The Cuban Revolution

Introduction

The Cuban Revolution was a historic event which not only affected the people of Cuba but also people from Latin America and the world. The main leaders, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara among others, have been characters that will live forever in the memories of everyone. This revolution was carried out after numerous clashes between the army of Batista and Fidel Castro's revolutionaries, giving victory to the latter, in January 1959, when Fidel arrived in Havana and was appointed Prime Minister.

Discussion

Why a revolution in Cuba?

The Cuban Revolution was the response of the Cuban people to the contradictions created in Cuban society by the neocolonial model imposed by the United States. Politically, the expression of this model was the Batista dictatorship; economically, it was underdevelopment; in the social sphere, it was a rate of unemployment close to 20 percent and a high level of underemployment; internationally, it was the absence of an independent foreign policy; and culturally, it was an increasing crisis of cultural identity threatened by images of the “American way of life”. When the United States responded aggressively with sabotage, breaking off diplomatic relations, launching the invasion of the Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) in 1961, and establishing the blockade in 1962, Cuba had no choice but to join the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), which served as an alternative market for the island as well as supplying the weapons necessary for its defense (Schoultz, pp. 40 - 50). The economic crisis that Cuba faced in 1989 was the result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting disruption of Cuba's commercial links with Comecon and the difficulty of finding alternative markets. While Cuba did recover during the 1990s—although with great suffering—from this failure of “real socialism,” it did not achieve a gross domestic product (GDP) similar to that of 1989 until 2006. The main challenge now is building a new model of socialism in order to prevent a return to dependent capitalism and neocolonial status. This will require not only the adoption of practical policies but also a great debate concerning the transformation of Cuban socialism (Perez, pp. 57-93).

A number of possible scenarios can be imagined, among them (1) transformation toward a twenty-first-century socialism consistent with the historical roots of the Cuban Revolution, (2) immobility, (3) a socialist market economy such as those of China and Vietnam, (4) collapse and implosion in the style of the Soviet Union and the countries of the Eastern Bloc and/or internal revolt, and (5) the overthrow of the government because of a military invasion by the United States. The most probable of these scenarios are 1, 2, and 3, but we cannot rule out (Fleites-Lear, pp. 31-56). The proposals in this paper are aimed at making possible scenario; if they are not adopted, I think that scenario 2 or 3 will prevail. The fundamental features of the twentieth-century socialism of the former Soviet Union and the East European countries were state capitalism, central economic planning, and political ...