Cuba announces military exercises to prepare for 'enemy actions' after Donald Trump win

Cuban President Raul Castro
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Chloe Chaplain9 November 2016

Cuba has announced a week of pre-scheduled military exercises to prepare for "enemy actions" following Donald Trump's US election victory.

The announcement was not directly linked to Donald Trump but came immediately after the election result.

The President-elect has threatened to unravel the U.S.-Cuban detente, reversing outgoing President Barack Obama's moves to open relations with the island.

But there has been no official reaction to the news yet.

The announcement about the week-long military exercise was made in red letters on the front page of the country's main newspaper, the Communist Party's Granma.

It warned citizens that the exercises would include "movements of troops and war material, overflights and explosions in the cases where they're required."

Speaking of Cuba's leaders, Communist Party member Esteban Morales told the Telesur network: "They must be worried because I think this represents a new chapter."

It is the seventh time Cuba has held what it calls the Bastion Strategic Exercise, often in response to points of high tension with the United States.

US President Donald Trump (Getty)
AFP/Getty Images

Trump has promised to reverse Obama's opening unless President Raul Castro agrees to more political freedom on the island, a concession considered a virtual impossibility.

Military exercise: The announcement in the country's main newspaper, the Communist Party's Granma
Granma

Many Cubans said they feared they were on the verge of losing the few improvements they had seen in their lives thanks to a post-detente boom in tourism.

Along with a surge in visitors, normalization has set off visits by hundreds of executives from the U.S. and dozens of other nations newly interested in doing business on the island.

Jubilant Donald Trump supporters

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"The little we've advanced, if he reverses it, it hurts us," taxi driver Oriel Iglesias Garcia said. "You know tourism will go down. If Donald Trump wins and turns everything back it's really bad for us."

The first Bastion Strategic Exercise was launched in 1980 after the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. president, according to an official history.

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