Page 299 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1600 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

breaking of alliances, divisions between moderates and to openly express his alliance with the USSR and defeat
radicals, postponement of elections, and the tightening of an invasion by U.S.-backed exiles at the Bay of Pigs in
power by those with the best access to violence. While April 1961. The agreement between the United States
large parts of the opposition to Batista had been moti- and the USSR following the October 1962 missile crisis
vated by hatred of the dictatorship, many among Castro’s guaranteed the regime’s longevity.
group also sought to address the social inequities ram- The next four decades saw the revolution proceed
pant in Cuba. While the island did possess a large (by through a series of stages. In the first, political authority
Latin American standards) middle class and Havana was further consolidated by Fidel Castro and the Cuban
appeared to be a first world city, the gulfs between white Communist Party. Until 1970, Cuba resisted the “Sovieti-
and black, rich and poor, and town and country were zation” of many aspects of the economy and the society,
massive. The revolutionary regime faced the classic but following the disastrous“ten million ton” sugar harvest
quandary of wishing to initiate dramatic social changes of that year, the regime’s autonomy appears to have
while respecting the constraints imposed by electoral declined. Over the next twenty years, Cuba behaved fairly
democracy. Led by the Castro brothers, the regime chose much like the standard Soviet satellite with two critical
to privilege the former. exceptions: It had a much more acrimonious relationship
By 1961, indications of a more socialist policy had with the United States, and it also followed an adventur-
produced the exile of large parts of the middle class and ous foreign policy, with Cuban military involvement in
the active opposition of the United States. Having estab- Angola and Ethiopia and considerable aid presence in
lished his control over the armed forces, Castro was able many parts of LatinAmerica andAfrica.The policies of the
regime remained fairly stable
and the population enjoyed an
increasing standard of living (at
least as measured in education,
health, and basic nutrition, if
not consumer goods).Certainly
by the mid-1980s, the revolu-
tion was widely admired as a
social success (if a political and
economic disappointment).The
one major crisis involved the
departure of over 100,000
Cubans from the port of Mariel
in the spring of 1980.
Following the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991, the
island entered the euphemisti-
cally named “Special Period.”
This saw declines in pro-
duction and consumption by
nearly half and a real social
Che Guevara remains a powerful revolutionary symbol around crisis with hunger not un-
the world. Here, a banner with his photo is on sale in Athens, common by 1993–1994. The
Greece, in 2003.