Cuba: Despite It All

Cuba fascinates as the small island that has resisted imperialist aggression for over 60 years. But how? In what way is this aggression expressed? What achievements has Cuban socialism brought forth, and what mistakes? A sober examination of the history of the Cuban Revolution and the development of socialist Cuba.

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“The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified. And the [American] government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger, that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition.” (Michael Parenti)[1]

Part 1: From Colony to Beet Republic

1. Colony and José Martí

Since 1895, the Spanish colony of Cuba had been waging a war of independence against its Spanish masters.
In the preceding decades, Spain had lost the Dominican Republic and several other colonies to independence – at the time of the Cuban War of Independence, only Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines remained under full Spanish rule.

Even while Spain was still striving to retain the Dominican Republic, resistance to Madrid’s reign of terror was growing in Cuba. For Spain, Cuba served as the most important sugar and tobacco exporter among the colonies – on the plantations where the majority of Cubans worked, slavery, tied to social and economic apartheid, was the norm.

The whites and Afro-Cubans on the island were thus both subject to the colonial masters based in Madrid and their administrative officials, but they were also divided among themselves by slavery, property rights, and (limited) opportunities for education.

It was under these conditions that the writer, poet, revolutionary, and later national hero José Julián Martí y Pérez, known as José Martí, grew up. From his early youth, Martí wrote poems and essays for Cuban independence and, during the “Ten Years’ War,” in which Cuban plantation owners attempted to win independence from Spain, he sided with the Cuban petty-bourgeois freedom fighters.

At the age of 16, in 1869, he published his first journal, “La Patria Libre,” which he dedicated to the “independence of Cuba” and in which he denounced the brutality of Spanish rule. For his political writings, he was arrested by the Spanish colonial authorities, sentenced to hard labor, and subsequently deported to Spain.

Martí continued his education in Spain and worked tirelessly there for Cuban independence; in Spain he wrote immensely popular political essays and poems and became a central organizer of the Cuban exile community. In New York, in 1892, he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party (“Partido Revolucionario Cubano”), which was primarily responsible for planning the next armed uprising, the Cuban War of Independence starting in 1895.

Awareness of the US Threat

In his famous letter to the Mexican lawyer and close friend of Martí, Manuel Mercado, Martí wrote at the beginning of the War of Independence in 1895:

“I am in daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty for I understand that duty and have the courage to carry it out-the duty of preventing the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence, and from empowering with that additional strength our lands of America. All I have done so far, and all I will do, is for this purpose. I have had to work quietly and somewhat indirectly, because to achieve certain objectives, they must be kept under cover; to proclaim them for what they are would raise such difficulties that the objectives could not be attained.”[2]

Thus, Martí and his comrades-in-arms were already aware at the beginning of the independence efforts that the United States would not leave an independent Cuba in peace if they managed to free themselves from Spain.

As early as 1854, the USA had published the “Ostend Manifesto,” expressing the desire to buy Cuba from Spain:

“Under no probable circumstances can Cuba ever yield to Spain one per cent on the large amount which the United States are willing to pay for its acquisition.”[3]

Thus, the USA, by pressuring and later making war on Mexico a few decades earlier, had already threatened Mexico’s fresh independence from Spain and extorted vast land and sea territories (including present-day California, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico).

The Cubans, organized under the plantation petty bourgeoisie, had already tried in vain with the Ten Years’ War (see above) and the “Little War” (“Guerra Chiquita,” 1879-1880) to win their independence from Spain and end the social misery associated with colonial rule. In the years between 1878 and 1895, known in Cuba as the years of the “Fruitful Truce,” the poor, slaves, and workers of Cuba rose up in a further 300 uprisings and conspiracies[4] – without success, but fruitful:

“…of the approximately 1.6 million inhabitants Cuba had at the beginning of this war, about 200,000 were Spaniards, 500,000 were Blacks and Afro-Cubans, about 800,000 were white Cubans or Creoles, and an undetermined number were Chinese, Jamaicans, Haitians, and others. The Spaniards, with some notable exceptions, particularly within the clergy, remained loyal to Spain and rejected the revolution of the Cubans. The Blacks were, apart from isolated exceptions, enthusiastically united in supporting the rebels, as they had been promised the abolition of slavery and sensed that the rebellion against Spain would ultimately triumph… They hoped that under the new regime they would have living conditions similar to those in the neighboring Republic of Haiti… They dreamed of a free Cuba…” (Mgar)[5]

1.1 “Get Out of Here!”

On February 24, 1895, insurgents gathered in Matanzas, Granma, Guantánamo, Holguín, and Baire (the uprising is known in Cuba as the “Cry of Baire”) under the unification of the Cuban Revolutionary Party founded by José Martí in exile.

