Nearly 50 years after a botched US-directed invasion of Cuba, the communist nation said on Saturday it would hold a military exercise this week to boost preparedness against any future US attack.
“It is a necessity of the first order given the political-military situation that now defines relations between Cuba and the empire,” Major General Leonardo Andollo said, referring to the US.
He told the official Granma newspaper that the “Bastion-2009” exercises will “raise the deterrent capacity to prevent a military confrontation, under the principle that there is no better way to win a war than by avoiding it.”
The military exercise, Cuba’s largest in five years and the first since US President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January, will be held on Thursday through Saturday, followed by Sunday’s armed forces day to be marked nationwide.
The government of Cuban President Raul Castro, a longtime defense chief, expects that as many as 4 million Cubans may take part in Sunday’s events, in the country of 11 million, the Americas’ only one-party communist regime.
Major General Ermio Hernandez, head of the military’s directorate, said the exercise would involve tactical maneuvers, command of ground troops, artillery practice and military flights.
Washington quickly recognized the new Fidel Castro government after the 1959 Cuban revolution, but by 1961 the US broke ties with Havana.
In April that year, a 1,400-strong force of CIA-trained Cuban exiles invaded Cuba’s Bay of Pigs — a disastrous venture fatally compromised by leaky intelligence and poor execution.
In its aftermath the CIA hatched many failed plots to remove the elder Cuban leader, now 83 and still head of the Cuban Communist Party.
A US trade embargo on Cuba begun in 1962 remains in place despite calls by every country in the Americas to have it lifted.
Obama has largely abandoned the confrontational rhetoric with Havana that marked past administrations, and has sought to allow unlimited family travel and financial remittances from the US to Cuba.
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