Cuban army called key in any post-Castro scenario
HAVANA, Aug 16 (Reuters) Cuba's armed forces, a one-time guerrilla outfit that became the communist country's most efficient and business-savvy institution, will play a crucial role whatever happens after Fidel Castro, experts on Cuba say.
With their commander, Defense Minister Raul Castro, now taking over at least temporarily from his brother Fidel Castro as president, the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) are virtually running the country, they said.
''We have the head of the armed forces as the head of state,'' said Hal Klepak, a professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada and author of a book on the FAR.
''The message is very clear -- there will not be disorder because it won't be permitted.'' Fidel Castro on Sunday spent his 80th birthday in a hospital bed after surgery to stop intestinal bleeding around two weeks earlier.
Cuba on Monday evening issued video footage of him being visited by his main leftist ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, putting paid to speculation that he might in fact have died. But Castro looked frail.
Klepak said it was the armed forces and not the Communist Party that wielded real power in Cuba today, especially with Castro momentarily sidelined.
Born of the rag-tag force that the Castro brothers assembled in the Sierra Maestra mountains to oust dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1959 revolution, the FAR is seen as one of the best-trained armies in Latin America.
Its ranks have shrunk to 60,000 regular troops, one fifth of the force that existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged Cuba into dire straits in 1991, Klepak said.
But it has reserves of 30,000 soldiers, a disciplined force of 70,000 young Cuban recruits who work on its farms and a territorial militia of some 700,000 people capable of firing AK-47 semi-automatic rifles.
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