HAVANA, Cuba.- An official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has broken the record of self-confidence by lying and claiming in the United Nations that military service in Cuba is not compulsory and that only young Cubans of both sexes who wish to do so are called up.
The official, who wanted to go to extremes in serving the regime, could create a serious problem for the FAR with his lie: Imagine that when they find out that military service is no longer compulsory, the recruits who did not ask to be enlisted and who do not want to continue confined to their barracks and obeying orders take off their uniforms, gather their gear and go home.
Calm down, bosses, that will not happen. We all know that what the official said is a lie, another lie among the many they tell the world: although it is now called General Military Service, it is still as compulsory for men as it was when it was introduced in 1965.
Cuban male adolescents, when they reach the age of 16, have by law to enroll in the records of the municipal military committees and wait to be recruited.
It doesn’t matter if they are studying in pre-university or university. Only those exempted by illness are exempt from going to the army. And the healthy envy their luck.
For most Cubans born after 1949, military service has been a nightmare: confinement, hunger, dirt, mistreatment, humiliation, forced labor…
They say that military service, which lasts not three years but two, is not as rigorous as it was decades ago. But it continues to be a torment that hinders the lives of young people, interrupts their studies, distances them from their loved ones…
For those of my generation, and even worse for those of the first called, military service was a traumatic experience.
The rigors of the 30 days of “the previous one” were the preamble to what awaited us in the military units: the barked orders and the insults of the despotic drill sergeants, the marches at a forced pace under the midday sun, the insufficient ranch and bad, the trenches dug in the rock and then filled again, the combat alarms in the middle of the night, the disciplinary reports for any reason, the passes arbitrarily suspended, the punishment dungeons…
To avoid this torture, even for a few days, some recruits resorted to self-harm. Self-inflicted blows to the ankle or knee. Deodorant smeared in the eyes to simulate conjunctivitis. Those who slept with their arm wrapped in a wet towel to break it at dawn against the iron bar of the bunk. Shots in the feet or hands to spend a season admitted to the Finlay or Naval Hospital.
They say that Raúl Castro, when he was a FAR minister, used to say that the recruit who did not escape was not a good soldier. But this did not stop the recruits who escaped from being severely punished.
For escaping, sometimes only for a few hours, many recruits, accused of desertion, ended up in Cabaña, el Príncipe, Valle Grande, El Pitirre. They were hunted by the red berets of Prevention on highways, bus stations, in their homes or at their girlfriends’ houses.
Some, to try to get military doctors to discharge them from the army, “filmed like crazy.” Playing it as it was. It was my case. And very little was missing for it to cost me my life. Because officers and psychiatrists/jailers pushed you to the limit to test if you were really crazy. Well, I will know, if to get discharged from the FAR I had to spend more than two years in cells, in the convict room of the Mazorra Psychiatric Hospital or hidden, fleeing from the Red Berets.
Others did not have my luck, and died or committed suicide, from a bullet, hanged, stuffed with pills.
More than 56 years after the first call for Military Service, the toll is terrifying: deaths in accidents, suicides, wounded and maimed by explosions or shots and escaped blasts, irreversible psychological sequelae.
To hide the torments to which Cubans who reach the age of 16 are sentenced, was the lie of the MINREX official at the UN. Wait soon for the clarification, ridiculous and not at all convincing, that they will give. That is, if now that the Castroists are almost always on the defensive, to avoid a stir on social networks, they deign to clarify something. Because, in short, there are so many lies from her…
OPINION ARTICLE
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