The exercise, known as Bastión 2004, was launched December 13. It involved 100,000 people in the first five days of strategizing and simulated attacks and over 4 million Cubans in the final weekend of national mobilization. Bastión 2004 was the first nationwide military mobilization in this nation of 4 million in 18 years, and the first time in more than a decade that heavy tanks and MIG fighter planes have been brought out.

“For many years our principal objective has been to avoid war,” said Minister of the Armed Forces Raúl Castro when he initiated Bastión 2004 on December 13. “And we know that the only way to avoid an invasion is to make it clear that if it happens Cuba will be converted from one end to the other into an enormous wasps’ nest, which no aggressor can conquer, no matter how strong he is. In the end, the invader will have to retreat, bloody and defeated, because this would be a war of the entire people.”

“Better to spill rivers of sweat now than rivers of blood later,” became one of the slogans of the mobilization.

Active-duty members of the armed forces, reservists, and civilians organized into the Territorial Troop Militias were placed on alert status all over the country. They went into action with their weapons in response to announcements of bombing attacks, incidents of sabotage, or the landing of U.S. troops. Although the weapons were real, they fired blanks, in order not to waste precious ammunition.

Julio César Arteaga, a young first sergeant from Camagüey, told the press he had received six years of advanced weapons training. “What sets us apart from an invading army is our background and the values we have acquired,” he said. “There could be soldiers with a material and technical support system superior to ours, but they could never have our commitment to our revolution and our nation.”

Rafael Ramos Traba, an agricultural worker and reservist, made a similar point. “We aren’t just prepared physically and militarily but also psychologically and above all ideologically, which makes us stronger and even invincible against an enemy that needs to draw the lesson that we shouldn’t be underestimated.”

According to Mercedes Valdés, a young soldier in her first year of anti-aircraft artillery training, “These days have helped me a lot in every way. First because I know I am being useful, and secondly because, even though it’s not an exam, for me Bastión 2004 is my first trial under fire.”

One difference between this year’s mobilization and the military alerts that took place in Cuba during the 1980s is that now there are many more young women who are officers in the army and more women of all ages leading the work of the Cuban Communist Party, Union of Young Communists, and Civil Defense Councils in different municipalities and provinces. This was clear in the television and press reports on Bastión 2004, as was the case during preparations to confront Hurricane Ivan three months ago.

Several million Cuban workers, peasants, students, and others are organized into the voluntary Territorial Troop Militias. Bruno Guerra, 53, who has been a member of the militias for more than 30 years, said, “When Playa Girón happened and the struggle against the counterrevolution in the Escambray mountains, I was just a boy. My Girón, my Escambray, my Sierra Maestra has been the Territorial Troop Militias, and that’s where my post is when it comes to defending the homeland.”

Guerra was referring to the 1961 mercenary invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, which was organized by Washington and crushed by Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces and popular militias within three days. The Sierra Maestra is a mountain range in eastern Cuba from which the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement led the revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Cuba on New Year’s Day in 1959. A counterrevolutionary campaign by U.S.-backed rightists was organized in the Escambray mountains in the 1960s and was defeated by the country’s armed forces and militias.

A key part of Cuba’s defense system is an elaborate system of tunnels for refuge and organizing resistance. These underground fortifications, in and near the city of Havana and other urban areas, are maintained with ventilation, light, water, medical services and sometimes even classrooms. There are also field hospitals and refuges in natural caves in various parts of the island. The province of Holguín celebrated the early completion of its plan for expansion and fortification of the tunnel system with an act honoring the tuneleros, or tunnel-builders.

An important aspect of the training exercise was guaranteeing supplies of water, food, and medical care to the population and continuing industrial and agricultural production in the event of war. During Bastión 2004, every national industry drew up plans to protect or move machinery and supplies, and to continue production under conditions of extreme hardship.

One garment factory in Havana Province trained workers to continue producing with pedal machines if electricity was lost. “And if the factory is bombed,” said plant director Rosalina Lago Hernández, “we have workers chosen to continue working in their houses and in the people’s tunnels.”

A steel factory in Havana that normally produces medical equipment devised a plan to change over to weapons production. Bakers at the La Flor factory in Camagüey organized to produce bread without their electric mixing machines and ovens, kneading the dough by hand and baking it with wood-fired stoves. “This is my job if the enemy invades,” said young baker Kilbert Alvarez. “The Americans should realize that children and fighters here can count on getting their pieces of bread, because even without electricity and in a war, La Flor won’t stop.”

Although Bastión 2004 was announced only a week before it began, military preparedness has long been part of the routine of life for millions of Cubans. Most workers and professionals do voluntary overnight guard duty every four to six weeks at their workplaces or in their communities. School children get target practice, starting in about seventh grade. The country also has an extremely efficient and well-organized civil-defense structure to deal with natural disasters such as hurricanes.

The last two days of Bastión 2004 were designated as Days of National Defense and involved the mobilization of a large part of the Cuban population and detailed plans for evacuation of the most vulnerable sectors.

On Sunday morning, about 8 a.m., a woman came down the street where I was staying in Havana, calling loudly for “evacuees” to gather on a nearby corner. Retirees and people who were sick or disabled assembled to receive evacuation instructions, following a short presentation about the danger that our neighborhood would be the target of bombing in an invasion, because of the proximity of government buildings, and tunnels and bridges across the Almandares River. The gathering point for children was at their schools. A few hours later I talked to a young mother who was taking her daughters—Anabel, 5, and Mabel, 3—to perform in a children’s chorus. She explained that when she arrived with the girls at the school early that morning, she was told that in the event of a real war, they would be taken first to nearby John Lennon Park and then in buses to a refuge in Matanzas province, and she was given a list of supplies to pack.

Near the end of the weeklong exercise, Raúl Castro directed an operation of heavy-armored tanks and then addressed residents of a nearby working-class neighborhood of Havana. Bastión 2004, he said, “involved Cubans of all colors, a beautiful rainbow of people. But all speaking the same language, all with one goal, one ideal: our most powerful weapon is our unity.”  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home