ABSTRACT
The Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) are and have always were the central pillar sustaining the communist regime of Fidel Castro. The new regimes proceeded to militarize civilian society, but ultimate control was kept in the hands of the Party, which was declared to be the vanguard of the state in most communist constitutions. The roles played by the FAR in the Cuban economy can be summarized in a typology comprising "soldiers" of three different kinds, each of which has its own characteristics and ramifications for the future development of the FAR. Three kinds of soldiers are civic-soldier, technocrat-soldier, and entrepreneur-soldier. Cuba is the prototype of a different regime-type, a military-mobilizational variant of totalitarianism. The FAR has a central place in the eroded military-mobilizational totalitarian regime. It is also identified by a wide array of sources as the preferred and privileged actor, outranking the Cuban Communist Party, the Catholic Church, and the internal opposition.
