Reply #3: They still run maneuvers in the Everglades.

[Mika]

They train children to pick up hate where they left off.

Alpha Males
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/Issues/1998-08-27/news/feature.html

Hustling down a dirt road surrounded by miles of farmland, Leslie Fernandez struggles to keep a rifle balanced on her shoulder. Dressed in bell-bottom jeans and a white T-shirt, she catches up with her fellow commandos -- five men dressed in military fatigues and also toting weapons.

"What kind of gun is this?" she asks Jesus Hoyos, who is leading the team.
"That's an M-1," Hoyos explains curtly. He's cradling a semiautomatic Bushmaster AR-15.

The group stops and huddles. "This is the rally point," Hoyos tells them. He reviews the plan: Leslie will remain behind to guard the backpacks under cover of darkness while the men sneak into a Cuban military base and shoot at two MiGs parked in a large grassy field. "Let's go," Hoyos says quietly.

Leslie watches the men creep down the edge of the road -- two in front, three behind -- then disappear through an open metal gate surrounding a small military camp. Moments later machine guns pop. They pop again, faster. "Retreat! Retreat!" Hoyos shouts. The commandos pull back, turning and firing as they go. They scurry down the road and regroup, breathless, at the rally point, where Leslie has been patiently waiting. "Okay, enemy troops have the beach blocked," Hoyos pants. "Contingency plan A -- the helicopter -- was shot down. So we have to walk five miles to a point where they're going to pick us up at 0600."

But there are no enemy soldiers, no MiGs in the field. Only stacks of old tires. The bullets are blanks. It is not night, but Sunday morning. And Leslie is no companera; she's an eleven-year-old who has never been to Cuba and scarcely speaks Spanish. Her father Mario, one of the fighters, left the island during the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Though Leslie thinks she would be willing to join a raid on Cuba when she gets older, she's still a bit uncertain about logistics -- like how she would get there. "I have no idea," she shrugs. "Maybe by boat." But she does have a firm grasp of the objective. "Fidel Castro shouldn't be there, treating those people like he does. He's just really bad to them," she declares. She learned to shoot semiautomatic weapons earlier this year.

Then the thoughtful, articulate sixth-grader at Miami Lakes Middle School confesses the real reason she attends the Sunday training sessions: "I really don't have anything to do at home, so I decided to come here to learn about Cuba and how they train and stuff."

Welcome to Rumbo Sur -- a secluded South Dade training camp belonging to Miami's best-known anti-Castro militia, Alpha 66. The group's secretary general, 78-year-old Andres Nazario Sargen, says Leslie is far too young to go on a real commando raid. But in the next few months he plans to recruit about twenty new troops in their late teens and early twenties.