Martí, along with other revolutionaries like Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, took on the coordination between the various participating factions during the uprisings, but they were far from the only, let alone the only significant, insurgents – the Cuban cry for independence was carried by the workers, slaves, and poor of Cuba and was, in its composition, a cross-class mass movement.

The “Manifesto of Montecristi,” written by Martí and Gómez as an official declaration of war and leadership plan for the Revolutionary Party, proclaimed the following to the insurgents:

“This war will not be a cradle of tyranny or of disorder, which is alien to the proven moderation of the Cuban spirit. Those who promoted it, and who can still raise their voices and speak, affirm in its name, before the patria, their freedom from all hatred, their fraternal indulgence toward timid or mistaken Cubans, their radical respect for the dignity of man, which is the catalyst of combat and the cement of the republic, and their certainty that this war can be conducted in a way that contains the redemption that inspires it, and the ongoing relations in which a people must live among others, alongside the reality of what war is.”[6]

At the core of the document was anti-racism, which was to fully unfold in the revolutionary struggle:

“The revolution, with all its martyrs and generous subordinate warriors, denies indignantly, as the long experience of those in exile and those on the island during the truce denies, the slanderous notion of a threat by the Negro race, which has been wickedly employed to the benefit of those who profit from the Spanish regime to stir up fear of the revolution.”[7]

Under the military leadership of Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, the Revolutionary Army pursued a strategy of rapidly expanding the front, strategically attacking the economic foundations of Spanish rule, particularly sugar production, without descending into indiscriminate destruction.

The war quickly reached a national dimension. Spain’s clinging to the colony was severe: mass displacements, destruction of crops, and a repressive apparatus that routinely tortured and executed. After Martí’s death in May 1895 and Maceo’s death in 1896, the military conflict intensified further. Spain was increasingly economically and politically exhausted, while Cuban troops continued the war despite limited resources.

With the policy of “Reconcentración” (Reconcentration), General Valeriano Weyler, responsible for Cuba, moved about 400,000 peasants into concentration camps from 1896 onwards to deprive the Cuban resistance of its support among the peasantry and to interrupt the rebels’ food supply. At least 10% of all Cubans died in the “Reconcentrados,” equivalent to approx. 225,000 people[8], some sources speak of up to 400,000. The “Cuban Holocaust”[9], through its systematic starving of the Cuban population, is considered the origin of the 20th century’s concentration camps:

“Cuban historians have long argued that the mass death in the fortified villages of Cuba occupied by Spanish troops anticipated the suffering of European camp inmates in the age of the world wars. Together with the British concentration camps in the South African War (1899-1902), the reconcentración in Cuba is now widely regarded as the origin of modern concentration camps.” (idw)[10]

Change of Rule: US Capital Arrives

For the United States, the “Reconcentrados” offered an opportunity to convince the American civilian population to intervene in the war. With the explosion of the US battleship “Maine” in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, which killed 259 American sailors, the intervention of the United States began.

The USA blamed Spain for the disaster and declared war on them a few weeks later – the American government under President McKinley pursued both economic and strategic interests: Cuba was an important sugar and tobacco producer and was geographically favorable for US expansion plans in the Caribbean.

Moreover, many of the plantations (approx. 16%[11]) that were specifically targeted by the rebels belonged to Americans, who exerted massive domestic political pressure on the US government to intervene in the war.

Through the reporting of the yellow press, the course for war was already set domestically:

“William Randolph Hearst [largest US media tycoon and pioneer of the yellow press, KP] understood that a war with Cuba would not only sell his papers, but also move him into a position of national prominence. From Cuba, Hearst’s star reporters wrote stories designed to tug at the heartstrings of Americans. Horrific tales described the situation in Cuba – female prisoners, executions, valiant rebels fighting, and starving women and children figured in many of the stories that filled the newspapers. But it was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor that gave Hearst his big story – war. After the sinking of the Maine, the Hearst newspapers, with no evidence, unequivocally blamed the Spanish, and soon U.S. public opinion demanded intervention.” (Hugh Rockoff)[12]

Besides the media campaign to justify an intervention in Cuba, the intervention was a very conscious decision to expand the American sphere of influence – that sounds obvious today, but it wasn’t at the time:

“During the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, Theodore Roosevelt in the Navy Department and his allies in Congress, especially Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, saw the ability of the United States to project its naval power by building ships, constructing an isthmus canal, and acquiring colonies and naval bases, as crucial to American prosperity in an increasingly imperialist world.” (Hugh Rockoff)[13]

With the intervention in Cuba, the United States was now in an open war with Spain, which was to play out not only in Cuba but also in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam.

