Raul Castro transformed the Cuban military - to emergency response brigades.

[Mika]

Cuba still has a small defensive military, but the primary role of Cuba's military is to respond to disasters like their tremendous hurricane evacuations and subsequent road and land clearing post hurricane, to road building, to clearing land for farming, to providing emergency transport for medical cases.

Cuba has no real military power per se.

THAT is one of Raul's greatest achievements, post Revolution.


VIVA CUBA!

[Judi Lynn]

1. Vital civic work, in the interest of the country.

Reminds a person of the ways the U.S. National Guard can work, in ideal circumstances. Clearly this disgusts the pain fetish (for other people, of course) "purists" who envision the military as people who "break things and hurt people."

This is a far more enlightened way to work together for a country.

[bemildred]

2. Swords into plowshares, as they say, it's not like there is not plenty of work to be done. nt

[Judi Lynn]

4. They can never be sure there will never be another Bay of Pigs, or the military occupations

from the US like the ones they used to have, or even the heavy presence of the US military, like the days when the U.S. Navy used Cuba for a "Rest and Relaxation" area, or the U.S. Mafia simply ran the casinos and hotels in Havana and paid off high officials in the Cuban government under Batista, etc.

They also know from experience that, as the "exiles" have boasted, "exile" (and friends) militia murder teams do make their way to Cuba to knock off people, or kidnap people, and the "exiles" are also known to hire poor people who need the money from Central America to go to Cuba and place bombs in populous areas, like the hotel bomb which killed an Italian tourist in Havana a few years ago, placed by a man, Leon Cruz, from El Salvador, who is in prison, along with 2 others who accompanied him from El Salvador.

[center]

Leon Cruz[/center]
From a previous D.U. post:

Aidoneus Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jun-12-04 04:59 AM

The Terror Hour
Miami TV Station Invites Terrorists to Talk Openly About Their Planned Attacks on Cuba and Venezuela
By CounterPunch Wire

Cuban television tonight broadcast remarkable segments of a one hour program on Miami TV Channel 41 in which known paramilitaries from the Florida based Comandos F4 organization openly spoke of their preparation for an armed attack against Cuba.

In moments of near-hysteria, the leader of Comandos F4, Rodolfo Frometa, said that his organization has people inside and outside Cuba ready to carry out armed acts against the Cuban government. Dressed in fatigues, as were the others of his organization present in the studio, Frometa said that his group trained with AK47 semi-automatic weapons--arms, he said, that were legally obtained in the United States although he admitted he had no paperwork to prove it.

The program was hosted by Oscar Asa, the nephew of former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista was responsible for the murder of thousands of Cubans until he was forced out by revolutionary forces in 1959. Asa seemed to enjoy posing provocative questions relating to assassination in what critics on Cuba's nightly televised Round Table classed as openly violating US federal law.

It is illegal in the US to defend terrorist actions on TV. The promotion of the assassination of another nation's leader is also illegal under the US Neutrality Act. Nonetheless, commented round table participants, these men were able to openly sit in a studio dressed for war and happily discuss the different armaments they were using to train paramilitaries to attack Cuba, and get away with it. There couldn't be better proof of the US government's complicity with such would-be terrorists.

--snip--

http://www.counterpunch.org/wire06112004.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x617904

[Bacchus4.0]

5. there won't be a Bay of Pigs for sure

so that is just stupid. but if they are suffering from paranoid delusions of an invasion, like the current leadership in Venezuela, then they can waste their limited resources on their outdated military.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Adding Time Magazine's cover, published in 1937, of "Cuba's Boss Batista:"

[center][/center]
Just saw it by chance, wanted to make sure someone else saw it.

It has been testified that his death squads not only tortured suspected dissidents, they also dismembered them, or dangled them from lampposts, or trees, or threw them in the streets, or forced them to dig their own graves, or, one of their unusual features, put them in burlap bags, then set the bags on fire.

[bemildred]

7. I'm not too worried about that at the moment.

Not saying nobody would ever think of it, but I don't think they can, politically. And Raul seems to agree. There was a reason they went with Cuban irregulars at the Bay of Pigs, and it wasn't because nobody thought GIs was a good idea. It's because it's too close to home, and people will see what they do.

