Cuba builds up national defense website

HAVANA - The Cuban Ministry of Armed Revolutionary Forces (FAR) announced the establishment of its official website www.cubadefensa.cu to make its military more transparent, the official newspaper Juventud Rebelde (JR) said Sunday.

The site, which will begin operation next Tuesday, will be dedicated to information and issues related to national defense, Juventud Rebelde said.

The new digital portal will allow visitors to access specialized and up-to-date information -- but not published before -- on Cuban defense affairs, military history, and activities of FAR.

"So far any person interested in knowing data on FAR or Cuban defense hasn't have any place to intensively find this kind of information," said Jorge Galvan Blanco, director of the FAR Publishing House "Olive Green."

"It was necessary to build up a site, according to development of information technology, to show Cuba's defense reality and what the country does in the defense field," said Galvan.

Galvan stressed the site aims also at "denying the campaigns of some international media to defame Cuba's defense reality."

The officer added the site in its first issue will contain Cuba's military doctrines, an image gallery, historical data, graphics, military literature and different issues of the "Olive Green" journal.

The website was designed with free software produced at the Havana Informatics Sciences University, created by former Cuban leader Fidel Castro 10 years ago, at the facilities of the former Soviet base of Lourdes, which was dedicated in the 1980s to electronic surveillance in the Western hemisphere but was abandoned by Russians in 1992.

According to data of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Cuba is one of the countries with high literacy on informatics, even though the island has suffered a decades-long technological blockage, part of an overall embargo imposed by the United States.