The Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (MINFAR) published yesterday on its official Facebook page a 40-second reel titled "Combat preparation does not stop," under the hashtag #FARCuba, and the reaction from Cubans was a flood of mockery that turned the propaganda video into an unintended meme.
The material shows soldiers in camouflage uniforms and dark tactical helmets inside a military aircraft, a Soviet-made Mi-8 helicopter, conducting tactical air insertion maneuvers via rappel over a dilapidated training building, with fighters in combat positions carrying AKM-type rifles.
The post accumulated more than 113,900 views, 5,845 reactions, and 1,286 comments, the vast majority of which were ironic and sarcastic.
The comment that best summed up the general sentiment was also the most repeated: "Even the helicopter is hungry there."
Other users pointed directly to the condition of the equipment: "That must be the only helicopter that works in Cuba and it’s from the 80s," wrote one; another added, "There is no vest, no tactical helmet, no sights mounted on the rifles. Not even the most basic gear that a modern infantryman has."
A detail from the video amplified the mockery: several commentators pointed out that one of the soldiers fell spectacularly when jumping from the helicopter. "The fourth guy who jumped from the helicopter really took a tumble; he broke his two-day fast with the dirt he ate," wrote one user.
The contrast between fuel expenditure for maneuvers and the crisis faced by the population was another central theme of the comments. "For that, there is fuel," a Cuban remarked ironically, directly referencing the prolonged blackouts that the island suffers from.
This video is the latest in a series of propaganda posts from MINFAR that have produced the opposite effect of what was intended, framed within the regime's declaration of the "Year of Preparation for Defense."
The pattern has been repeating since January: manoeuvres with old motorcycles, Díaz-Canel's participation in military exercises, the training of the so-called "Black Wasps" from Matanzas, and the message from May 5 in which the MINFAR stated that "the ceasefire order will never be given," accompanied by an image of a missile.
The campaign intensified following the pressure measures from the Trump administration, which in May signed an executive order expanding sanctions on Cuba regarding energy, defense, mining, and finance.
The day before, on Wednesday, the MINFAR had published another training video that accumulated over 92,500 views and 888 comments, equally ironic, including one from the user Missy Groot: "The Delta Force are going to die... but from laughing."
The food crisis facing Cuba after 67 years of communist dictatorship has thus become the inevitable backdrop of every military publication from the regime: Cubans themselves point out that the soldiers suffer from the same malnutrition as the rest of the population, which undermines the credibility of any warlike rhetoric. "Cuba Circus 2026," summarized one commentator.
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