In the Cuban army, technology does not age
“In the blue Antillean Sea, the Caribbean is also called it, whipped by evil ramparts, decorated with openwork foam, Cuba sways on the map: a green long lizard with eyes like wet stones,” the poet Nicholas Guillen painted the Island of Liberty. And Washington warned: "But you, a sea jailer standing on a strong guard by the seashore, remember the high spears sparkling, the tongue of the tongues of fire and the lizard that woke up to pull the claws out of the map!" The lizard finally woke up at the very beginning of 1959, and the Soviet Union helped her to find sharp claws.
Cuba became a military outpost of the USSR in the very underbelly of the United States, which in 1962 experienced a colossal shock from Russian missiles with nuclear warheads, whose starting positions - even for a short time - settled among the palm forests of the rebellious island.
Arguments for the revolution
Equipped with what is called Soviet weapons to the teeth, Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces (RVS) quickly became the strongest in Latin America. By 1961, Castro's army had far outstripped all other Central and South American states combined in terms of armored power, having received 150 thirty-fours, 41 heavy IS-2s and several dozen SU-100 self-propelled guns. They played their role in 1961 during the defeat of the Gusanos landing in the Bay of Pigs. They say that Fidel himself with a well-aimed shot from the SU-100 hit one of the ships equipped with the CIA, and the T-34-85 did not allow the US Navy ships to evacuate the would-be counter-revolutionaries who were trying to escape from the island. Against this background, the five light tanks M41 "Walker Bulldog", with which the Yankees supplied those "Gusanos", looked like sheer nonsense. And the ousted Batista four years earlier was given as many as seven average Shermans, which eventually fell into the hands of the rebels (against whom they were intended). One of those Shermans with triumphant Fidel entering Havana can be seen on the Cuban one peso note.
In the future, the equipment of the Cuban army with Soviet and partly Eastern European military equipment only increased. The republic has acquired a strong combat aircraft and a "biting" navy with ship-to-ship missile weapons (the first in Latin America). The Soviet units withdrawn from Cuba at the end of the Cuban missile crisis left Fidel even such exotic equipment as the FKR-1 ground-to-ground class, taking only nuclear warheads for them. Cubans loved to carry these gifts at parades.
By the mid-80s, more than 200,000th RVS had over 600 tanks (according to some sources, up to 900) - from light PT-76 to medium T-62, hundreds of armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, powerful artillery of caliber up to 152 millimeters inclusive, tactical and anti-aircraft missile systems, about 170 fighters (MiG-17, MiG-19, MiG-21, MiG-23), three diesel submarines of Project 641, a couple (later three) specially designed in Zelenodolsk for export brand new patrol boats of Project 1159T and three dozen missile boats of projects 183R, 205 and 205U. Cuban troops demonstrated excellent training in Angola and Ethiopia, performing combat missions in the interests of the Pax Sovietica. In a word, it was still that splinter stuck in the ass of Pax Americana and much more durable than other allies in the Warsaw Pact (we will leave the question of what the content of Pax Sovietica turned out to be outside the scope of this article).
Along the way, Havana was solving its own problems by force. So, in 1977, the Dominicans did not fiddle too long with the release of the detained was a Cuban civilian ship: the afterburner flight of a dozen MiG-21s that had been granted from the Island of Freedom, which stunned their capital Santo Domingo, quickly revived the leadership of the banana republic.
Kulibins involuntarily
The collapse of the USSR was especially painful for the air and naval forces of Cuba. The lack of spare parts, components and simply modern models of military equipment was acutely felt by the ground forces.
But the Cubans are not giving up. Today, Freedom Island is not only a freak show of American autoclassics, but also a unique workshop of military equipment, also "vintage". It's amazing how Cubans manage to cope with the culture of weight in prepared products that are not at all designed for what the local Kulibins do with them. There is only one explanation: Soviet technique, two-core.
In measures for "rearmament", the emphasis is placed on extending the service life of elements of Soviet military equipment, suitable for use, despite the fact that the machines themselves have fallen into disrepair. For example, we are talking about combat modules BMP-1 (tower with 73-mm gun "Thunder" and ATGM launcher "Baby") and 100-mm tank guns D-10T, removed from medium tanks T-54 and T-55 … "Top" BMP-1 without any alteration is installed on the chassis of wheeled armored personnel carriers BTR-60PB. In the second case, lightweight turrets of local design with a 100-mm tank gun are mounted on the same base. By the way, this wheeled BMP practically repeated the Soviet experimental BMP GAZ-50, created in 1971 on the same chassis and with the same armament. The only difference is that the Malyutka anti-tank missile system used by the Cubans is not the original Soviet system, but, apparently, the Chinese modification of the HJ-73C or HJ-73D with semi-automatic guidance and a tandem warhead.
On some Cuban BTR-60PBs, the roof was completely cut off and a 23-mm twin anti-aircraft gun ZU-23-2 was installed in the troop compartment. Old armored personnel carriers of the open type BTR-152 are used in a similar way (this is no longer Cuban know-how, but a "self-made" modification of the 152nd, which is quite common in the countries of Asia and Africa).
Soviet military equipment began to undergo this kind of metamorphosis in Cuba for a long time - there is a photo of Fidel Castro in the prime of life against the background of an BTR-60P converted into a self-propelled gun with a Czechoslovakian 30-mm coaxial automatic anti-aircraft gun M53 / 59. Part of the BTR-60PB is equipped with a rotating twin of 37-mm automatic anti-aircraft guns.