Lenin described the Spanish-American War as the “most important milestone of imperialism as a period,” i.e., as a caesura marking the beginning of “open imperialism” as the highest stage of capitalism[14]. This realization was probably so obvious that most bourgeois historical narratives also acknowledge it today:

“The economic influence of the USA in Cuba was enormous. Many sugar and tobacco plantations as well as iron ore mines were under American domination. The constant fighting and battles impaired the once flourishing trade relations of the USA with Cuba. Imports from Cuba at the end of 1896 had fallen by 34 million dollars compared to 1894. The United States no longer wanted to watch as their economic interests in Cuba seemed to stagnate further and threaten to decline.”[15]

However, hostilities did not begin immediately in Cuba, but in May with the naval battle in Manila Bay, where the obsolete Spanish Pacific fleet was crushingly defeated.

In June 1898, American troops finally landed on Cuban soil and launched an offensive against the Spanish colonial forces. The US forces were far superior to the Spanish troops in terms of technical equipment as well as logistics and fighting morale. On July 3, 1898, the Spanish Atlantic fleet was decisively defeated in the naval battle off Santiago, which greatly weakened the Spanish will to defend the island – parallel to the naval battles, American troops conquered strategically important areas on the Cuban mainland.

The military superiority of the USA and the weakness of Spain, which was politically and economically battered by the four-front war, led to a quick end to hostilities. The war ended with the Treaty of Paris in December 1898, in which Spain ceded control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States.

The fear of the revolutionaries around Martí, that the United States would not leave freedom to such a favorably located Caribbean state, proved correct.

2.1 Sugar Beet Republic

What follows will sound almost absurd from today’s perspective, for various reasons, but it’s actually true:

The intervention in Cuba was so controversial in the US Congress that the previously expansionist faction around Henry Teller would not agree to the invasion without first establishing that…

“We [the USA] have no intention [of] conquering this island,” and we “must make it clear to the world, so that no European government can claim we are doing this for the purpose of self-aggrandizement or to increase our territorial possessions.”[16]

Thus the “Teller Amendment” was created as an addition to the war authorization: it clearly stipulated that the United States would not annex Cuba – The USA thus consciously presented itself as a liberator and not as a new colonial power (simultaneously they annexed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico).

As William R. Adams and James W. Cortada correctly state in their essay “The Teller Amendment: Idealism Or Realism,” the Teller Amendment was not an expression of a sudden anti-imperialism on the part of some US congressmen, but very precise lobbying from the (no joke) sugar beet lobby:

“Although America’s stake in Cuban sugar was considerable and constantly expanding, mainland sugar beet producers opposed any suggestion of annexation because this would bring Cuban sugar within the tariff wall. If Cuba joined the United States, reasoned domestic producers, the island would prove stiff competition to the sugar beet farmers. Sugar beet interests, politically more powerful than the cane sugar producers in the United States, maintained a large lobby in Washington as well as in key state capitals during the critical period of 1895-1898.28 In states such as Colorado, Louisiana, and Florida, sugar lobbyists were able to force politicians to consider seriously blocking Cuban annexation.”[17]

Thus, the United States occupied Cuba until 1902 and developed a form of political and economic dependence that formally maintained the appearance of national sovereignty, but was in fact characterized by deep integration into the structures of US capital.

Building Dependency

Economically, the dominance of the USA over the pseudo-sovereign Cuban republic manifested in the rapid expansion of American investments, which led to a massive concentration of capital, particularly in infrastructure and sugar cultivation, thereby pushing formerly independent Cuban producers into the role of dependent tenants or wage laborers. The introduction of the so-called “centrales” as highly capitalized production centers in the sugar sector was the main driver of this development, as their high fixed costs and constant need for raw materials could only be managed through the availability of large capital, which accelerated the displacement of smaller producers and fundamentally changed the island’s ownership structures.

The political flanking of this economic transformation found its institutional expression in the forced adoption of the “Platt Amendment” (1901), which not only secured the US military intervention capability in Cuba but also ensured that any foreign policy orientation or financial commitment of the island state remained compatible with Washington’s interests:

“Until 1902, Cuba was under US military occupation, then it became formally independent. However, through an additional article in the constitution, Washington secured the right to intervene on the island at any time – which it then did extensively in the following years. The Cuban presidents are puppets, and the economy, based on the sugar monoculture, is dependent on trade with the USA.” (SZ)[18]

The first election is won by the (US-resident) American Tomás Estrada Palma for the presidency – he wasn’t particularly popular, his election victory was aided by the fact that no one else stood: his opponent, the people’s hero General Bartolomé Masó, left the presidential race in protest against the Platt Amendment and Cuba’s pseudo-autonomy.[19]

3. Ruckus and the Long Road to Batista

The leasing of Guantánamo, the clarification of the Isla de Pinos’ affiliation only in 1925, and the renewed US intervention from 1906 to 1909 made it clear that the supposedly sovereign state order always existed within the framework of those structures that served the interests of US capital and its strategic security policy.

