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.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home