Cuban army called key in any post-Castro scenario

Cuban army called key in any post-Castro scenario
Tue Aug 15, 2006 5:48 PM ET
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.

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