The succession of early Cuban presidents – Gómez, Menocal, Zayas, and Machado – was closely linked to the role of sugar exports, whose fluctuations determined the political course and bound the power of the local elites into a permanent relationship of dependency on American importers. The peasant class on the sugar plantations consisted largely of former slaves, who continued to live in dependent relationships and were politically largely ignored.

Inspired by the ideas of José Martí, the “Partido Independiente de Color” (PIC, “Independent Party of Color”) was founded in 1908 by black veterans of the War of Independence. The reform efforts for the legal equality of the PIC were politically largely ignored, to the point where the PIC turned to the United States to seek help from them via the Platt Amendment. The ultra-reactionary US President Taft denied the request.

From 1912 onwards, the PIC revolted for the rights of Afro-Cubans: Around 3,000 PIC rebels, partly armed with support from Haitian solidarity activists, attacked the Cuban army in coordinated actions. In response, President Gómez alerted the United States, which sent thousands of US Marines to the predominantly black regions of Santa Clara and Oriente to protect the property of American investors.

The barely disguised, almost absurd final report of the US Marines on the suppression of the PIC revolt summarized the events as follows:

“Results: Though the rebels threatened to make life difficult for the American owners of property in Cuba, hoping that it would bring in the American military, nothing of consequence really happened. With the death in action of Estenoz [significant leader of the PIC], the Negro forces broke up into small factions and were defeated, most eventually returning to their homes, no better off than before. The Marines were on hand to protect American-owned property, which they accomplished as usual.”[20]

The uprising involved about 10,000 Afro-Cubans; the number of deaths is difficult to confirm; the Cuban army, in cooperation with the US Marines, spoke of 16, while local estimates were between 5,000 and 6,000[21]. However, the events in eastern Cuba had deeper roots. Cuba historian Louis A. Pérez describes it as follows:

“What occurred in eastern Cuba in 1912 was only marginally related to the armed movement organized by the Partido Independiente de Color. The Independiente protest set in motion a larger protest. The political spark ignited the social conflagration, and the countryside was set ablaze. Disorders quickly assumed the proportions of a peasant jacquerie: an outburst of rage and the release of a powerful destructive fury directed generally at the sources and symbols of oppression. As is often the case with peasant movements, the uprising possessed a formless and desultory character. It was a popular outburst, born of social distress and directed not at government but at local social groups and specific conditions of abuse.”[22]

3.1 Reform and Revenge

With the collapse of the financial system following the plunge in sugar prices in the early 1920s, the fragility of the sugar-based economic model became apparent. Although President Machado tried to create stability with infrastructure projects, he could not remedy the fragility of the dependent economic model. The increased reliance on US loans tied Cuba more closely to US interests and increased dissatisfaction among the population through massive cuts in the social budget.

When Machado clung to power after the end of his term, the ongoing tensions eventually led to massive general strikes, organized by the Communist Party of Cuba.

Public opinion turned decisively against Machado – Cuba’s largest magazine, Bohemia, wrote on August 6, 1933: “As long as you occupy the Palace, the Palace will be seen by the people as a symbol of misery, blood and mourning. When you abandon it definitively, the Palace will recover the prestige that corresponds to the First Magistrate of the Nation. Abandon the Presidency, General.”[23]

The overthrow of Machado was supported by both the Communist International (3rd International) and the United States. The latter were concerned that larger revolutionary movements, fueled by Machado’s massive unpopularity, could endanger American capital interests in Cuba.

The 100-Day Grau Government

It was unfortunate for the United States when the subsequent government under Professor of Medicine Grau San Martín, which emerged from the revolutionaries of 1933, actually began to pursue policies in the interest of workers and peasants.

Reformist though it was: women received the right to vote, the Platt Amendment was repealed, Cuban electricity was nationalized, the 8-hour workday and the minimum wage became mandatory for companies, agrarian reforms were announced, and “Cuban quotas” for foreign capitalists were passed, requiring an employer to employ at least 50% Cuban citizens.

At the same time, the government deported tens of thousands of Haitians living in Cuba to Haiti, to accommodate the racist sentiment of large parts of the Cuban population. Fidel Castro later wrote about this:

“The so-called revolution of 1933 was a movement of struggle and rebellious-ness against injustice and abuse. It called for the nationalisation of the electric company and other foreign enterprises, and for the nationalisation of employment [but] Tens of thousands of Haitians were mercilessly deported to Haiti. According to our revolutionary ideas, that was an inhuman thing to do.”[24]

The United States were happy about the socio-economically progressive politics of the revolutionaries under Grau – no, of course not: After only 100 days, the Grau government was overthrown by the United States with the help of a young, up-and-coming officer named Batista y Zaldívar.

