Cuba Orders North Korea-Style ‘Fighting People’s March’ Following Military Exercises

Cuba Orders North Korea-Style 'Fighting People's March' Following
Military Exercises
by FRANCES MARTEL23 Nov 201628

The communist government of Cuba has announced a "Fighting People's
March" in Havana on December 2 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the
Castro brothers landing in Cuba after fleeing a confrontation with
Fulgencio Batista's forces.
The march follows the completion of "military exercises" announced
immediately after the U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump, who
made opposition to human rights violations in Cuba a cornerstone of his
Latin America foreign policy.

The Spain-based Diario de Cuba cites state propaganda outlets as
announcing that dictator Raúl Castro had decreed December 2 a national
holiday — a "National Day of Defense" — in order to maximize attendance
at national marches. "Cubans are pressured by political organizations in
their places of employment, study, and their neighborhoods to
participate in these marches," the newspaper notes.

The march will mark the anniversary of the landing of the Granma, a boat
the Castro brothers and mass murderer Ernesto "Che" Guevara, along with
some close allies, navigated out of Mexico into Cuba. By the time the
communist revolutionaries landed in Cuba once again, the leaders of the
true opposition to President Batista — urban guerrilla leader Frank
Pais and student leader José Antonio Echeverría — had completed most of
the work of dismantling Batista's regime but perished in their efforts.
As Yale professor Carlos Eire explains, the landing of the Granma was
largely a failure:

… After begging for money from exiles in the United States and living
off the work or the fortunes of others, Fidel, Raul, an Argentine
scumbag they called "Che" and a handful of fellow "revolutionaries"
landed in eastern Cuba in a boat named Granma, and, once again, Fidel
and Raul managed to get nearly everyone in the expedition killed. The
brothers and the Argentine survived, mostly by avoiding all
confrontations with their enemies and letting everyone else do the
fighting. They headed for the mountains, met up later with a New York
Times reporter named Herbert Matthews and managed to draw all attention
to themselves and their 26th of July Movement, even though there were
many other "revolutionaries" fighting against Batista, much more
effectively, with much nobler goals.

The celebration of this historical event follows the conclusion of the
2016 "Bastion Strategic Exercises," announced in response to Trump's
election to the White House. The exercises were allegedly meant to
"simulate the struggle against the enemy landing within defensible
territory" on the island, according to the state newspaper also named
Granma. Granma published multiple updates on the exercises that did
little to explain the need for such exercises, particularly in light of
the cordial visit President Barack Obama made to the island in March.

"This is a way for us to prepare ourselves to defend the nation,"
Sergeant José Antonio Pedraza Caballero is quoted as saying, without
explaining what Cuba needs to defend itself from. "Confronting the
adversary and defeating them is our mission, and we are equipped to
achieve it, as we have proven today."

Cuban state television propagandists also appeared on television in
military outfits, and civilians were encouraged to dress in military
garb to support the troops.

The Miami-based Martí Noticias agency reports, however, that those on
the island appeared little enthusiastic about the exercises.

"I saw absolutely nobody in my neighborhood wearing green, absolutely
nobody in military garb, absolutely nobody mobilizing for the War of
All People," dissident Witner Ballester told the agency from Cuba. "The
only war here is against the hunger that is killing the Cuban people."

Dissident Guillermo Fariñas, an EU Sakharov Prize winner who has
completed 24 hunger strikes against the regime, argued that the target
of these exercises is not Donald Trump, but the Cuban people. Fariñas
told the Diario de Cuba that the Cuban government is "very nervous since
Obama achieved so much popularity, even within the Communist Party. The
military exercises, he argued, were a measure of "intimidation against
the Cuban people and international public opinion."

Source: Cuba Orders North Korea-Style 'Fighting People's March'
Following Military Exercises - Breitbart -
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/11/23/cuba-communist-military-march-trump/