Cuba to Get 13,000 ‘Night Vigilantes’

Neighborhood committees throughout Cuba will select 13,000 men and women to guard their blocks from so-called anti-social elements during the early morning hours, the official newspaper Granma said Thursday.

The local committees for Defense of the Revolution will choose the guards, to be called “night vigilantes,” from among housewives and retired persons on a neighborhood basis, the paper said.

The guards, 7,000 of whom will work in Havana, will be on watch from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m., the paper said. It gave no reason for the new move.

The main task of the committees, which have been organized on every city block since a year after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, is to watch for “counterrevolutionaries” and delinquents alike.