Batista had previously managed to rise to the top of the military overnight in the chaos of the 1933 revolution. During the 100 days of the Grau government, he expanded his influence at a rapid pace to the point where the United States quickly realized that it was the young string-puller Batista they needed to bet on in the future:

“When the Revolutionary Committee called the general strike against dictator Machado in the fall of 1933, he placed himself at the head of the movement – with a trick: On the evening of September 3, he telephoned the non-commissioned officers on duty, whom he had previously won over to his side, with the slogan: ‘The sergeants are taking command.’ His people then locked the barracks and denied the officers access the next morning. The army was leaderless – and mutinied under Batista’s leadership.” (Spiegel)[25]

After Grau’s ouster, Batista acted as a nominally invisible but factually dominant actor, forming a clientelist network with military and elite circles based on the control of key resources and repressive institutions. Richard Gott describes the years 1934 to 1939 as a socio-economic counter-revolution against the reforms of the Grau government.[26]

Through his military and police monopoly on force, Batista guaranteed the maintenance and intensification of the US-capital-friendly ruling constellation by eliminating opposition forces and suppressing any emancipatory mobilization. The political oligarchy secured its power through a mixture of corruption, patronage, and repression. Between 1934 and 1940, seven different governments attempted to rule Cuba – but all were under the control of Batista, who pulled the strings behind the scenes:

“Batista manipulated events behind the scenes during the civilian govern­ments of the 1930s – seven followed in quick succession from 1934 to 1940 – before finally submitting himself for election, successfully, in October 1940.” (Richard Gott)[27]

The massive expansion of the repressive apparatus led to a wave of revolutionary excitement in the countryside: workers took over sugar mills, formed workers’ militias, and imprisoned managers. An intense class confrontation also unfolded in the cities: in Havana, there were open street battles between revolutionaries (often Communists and Anarchists) and reactionaries of the fascist “ABC” party. Afro-Cuban uprisings were also part of everyday life.

A US report summarized the situation as follows:

“Within less than a month the number of mills under labour control was estimated at thirty-six. Soviets were reported to have been organised at Mabay, Jaronú, Senado, Santa Lucia, and other centrales. At various points mill managers were held prisoners by the workers. Labour guards were formed, armed with clubs, sticks and a few revolvers, a red armband serving as uniform. Workers fraternised with the soldiers and police. […] Relief committees supplied food to the strikers and their families, and in some cases became subsistence commissions for the whole population of the strike area. At various points these committees allocated parcels of land to be cultivated by the field workers.”[28]

The revolutionary movements had strong international connections. Many Cuban anarchists and communists joined the fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In Cuba itself, the “Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista” supported the Spanish anti-fascists financially.

3.2 “One favorable Development”: The 1940 Constitution

Large sections of the workers in the maritime sector, railways, tobacco production, and gastronomy were organized in anarcho-syndicalist unions, which increasingly oriented themselves towards Marxism-Leninism after the October Revolution. In this environment, the Communist Party of Cuba (PSP) also gained importance.

At the end of the 1930s, Batista, lacking his own popular base, decided on a political alliance with the communists:

“At the end of the 1930s, Batista was a military man lacking a popular base. So he decided to create a political coalition with the help of the Partido Comunista Cubano. And the PCC entered into a pact with Batista. In exchange for its services and its support in the next presidential election, the PCC was handed the recently created Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC Cuban Confederation of Workers). […] Thus, for the first time in Cuba, there was a marriage of unionism and the state.” (Frank Fernández)[29]

The Constitution of 1940

In the context of these social struggles, the Constitution of 1940 emerged, which the Cuban historian and anarchist Frank Fernández called “one favorable development under Batista”[30]. It prohibited “racial segregation” [sic] for the first time, strengthened the role of the state in the economy and education, and formally abolished the US intervention right of the Platt Amendment. Through the new opportunities for political participation offered by the constitution, the two largest anarchist organizations, which had previously operated in semi-legality (the SIA and the FGAC), were able to merge into the “Asociación Libertaria de Cuba” (ALC), which had tens of thousands of members.[31]

In practice, however, property and power relations remained largely untouched: large landowners and US sugar companies continued to dominate, and land reforms remained half-hearted. Afro-Cubans remained marginalized despite the ban on segregation; apartheid-like practices persisted, and strategies of “lightening,” i.e., making the Cuban population “whiter,” continued to weaken their social position.[32]

