MEXICO CITY, Mexico.- “Our National Defense Law is clear when it refers to three fundamental premises: that citizens of both sexes who so wish and openly express it may voluntarily join military service,” said this May 11 before the United Nations (UN) a member of the Cuban delegation. In this way, Yisel González García, an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX), publicly denied the mandatory Active Military Service (SMA) for the country’s youth and falsified the content of said law, where the mandatory nature is highlighted.
The Second Secretary of the National Directorate of Multilateral Affairs and International Law of the Ministry was one of the last members of the official delegation of the Island to respond to the concerns of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which is currently examining Cuba in Geneva. González García avoided directly answering the Committee’s question about the age of military recruitment, which starts at 17 (and therefore they are minors), and instead said that children are not recruited in Cuba. He then added that the violation of the alleged three premises of the Defense Law (possibility of incorporation for both sexes, that they express their desire to join and that they do so of their own free will) would be punished with the crimes provided for in the Law of Military Crimes and The criminal code.
According to the national defense law, male citizens who are between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight, must complete Active Military Service for a period of two years. In the case of those who obtained university places, this period is reduced by half, but it is still mandatory. In recent years, medical students have been exceptionally exempted, probably to speed up the export of their services.
According to Cubalex’s lawyer, Alain Espinosa, this is a sine qua non requirement in the case of men for admission to higher education. To such an extent that even those who have a disability or illness incompatible with said service must do it in another variant.
“Those who are colloquially known as unfit have to fulfill administrative or similar tasks oriented at this stage. The foregoing only applies in cases of obtaining university degrees and as a prerequisite for admission to them”, details the lawyer.
Only those who are incapacitated and are officially declared as such are exempt from said compliance, as established in articles 67 and 65 respectively of said legal text.
The expert also points out that there is a much longer period of time in which you can be prohibited from leaving the country and limit your mobility because you are of compliance age.
Despite the diplomat’s declarations, Military Service has been mandatory in Cuba since June 1963. Later, with the support of the 1976 Constitution, a law was enacted to regulate it. There it was stated that the man who refused to defend the Socialist Homeland would be considered a “traitor”. The discourse of the besieged square and supposedly the possibility of a military invasion, which has never occurred, has been the argument to maintain this practice for almost six decades.
The mandatory of the Military Service has been systematically criticized by citizens for the conditions suffered by young people in these facilities. the independent press Cuba has frequently reported incidents in this system that harm young recruits, even fatally. Human rights organizations such as Cubalex have denounced the self-harm inflicted by young soldiers. To escape the constraints of the system, some choose to cut themselves, swallow sharp objects, and even shoot themselves in limbs.
At the end of 2019, the Cuban military courts published in the Gazette that they would sanction the recruits of the Active Military Service who self-harm during the fulfillment of that period.
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