Jon Lee Anderson

Everything's breaking down primarily because of the lack of fuel.

So the Cubans, beginning in mid-January, around the time I arrived there on this latest trip, there were directives going out to Cuba.

The reserves around Cuba, around Havana, different neighborhoods for people to sign up for training, retraining, that kind of thing.

Now, exactly what those exercises involve are generally secret.

But I have friends in Cuba.

some cuban neighborhoods and they were telling me some of this i mean they weren't involved themselves but um you know in addition just like in in the united states you have an active army and then you have reserves and so when they call up the reserves these people are expected to go to a mustering point and they're given weapons or you know new weapons and told what to do and they have a action plan to defend that area in case of invasion

this is building upon a long-standing system of mobilization.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90s, Fidel Castro called for what he called the zero option, which was

expecting to be the country to go to basically to go back to almost nothing in terms of sustenance and backup and and he they had his citizens volunteer corps build tunnels under the city tank traps on the coast there was a whole national action mobilization plan do they still exist

Look, if it does, they're not saying so exactly.

They're saying so rhetorically.

We're not seeing huge military mobilizations in the country, but the Revolutionary Armed Forces is perhaps the powerful entity in Cuba.

Everybody has a cousin, son, brother, sister who is a member.

And so wherever you go in Cuba, the armed forces have camps, they have their bivouacs, they have...

their maneuvers, they are well-armed, and they have an esprit de corps that goes back decades involving their fights around the world against, as they would see it, the imperialists.

And so it's difficult to quantify their level of readiness or preparedness, but I would think it would be unwise to regard them as a spent force.

I think...

The psychology of national preparedness, the psychology of the anti-imperialist ethos is well grounded within the armed forces.

And they are preparing to fight.

Yeah, at that moment, he even said, where's Delta Force?