The political culture also remained characterized by corruption and patronage. Even governments with revolutionary promises – such as the second government of Grau San Martín (1944–1948) – did not implement profound reforms. The government of Carlos Prío Socarrás (1948–1952) brought the disappointment over the reform weakness of the second Grau government to a head: Prío’s term is considered the peak of “Gangsterismo,” i.e., the interweaving of organized crime and politics. This manifested in street battles between rival, often state-funded gangs, as well as in an almost absurd extent of corruption (Carlos Prío’s brother Antonio Prío was, for example, intent on amassing a fortune through the import of various drugs, facilitated by the support of the head of the Cuban police).[33]

4. Gangsterismo and Batista

The close economic dependence on the USA persisted throughout the Grau and Prío years (1944-1952): American corporations controlled large parts of the sugar industry, diplomatic pressure and military cooperation prevented structural changes. The labor movement was subjected to increasing institutionalization, repression, and co-optation, while social improvements failed to materialize. The political organization of the opposition, in the nascent Cold War, was overshadowed by growing anti-communism, which convinced the United States to massively fund reactionary forces.[34]

This funding flowed, among other channels, through anti-communist unions that regularly carried out attacks on their communist counterparts. For Batista’s propaganda, these shootings were a godsend: The “lawlessness” and “Gangsterismo” under President Prío formed the breeding ground for Batista’s almost resistance-free total seizure of power in March 1952.

Batista, who had been able to consolidate almost complete control over the military beforehand, began his extraordinarily unspectacular coup in the early morning of March 10. It is almost questionable whether his control over the army was even necessary – Prío had become such an unpopular president due to the years of Gangsterismo that probably any janitor could have taken over state power without significant resistance from the army.

“Batista’s new regime was widely welcomed. After a perfunctory attempt to preserve the constitutional niceties, and to repeat his experience of the 1930s by finding a figleaf president, Batista appointed himself as chief of state. He invoked the name of Martí in his first public speech and associated himself with the popular aspiration for progress and democracy, and for peace and justice; it was an impeccable performance.” (Richard Gott)[35]

Before sunrise, he had the high-ranking officers stationed at Camp Columbia arrested and took control of Havana before daybreak. President Prío fled to the Mexican embassy and found asylum there.[36]

The initially bewildered United States recognized Batista’s rule within a few days – after all, they already knew him well. In return for recognition, Batista had to promise the United States to crack down harder on Cuban communists and anarchists. That was no problem for Batista: to show how serious he was, he soon founded, with US support, the “Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities” (BRAC), whose “father” would later be called US Ambassador Arthur Gardner.[37]

In his first public speech, Batista associated himself with the popular aspirations for “progress, democracy, peace and social justice” and invoked Martí’s name – In parallel, the new government increased the salaries of the police and army, while congressmen and senators continued to receive their emoluments.

If the average Cuban had slept through the coup, they probably wouldn’t have noticed at all that the rule was now a different one.

The military junta presented itself as the guarantor of an orderly state, which was supposed to prevent a regime of “Gangsterismo” and corruption that had destroyed institutions, created disorder, and reinforced the sinister plans of the previous government to illegally extend its term.

Although Batista declared his loyalty to the social-democratic constitution of 1940, he simultaneously suspended constitutional guarantees such as the right to strike. In April 1952, only a month after the coup, he announced a new constitutional law, the “Estatutos de Gobierno,” comprising a total of 275 articles, which was supposed to preserve the “democratic and progressive essence” of the 1940 constitution.

“Much of the constitution of 1940 was suspended, but most people, with the exception of the Ortodoxos, like Castro and his friends, gave the new government the benefit of the doubt. European and Latin American countries granted swift diplomatic recognition, followed […] by the United States.” (Richard Gott)[38]

In practice, fundamental rights, including freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, were automatically suspended for 45-day periods. The traditional political parties were suspended, and it was obvious that any eventual reorganization would only take place on Batista’s terms.

Part 2: Terror and the Cuban Revolution

1. “History Will Absolve Me”

The young lawyer Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, who had just opened a law firm in Havana, planned to run in the 1952 parliamentary elections for the reformist “Orthodox Party” (Partido Ortodoxo), which was the main opposition to Prío in the upcoming election. Batista’s coup put a stop to Castro’s plans.

Castro, like many other members of the Partido Ortodoxo, was early on disillusioned with Batista’s references to Martí and the slogans about sovereignty. The fact that the Orthodox of Cuba rejected Batista early on was linked to their fundamental political-religious concerns: they saw in the corruption, the ties to US capital, and the Gangsterismo under Prío the reasons for his rejection, but they placed great value on maintaining the 1940 constitution, which they understood as an instrument to free Cuba from its “plagues.”

The de facto abolition of this constitution by Batista meant for the Orthodox not only the removal of a fundamentally progressive document, but also the loss of an opportunity to improve the lives of Cubans through democratic participation – an idealistic contradiction (why would US capital tolerate being voted away?), which nevertheless paved the way for the coming resistance. Castro understood resistance to the abolition of that constitution as a continuation of the legacy of José Martí and declared violence necessary to avoid Batista’s restructuring of the state.