I do miss Aidoneus, he was a useful poster.

Just because one opposes a side does not equal support for the other. There are complex principles at hand, most of which have nothing to do with overly simplistic "with or against" formulas. Fallacies in logic to the contrary are of the most crude vulgarity and are an intentionally baseless smear put forth by the unimaginable and conned at best, or vituperate liars at worst. If I thought you'd have a sporting chance in it I'd challenge you to paste in a single point of proof that the Left has "sided" with Saddam Hussein even though he is curiously the very antithesis of what the "Left" stands for--I'll even ask for so far as a single solitary compliment to do directly with him or his works not relating to the US involvements. In fact it was the "Left" you so baselessly deride that opposed Saddam Hussein while the Reagan-Bush regime was arming him to the teeth as a treasured ally. That photo of Hussein and Rumsfeld happily shaking hands looks so precious, one would think they were going steady. The hypocrisy and short memories on the part of the Bush regime and it's apologists is astounding. You can try anyway, though I'm certain you won't come up with anything except laughable tripe that may as well be directly lifted from David Horowitz (though don't worry about plagarizing, that's apparently ok for certain people to do around here).

Actually, invading Cambodia to depose the Pol Pot regime *was* all but deemed illegal by the US & China, and Vietnam was punished severely for doing the world a favour by deposing that US/China-backed regime. In fact it was then Ford & Carter that attempted to rearm the Khmer Rouge forces after Vietnam deposed them.

If Saddam is so bad for killing Kurds, why do the various US regimes snuggle up so closely to Turkey? Turkey has destroyed 2000 Kurdish villages and thousands of Kurdish civilians in the last decade--with the knowledge, aid, massive assistance, and most importantly approval of the Bush1/Clinton/Bush2 regimes--, and has employed the use of chemical weapons and napalm against Kurdish "terrorists" (read: tens of thousands of civilians), yet there are no wars against the Turkish state. Why is that? Oh, right. That's because they, like the Tashkent dictator Karimov, do their rapes and tortures while as a loyal colony of the Washingon DC regimes, thus it's A-OK. Saddam Hussein's crime in the eyes of Washington DC regimes is not the atrocities that Iraq carries out, but that it doesn't do so under the guardianship of the US regimes.

A short history of US/CIA involvement in Kurdistan is available here, and it isn't pretty:

http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/dec96kurdi.htm

Run a search on Mike Galos' posts, in a few of them you'll find a visual graph showing Palestinian so-called "terrorist" attacks per month divided by target (or check the I"D"F's website itself). You'll notice that almost a constant majority of them are against military units and bases, contrary to your remark. But even then it is attacks.on military targets that are still called "terrorist"! This is an absurd bit of intentionally misleading propaganda on the I"D"F's part.

The Islamic Jihad performed a carefully prepared ambush on strictly Israeli military forces in Hebron/al-Khalil, yet all of the hysterical jackals on the telescreens and printmedia still referred to it as a "terrorist" attack, even as facts to the contary were available. The reliance on such nebulous labels as a conversational crutch is a weak tactic, especially when employed in the task of intentional manipulation. As far as killing civilians, women and children, look at the headlines here lately. Your beloved Israeli "Defense" Force is also killing children and those up to 95yrs old as they sit in cars, women, so-called "militants", and MAYBE a "terrorist" if they're lucky--but even then they have to blow up everybody in the apartment with a 1-ton bomb just to get one. So just a little tip for you, don't throw stones in glass houses.

-- Aidoneus

[Marksman_91]

8. Newsflash: The Cold War is over

Most countries nowadays resolve their problems through diplomacy. And there is absolutely nothing the US would gain from another Bay-of-Pigs style invasion. I think your paranoia is getting the best of you.

[Bacchus4.0]

3. no reason to be hiding Migs and other weapons in cargo ships anymore is there?

Costa Rica hasn't had a military since the 1940s. Cuba probably hasn't needed a military since Reagan actually. I'd say most countries don't need a standing army type military since I doubt there will ever be a conventional war with the exception of the middle east and probably some countries in Africa.

Better late than never for Cuba and they may as well make use of the human and logical resources of the Army. Unfortunately some nations like Venezuela are increasingly militarizing.