Chronicle on Cuba - June 2008

Security

June 2: The director of Venezuela’s Military Aviation School, Colonel Luis Gilberto Rodriguez, expressed his admiration for the capacity shown by the Cuban militaries to train their officials with high knowledge and preparation. At the end of a tour by the Jose Marti Military Technical Institute, in Havana, the official indicated that Venezuelan military schools have much to learn from the Cuban system of education, since it is essential for its nation the educational sector based on the formation of new generations. This visit has instructive character and it is the third visit to Cuba by professors and students of the last year of the Venezuelan Military Aviation School, to last until June 8. That institution was created on April 17, 1920 and is mainly aimed at entirely forming Venezuelan young people as aviation officials, who are Science and Military Arts Graduates. The delegation visited polygons of practices, laboratories, classrooms and simulators of several specialties, in addition to talking with students, military leaders, officials and cadets. (Prensa Latina, 2/6/08)

June 3: President Hugo Chávez has used his decree powers to carry out a major overhaul of his country’s intelligence agencies, provoking a fierce backlash from human rights groups and legal scholars who say the measures will force citizens to inform on one another to avoid prison terms. Under the new intelligence law, Venezuela’s two main intelligence services, the DISIP secret police and the DIM military intelligence agency, will be replaced with new agencies, the General Intelligence Office and General Counterintelligence Office, under the control of Mr. Chávez. The new law points to the influence of Cuba, Venezuela’s top ally, on intelligence policies. For instance, the use of community-monitoring groups to assist in gathering intelligence resembles Cuba’s use of neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution to report on antigovernment behavior. “This is purely Cuban-style policy,” Juan José Molina, a legislator with Podemos, a leftist party that broke from Mr. Chávez’s coalition last year, said of the new intelligence law. “Our rulers want to impose old models upon us.” (The New York Times, 3/6/08)

June 15: Students and instructors from the Technical Aviation School of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, on a visit in Cuba, placed a floral wreath at El Cacahual Mausoleum, where the remains of Antonio Maceo and his aide-de-camp are buried. Brigadier General Carmen Yanaira Flames de Romero, head of the school, said that the objective of her visit to Cuba was to learn about Cuba and its military history. The visit follows in the wake of another by the Venezuelan Military Aviation School. The delegation is made up of over 100 undergraduates and it includes students of Electronics, Metallurgy, Provisions and Telecommunications. The program includes visits to the José Martí Technical Military Institute (ITM), the Playa Girón Aviation Brigade, the Latin-American School of Medicine, and other sites. This is the first time that students and instructors from the 58-year-old Technical Aviation School of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela have visited Cuba. (Granma, 15/6/08)

June 18: The Cuban government has designated a Cuban army colonel as the new representative to regularly shuttle to the fence-line in Guantanamo Navy base from Havana for meetings with US officials, the Navy base commander disclosed. Earlier this year, Cuban Army Col. Juan Marsans Orgales, in his 50s or 60s, turned up at the monthly meeting with US officials, said Navy Capt. Mark Leary, the Guantánamo base commander. He suddenly replaced Navy Capt. Pedro Román Cisneros, a Soviet-trained submariner who had been the Cuban representative at the fence-line meeting since January 2006. The Clinton administration launched the unprecedented monthly meetings in the 1990s to try to decrease tensions at the last US Cold War outpost, a 17.4-mile minefield and frontier separating this century-old, 45-square-mile base from Cuba proper. The sessions grew out of the huge 1994 rafter crisis, in which the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard intercepted tens of thousands of Cubans in the Florida Straits and sheltered them in tent camps in Guantanamo before negotiating a US-Cuban migration accord. Because of the long-standing US embargo on relations with Cuba, the base commander's meeting is the only sanctioned talks between the US and Cuban militaries. (The Miami Herald, 19/6/08)