As early as the summer of 1952, Castro and a group of about 160 young men and some women spent months organizing weapons and training to resist Batista’s plans based on the right of resistance anchored in the 1940 constitution.[39]

The rebels divided into several task forces and tried, besides the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, to also take the civilian hospital and the Palace of Justice there – They were poorly armed, encountered a thousand well-equipped soldiers, and quickly failed. In the following days, over seventy of the insurgents were captured and many executed, while Fidel and his brother Raúl Castro were eventually taken into custody.[40]

The consequences of the failed attack profoundly and rapidly shaped Batista’s rule; bloody repression against any regime critics, with prisoners systematically shot and torture institutionalized, left the population shaken and massively restricted even the politically disinterested’s civil liberties.

Despite the defeat, Castro, through the trial and his defense speech “History Will Absolve Me,” transformed into a political symbol – Thus, the Moncada attack, although militarily unsuccessful, became the starting point of a dynamic that established Castro as the legitimate leader of a new generation of opponents. In his defense speech, which Fidel indeed used to defend his revolutionary ideals, he spoke as follows after a capable analysis of Cuban material conditions:

“It remains for the court to solve a more serious problem: the crime of the seventy murders [the executed rebels of the Moncada attack, KP], that is, the greatest massacre known to us; the guilty are at large and armed, so that they are a permanent threat to the lives of our citizens; if the full weight of the law does not fall on them, out of cowardice or because the court prevents it and does not resign en masse, then I am sorry for your honor, and I lament the unprecedented stain that will fall on the administration of justice. As for myself, I know that imprisonment will be harsher than ever for a man, aggravated by threats, by mean and cowardly rage, but I do not fear it, just as I do not fear the wrath of the wretched tyrant who took the lives of my seventy brothers. Condemn me; it does not matter; history will absolve me.”[41]

1.1 Concentration Camps and Torture

From the attack on the Moncada onwards, the excessive violence of the Batista regime took on a completely new dimension:

Even unavoidable injuries from accidents were used as a pretext for arrests and mistreatment to nip any resistance in the bud, while the cabinet on July 26, 1953, passed a decree without discussion that repealed Article 26 of the Prison Statute and thus released prison guards from their responsibility for the lives of prisoners, further eroding the legal basis for the arbitrariness of the security forces.

Just ten days later, on August 6, 1953, Batista decreed a tightened public order law that silenced any opposition press and effectively led to journalism in Cuba coming to an almost complete standstill, while constitutional guarantees were routinely suspended. Additionally, with the help of the “Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities” (BRAC), Batista issued a decree in 1954 allowing workers to be fired if they were suspected of being “Communists.”

The regime reactivated the “Voluntarios” paramilitaries under the name “Los Tigres” and, under the leadership of Rolando Masferrer, shaped them into the state’s harshest repressive force. At the same time, the strategy of “Reconcentration” was applied to peasant families in rural areas, modeled on General Weyler’s concentration camp methods from the 19th century, with the aim of depriving the rebels of any support from the impoverished peasant class.

The displaced peasants were forcibly removed from their homes, and people found in the cleared zones were often shot immediately or bombed from the air:

“Taking a leaf from Weyler’s book, Batista’s men began ‘re-concentrating’ the peasants on the lower slopes of the Sierra Maestra, clearing them from their fields and homes to prevent them making common cause with the guerrillas. Anyone found in the cleared area would be shot on sight. In a twentieth-century development of an old strategy, they could be bombed from the air.” (Richard Gott)[42]

The wave of repression intensified through constant arrests, with numerous people imprisoned and often executed for arson on sugar cane fields or the mostly arbitrary suspicion of bomb attacks.

In addition, the state ordered the closure of secondary schools and prohibited the mid-term congressional elections planned for 1957, reducing the political participation of the population to zero. In view of the countless atrocities documented after the Moncada attack, trust in Batista’s promise to hold those responsible for torture accountable waned, as the police itself grew into an almost autonomous and uncontrollable apparatus of violence.[43]

1.2 Granma and Guerrilla Consolidation

Shortly before (1955), Fidel met the young Argentine doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara, living in exile in Mexico, and convinced him to shift his revolutionary ambitions from Argentina to Cuba. Guevara joined Castro’s group and rose within a few months from field doctor to the number one guerrilla after Castro.

