Colleges across Cuba announced on Tuesday that they would organize a “University Student Bastion Exercise” forcing students to engage in military training and “revolutionary, patriotic, and anti-imperialist activities.”
Statements from the universities, according to the independent outlet Cubanet, explained that the event, scheduled for March 27, would honor the upcoming 100th anniversary of the birth of mass murderer Fidel Castro and serve to prepare the nation’s most elite youth to engage in an “all people’s war” in the context of the economic collapse of the country.
Cuba is currently facing nearly unprecedented levels of dysfunction and acute poverty following the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. As a communist state, Cuba’s economy does not produce any significant profits for the vast majority of people and relies on parasitic relationships with wealthier communist states to stay afloat. Under Maduro, Venezuela regularly traded free oil to the country for security, torture, and espionage expertise; 32 Cuban soldiers were killed while defending Maduro in the American operation to arrest the dictator.
The lack of fuel has made tourism via plane to the country nearly impossible and exacerbated growing electrical failures caused by 67 years of negligence of the nation’s power grid. Without electricity, food is rotting at a faster rate, causing shortages, and the already barely functional hospitals in the country have struggled to offer anything resembling health care. Locals — who have been protesting ceaselessly since the July 11, 2021, uprising — have taken advantage of the darkness during blackouts at night to protest on a nightly basis, on some occasions targeting Communist Party buildings for destruction.
In this context, the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces Ministry (MINFAR) announced that an annual military training and recruitment event would take place on every college campus in the country on March 27. In addition to alleged military exercises with college students, Cubanet reported that the regime expects to “update the military registry of all students” and improve the “political-ideological climate” at colleges.
At the Central University of Las Villas, authorities announced an event “with the commitment to prepare for the defense of the Socialist Fatherland, before all the tasks bestowed by the Revolution as worthy heirs of our history.”
“The exercise is organized under the strategic concept of the All People’s War, recognizing the essential role of university students in preparation of the [national] defense,” the announcement explained.
Men in Cuba are forced to serve two years of mandatory military service between the ages of 17 to 28 and can be called upon as part of the reserves up to age 45. Boys are registered into the military starting at age 16. Cuba has not formally declared war during the years following Fidel Castro’s coup but has been involved in several communist military endeavors throughout the years, forcing its men and boys to die in Panama, Venezuela, Yemen, Angola, and, most recently, Ukraine.
The military exercises follow a rare protest at the University of Havana this month in which students concerned about the government’s failure to address national blackouts assembled a sit-in on the central steps on campus. While protests among adults and the non-university educated are common, the Communist Party’s careful selection of only ideological fanatics to attend its most elite universities has resulted in minimal protest activity on campuses.
“The conditions we are in today are very difficult for all of us,” one student told Telemundo this month, “so to see how to move forward, for the process to be the best possible… we want to converse, discuss, and take on the difficulties that are arising.”
“We are not martyrs for any side, we are university students,” another anonymous student protester said. “Therefore, none of us expected to be here, but there was no other option.”
Few protesting outside of the University of Havana would describe themselves in neutral terms. Protesters throughout the island have been flooding public areas with messages carrying slogans such as “freedom,” “down with communism,” and “long live Trump!” referring to President Donald Trump’s opposition to socialism around the world.
In some of the more violent protests, onlookers say that those demanding change are children, beaten publicly in many cases by state security agents.
“They totally ransacked the Party, outside, they burned it all. Most of them were young, about 15, a lot of kids, they arrested a lot of kids,” one anonymous witness in Morón, Ciego de Ávila, told the U.S.-based Martí Noticias outlet, referring to the burning of the Communist Party headquarters in the city.
“It was 300 percent repression,” the person narrated. “A 15-year-old boy, covered in blood, beaten, downtrodden. There were rocks flying.”
In the face of growing resistance, the Communist Party insists that it is at war with the United States and the country must unite with the Party against the outside enemy. On March 20, figurehead “president” Miguel Díaz-Canel, who is subordinate to dictator Raúl Castro, appeared in military fatigues at an alleged “territorial defense exercise” to prepare for “complete combat disposition for the defense and actions against the systematic erosion and invasion of the enemy,” according to Communist Party newspaper Granma.
In an interview this week with former Iranian television host and Spanish radical leftist Pablo Iglesias, Díaz-Canel claimed he was willing to die for the “revolution.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Díaz-Canel bizarrely claimed that the 32 Cuban soldiers killed defending Nicolás Maduro in Caracas during the American operation to arrest the accused narco-terrorist had “detained” the American forces.
“If 32 Cubans were capable of detaining — that numerical disadvantage, technological disadvantage, all types of disadvantage — an elite force of the United States and, besides, in a surprise situation, what are millions of Cubans on the island not capable of doing defending the revolution?” he asked.
The 32 Cuban soldiers killed returned home in small boxes, each carried by one soldier, leaving many speculating as to how their remains were reduced to such an extent in their confrontation with the Americans.
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