ABSTRACT
One must begrudgingly credit Fidel Castro with a neat sort of legerdemain, albeit with terribly tragic consequences for the Cuban people. If one reviews monographs and texts on the Latin American military, from the inception of the Castro Revolution of 1959 to the present, the absence of Cuba is more than noteworthy. To save the "dependency" model and its correlate, the "bureaucratic-authoritarian regime" model, Cuba had to be ignored, or cause great damage to faulty theorizing. The current stage of the domestication of the Cuban Armed Forces, its incapacity to function outside of Cuban borders, only heightens contradictions between the military and the polity. The distinction between communist and nationalist elements in the Cuban armed forces was evolving rapidly in the late 1980s. Cuba may be a highly evolved military dictatorship, but it is no less a highly refined professional military.
