Military: The Cuban Military

Military The Cuban military has prepared for an invasion by the United States since the early 1980 's. Anticipating an invasion by the United States, Cuba constructed miles of tunnels to counter any invasion. The tunnels would allow the protection of ground forces from most air threats, provide an emergency escape route and could possibly become an operational challenge to an opposing force. Cuba’s military has faced numerous downfalls in its past. The collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the Cuban military of its major economic and logistic support and had a significant impact on the state of military equipment. The army remains well trained and professional in nature but the lack of replacement parts for its existing equipment has increasingly

Cubans 17-28 years of age serve a 2-year military service obligation; both sexes are subject to military service. Cuba’s Military is very small in comparison to the United States Military in all aspects of the forces. Coastal defenses on the Island are comprised of 122mm and 130mm artillery pieces and two SS-C3 missile systems. The reductions in personnel, equipment and training have left the Navy with very limited offensive capabilities. Since they cannot operate outside their territorial waters, they should be no deterrence against any

Before the 1959 revolution, Cuba was a multiple layered society in which only 8 percent of the population held farmable land. Most of the farm workers experienced severe poverty and malnutrition, and almost no workers could afford farmland. In 1959, the Agrarian Reform law divided the biggest property estates and distributed the land to two hundred thousand farm workers. In 1975, the National Association of Small Farmers led the main effort to construct the agricultural cooperatives of Cuba. By 1986, a vast majority of private farmers had chosen to participate in the agricultural cooperatives of Cuba. In exchange, the country provided them with various seeds, fertilizer, farm equipment, modern housing, and lowered income taxes. Under the extreme situation of the period, the country had decentralized economic activity, allowing an expansion of private enterprise. A constitutional amendment in 1992, recognized the right of private ownership to the majority of production. With the new amendment, President Castro announced over one hundred new categories of authorized private economic activity. Commercial activity is now a mixture of social ownership of the larger means of production, private ownership of some agricultural lands whose products sold to the country and in the free farmers markets. Smaller size farmers who sell to other Cubans and tourists, and the import of