affairs’ Fall/Winter ’11 issue on the authoritarian state) analyzing the new Cuban political elite and exploring how power is distributed between the country’s military [...]

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Ammo deal is response to US missile shield

December 1, 2011

Russia Today, the state-run television news network, claims that Russia’s plan to sell ammunition-making technology to Havana is a response to the U.S. missile-defence plans in Europe. Moreover, Pravda chimes in on the Cuban armed forces’ modernization starting point: From 1961 to 1991, the volume of arms shipments from the USSR to Cuba made up [...]

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