LAS TUNAS, Cuba. — The Eastern Army through the Study Regiment based in Puerto Padre, and through the local radio station Freedom Radio, is calling for young pre-university graduates up to 24 years old to train them as infantry and tank officers in a crash course of just five months. It is also reported that graduates will receive a monthly salary of 7,050 pesos.
Are the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) of Cuba running out of junior officers in the infantry troops and tank units and urgently want to replenish them? Or perhaps… Is the FAR preparing urgently to place more infantry and tank units in combat readiness, anticipating an adverse operational situation in the near future?
Understood by junior officers are those who, with ranks from second lieutenant to captain, are directly in command of the soldiers, receiving orders from first officers, who are those with rank from major to first colonel; superior officers are generals, from brigadier general to army general.
The junior officers in command of platoons and companies or with other responsibilities in the units, such as those that will now be trained, according to the FAR note in rapid five-month courses, are, by regulation, young men and women and almost all —if not all—, graduates of military schools, military universities, or civilians, where they were already inserted as cadets of a military institute to prepare in specialties that are not taught in military academies. These officers graduate from two-year courses with mid-technical degrees and second-lieutenant degrees, or from five-year university degrees, such as bachelor’s degrees or engineers and lieutenant’s degrees.
If it is relatively easy and cheap for the FAR to replace the soldiers of its three armies (Eastern, Central and Western) through the recruitment of young people of military age —mandatory by law—, it is not possible in the same way to replace the corps of junior officers , because they occupy those positions not by obligation, but by vocation and academic training, unless that replacement occurs with improvised officers in five months, as is projected now.
But the vocation of young Cubans for military careers seems to decrease to the same extent that they show indifference to the discourse of the communist leadership. And, if the military schools do not increase their enrollments due to the vocation of high school or pre-university students in the general education system, new cadets do not enter, and in the end there will be fewer junior officers to give orders directly to the troops.
Even so, vocation in the military is also a double-edged sword, and even more so in the junior officer corps, as it is simply and simply a psychological mechanism linked to the aspirations of the individual, where the captain wants to be older, the older , colonel, and the colonel, general.
And now we have seen how Raúl Castro and the supreme leadership of the FAR, even to reach the generalship, have set a limit, creating the rank of “first colonel”, thus preventing colonels with a “ceiling” from ascending to brigadier generals.
In the military institutions of any country, the military ranks have a “ceiling”, understand a ceiling according to the position. Thus, if the position of commander of an infantry company is captain, a young first lieutenant will be very comfortable in that position until he is promoted to captain and has the years of service required to be promoted to major. But after that time he will no longer be comfortable if the leadership does not promote him to another position with the possibility of promotion in military and economic rank, because, in addition to being a military man by vocation, he is also a military man for monetary and social rewards, being then what It is more likely that, in search of better options, that young officer will ask to be discharged from the FAR, which in the end will have to be discharged for convenience or discharge convenience from the service, which is when serious indiscipline or crimes are incurred.
The political power of Castro-communism is not based on the support of the people, but rather on the military, police and para-police force, according to how the world saw how the demonstrations of July 11, 2021 were repressed. The FAR already had weapons and armored equipment more than enough to supply their logistical needs before the Angola campaign. Remember that, except for nuclear weapons, all the tanks, transport and artillery of the group of Soviet troops made up of 42,000 soldiers remained in Cuba after the Missile Crisis ended. But not enough with that gigantic arsenal, which needs underground silos tens of kilometers long for its conservation, the regime brought from Angola all the weapons that the former Soviet Union supplied to that country for its defense, including the most modern tanks, which were in the hands of Cuban soldiers.
On the 60th anniversary of the Missile Crisis, in the Cuban strategic panorama there is no glimpse of any armed conflict with any neighboring country, and it is logical that, if the pandemic, the migratory exodus and casualties due to service conveniences have diminished the body of junior officers, without the possibility of replacement through the military academies because Cuban youth no longer see attractions in military life, these officers be replaced quickly, in improvised courses, motivated by a salary of 7,050 pesos. But it will not be natural if, extracting them from their conservation silos, more tanks and mechanized infantry transports appear in the FAR units, because not having wars with our neighbors, those tanks, at a given moment, would point against the same Cubans, and we must not forget that already on July 11 Díaz-Canel issued a fratricidal order. This is a progressive issue that all Cubans must keep in mind. Let’s watch it.
OPINION ARTICLE
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