The T-34-85 also adapts to various types of SPGs. These are self-propelled guns with a 100-mm KS-19 anti-aircraft gun on a rotating platform and two variants of 122-mm self-propelled howitzers based on the D-30A. In one case, the gun was installed in a tank turret with the armor cut off in front and on top, in the other, the turret was removed, and the gun was placed in an open wheelhouse similar to German self-propelled guns of the Second World War, created, in particular, on the basis of captured French tanks (something similar from D -30 and "thirty-four" were once made by the Syrians). Some of the Cuban T-34-85s were converted into 130-mm self-propelled guns with an openly mounted M-46. There is also an anti-aircraft version of the "thirty-four" with a 57-mm twin S-68 from the Soviet ZSU-57-2.
Two local modifications of the BMP-1 were noticed: a tank destroyer (a kind of Cuban "Ferdinand") with a 100-mm D-10T tank cannon and a self-propelled howitzer with a D-30A, also installed in the rear of the hull, but in an open top armored chamber. Improvised self-propelled guns supplemented a decent (by Latin American standards) fleet of Soviet-made self-propelled howitzers (40 122 mm Gvozdik and 152 mm Akatsy).
But that's not all. The Cubans liked the KrAZ-255B army trucks. A whole family of Jupiter self-propelled guns was created on their chassis. There are similar examples in history: for example, in the 30s, the 76-mm SU-12 on the chassis of the three-axle GAZ-AAA was adopted by the Red Army.
The first generation Jupiters are equipped with a 130-mm M-46 cannon and a 122-mm D-30A howitzer. In the second generation, the chassis itself underwent a significant alteration - it was made two-cab in the manner of MAZ-543. On the platforms of such "Jupiters" are installed both the M-46 and the Soviet 122-mm cannon A-19 of the 1931/1937 model, which received a second wind, in relation to the self-propelled version, reasonably equipped by the Cubans with a two-chamber muzzle brake of the D-30A model.
Another local development is a 120-mm mortar based on the BRDM-2. By the way, a very reasonable decision. You can't shoot that much from the back of a truck, but from a specially prepared BRDM-2 just right.
Increasing the maneuverability of artillery in such an original way, the Cubans did not forget about the anti-aircraft missile systems of the object air defense. They turned the semi-stationary S-75 and S-125 into self-propelled ones, placing missile launchers on the T-55 platform. For the self-propelled version of the S-125, a new transport-loading vehicle based on the PT-76 was also created. Here, it should be noted, the Cubans are not pioneers. The Chinese have created their own self-propelled tracked versions of the C-75 (HQ-2B on a special chassis), the C-125 - by the Poles (the Newa SC complex based on the T-55, very reminiscent of the Cuban one), and on the automobile platform they are available in North Korea (for example, C- 125 for KrAZ-255B).
Trawler Helicopter
The Soviet BM-21 Grad, BM-14 and BM-24 form the basis of rocket artillery. But there are also examples. The former self-propelled launcher of the Strela-1 anti-aircraft missile system (based on the BRDM-2) appears under the name "Canimar-57". mm unguided rockets S-5. Such use of "eres" is quite widespread in various kinds of conflicts, including on the territory of the former USSR.
The inimitable development of Cuba's RVS is the MLRS, which is a combination of an automobile chassis and an anti-submarine 212-mm 12-barreled rocket launcher RBU-6000 "Smerch-2". This miracle of technology, apparently, happened after the decommissioning of three ships of the 1159T project, each of which had two RBU-6000. So one can assume that the RVS have a battery of six such MLRS, even though there is still a stock of RSL-60 rocket depth charges, with which the Cubans are ready to harass a land enemy.
The exclusion from the fleet, apparently due to the technical condition of all Project 1159T frigates (one of them was sold after decommissioning to some private company that flooded it near the Cayman Islands for the amusement of diving enthusiasts) deprived the Cuban Navy of more or less large surface ships. But here, too, the cunning islanders have carried out "import substitution", having armed the 3200-ton large fishing trawler "Rio Damuji" of the Spanish construction of 1972. It has two single-container launchers P-20 anti-ship missiles (export version P-15U) taken from an outdated project 205U missile boat, an artillery mount with a 100-mm D-10T tank gun, a shipborne 25-mm twin anti-aircraft machine gun 2M3 and 12, 7 -mm machine gun DShK. On top of that, there is a helipad on the trawler. Of course, on the one hand, it turned out the devil knows what, and on the other, Cuba demonstrated one of the options for mobilizing the fishing fleet. Subsequently, realizing the futility of a tank gun for such a ship, the Cubans replaced it with a 57-mm twin AK-725 automatic gun mount removed from a decommissioned Project 206M hydrofoil torpedo boat (nine units were delivered to Cuba by the Soviet Union in 1979-1983).
An unexpected application was also found for the OTA-53-206M single-tube torpedo tubes dismantled from these boats. The Cubans installed a torpedo tube on a kind of catamarans made of motor boats (at least two of these "torpedo boats" are known). And observant foreigners reported that they saw an ultra-small submarine in the port of Havana. Considering the ties between Cuba and the DPRK, which has become skilled in the construction of such babies, maybe.
Of almost two dozen missile boats of projects 205 and 205U, donated to the USSR in 1972-1982, only six remain in the ranks of the Cuban Navy. The naval command decided to place the P-20 missile launchers removed from the decommissioned boats on trailers, equipping the coastal defense with such Bandera complexes (in Spanish), in addition to the existing Soviet self-propelled anti-ship missile systems "Rubezh".
In a word, the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces are not going to surrender their positions in the region. And when the urgent need for further weapon improvisations disappears, God knows.
