Police

Venezuelan daily El Universal reports:

Next June, a group of Venezuelan police officers will travel to Cuba and Nicaragua to be trained in community police matters. Minister of Interior and Justice Ramón Rodríguez Chacín stated that they will be making institutional visits for three months.

“In June, July, and August, institutional visits will be made to highly experienced police organizations that have shown great results as community police officers, such as Cuba and the Revolutionary Police of Nicaragua, which are successful models,” Rodríguez Chacín stated in a press conference in Nuevo Horizonte slum.
The Organic Law on the Police and National Police Body Service establishes the creation of community police bodies, “professional, steady, mainly prevention officers, to promote strategies and procedures in the community and to work in specific places.”

Cuba’s National Revolutionary Police Force (Policía Nacional Revolucionaria, PNR) is under the administration and a sub-directorate of the Ministry of Interior.

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The Cuban Government’s infamous Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) is being utilized by Army General Raul Castro to shore up his authority over the country, according to an extensive article from the Washington Post. Castro will employ anew this political tool of control that has served well the regime.

As per the article:

Cuba’s block committees were born in 1960, shortly after Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces toppled the corrupt, U.S.-friendly government of Fulgencio Batista. Concerned about a U.S. invasion, Castro’s government adopted a motto, still present on Cuban billboards: “In a fortress under siege, all dissent is treason.”

The concept behind the CDRs was to create a citizen force that would reinforce the dictates of Cuba’s government, establishing a kind of omnipresent peer pressure network among next-door neighbors. Leaders of CDRs could put Castro’s every public thought directly and rapidly into the hands of every Cuban, so the government would not have to rely solely on mass media.

As Castro’s brother, interim President Raul Castro, prepares to take full control after his brother’s death, party officials take visiting dignitaries on tours of the committees, and there are signs that the younger Castro is trying to inject new life into a system that could be crucial to solidifying his hold on power.

Police call block leaders more often, pressing aggressively for information, according to interviews with current and former CDR leaders. Earlier this year, Cuba’s state-run television network broadcast an exposé shaming several committees for failing to post obligatory round-the-clock sentries.

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