In the same year, Castro and his followers had founded the “26th of July Movement,” named after the date of the attack on the Moncada barracks, and besides numerous newcomers, they received financial support from ex-President Prío and the US-American Mafia, which, by financing the rebels, wanted to ensure that if they succeeded, they would continue to tolerate their casinos, nightclubs, and drug trade on the island.[44]

In December 1956, Castro landed with about 80 followers, who had previously received weapons and training in Mexico, on the yacht “Granma,” bought with Prío’s money, in eastern Cuba – where they were already expected by Batista’s troops:

“Fighter planes approached the 20-meter-long boat at low altitude, greeting the revolutionaries with bombs and gunfire. The few who survived the attack and dragged themselves barefoot to the beach were hunted there by the alerted army patrols. Several rebels died in the carnage, the survivors escaped into the jungle-overgrown mountains of the Sierra Maestra.” (Spiegel)[45]

The number of guerrilla casualties during the “Granma Operation” is unclear, but undoubtedly significant:

“There may at one moment in early December have been only twelve men in the Sierra around Fidel Castro, as invariably argued since, no doubt to suggest Christ-like parallels […] Camilo Cienfuegos in an interview published in Revolution, 4 January 1959, spoke of ‘only eight men being left’ after Alegria de Pio [disastrous battle during the Operation]. Ameijeiras in another interview published 8 January 1959 said, ‘of the eighty-two men who embarked on the Granma there remained not twelve – as Batista said – but nine.'” (Thomas Hugh)[46]

The intensification of repression through the ban on the 1957 mid-term elections and the closure of schools contributed to the revolutionary opposition – especially among students and peasants – gaining massive popularity.

Thus, despite the massive losses from the Granma debacle, Castro’s guerrilla steadily expanded its influence – With targeted actions against police and military posts and strategic propaganda, the movement increasingly gained support among the population, especially among peasants who suffered en masse under Batista’s “Reconcentration” policy.

2. The Eve of the Revolution

Batista continued to enjoy considerable support from the black and Afro-Cuban population, as he skillfully exploited his own Afro-Cuban heritage, openly cultivated Afro-Cuban traditions, and integrated blacks disproportionately into the army and police.

Although Castro tried to win over black revolutionaries, his Afro-Cuban followers were often disparagingly referred to as “white” by black soldiers – in the sense of a betrayal of the black cause – and Batista was seen as a “friend of the blacks.” Over time, the discourse of Batista support drew a clear social and structural line between the different population groups:

“Another reason for the lack of black support [for Castro] was the emotional and political investment that many blacks had made in the dictator. Batista was a mulatto [colonial term for people with one white and one black parent, KP], a lower-class figure in origin, much despised and ridiculed by the traditional white ruling elite. Blacks could identify with him: he too was barred from exclusive whites-only clubs; he participated openly in the rites of Santeria; and he gave support to the indigenous ceremonies popular with Afro-Cubans. Batista’s role as an outsider, an opponent of the traditional white political system that had never done much to support the blacks, made him something of a role model for many poor blacks. The percentage of blacks in Batista’s army and police force was well above the national.” (Richard Gott)[47]

2.1 Support and Shift in Mood

Nevertheless, the social climate in Cuba changed significantly from the second half of the 1950s onwards.
The wage and job cuts pushed by the government and employers met with resistance, while the corruption-suspected union leadership around Eusebio Mujal collaborated with the regime, thus contributing to the formation of informal worker structures to defend their interests, especially in the east of the island.

Ever larger sections of the working class recognized the hopelessness of reformist approaches and developed new forms of action: while the 26th of July Movement considered armed uprising as its strategy, the Communist Party relied on mass mobilizations; in this mix, a combination of trade union organizing and sabotage emerged with the “movimiento obrero beligerante.”

As a result of the Granma operation, the state intensified repression to a peak: with torture, death squads, and massive violence, especially in the east of the country, which, although leading to a decline in strikes, did not break the workers’ resistance but pushed it into new forms of action.

Consequently, the focus shifted from labor struggles towards sabotage and covert support for the guerrilla:

“As 1957 progressed, the predominant political and social question became the continued existence of the dictatorship. This change in priorities from the economic to the political, combined with the growing realization that small-scale industrial action was becoming impractical in the face of repression, resulted in increased workplace sabotage and clandestine aid to the rebels, while the frequency of local or sector-based strikes decreased through 1957 and early 1958. As part of this process, the MR-26-7 set up a committee, chaired by Ñico Torres, to organize the spread of clandestine revolutionary working-class organizations from Guantánamo and Santiago to the rest of the island, and at the same time building a support network for the rebels in the hills.” (Stephen Cushion)[48]

The Cuban elites and bourgeoisie continued to stand united behind the regime. Batista was seen as a guarantor of order and stability, supported by key economic interests, foremost the sugar industry and banking, as well as by foreign actors and influential social circles, namely the US Mafia, which turned Cuba into a casino and prostitution island for American businessmen in the 1950s.

The United States also maintained an appearance of normality: American businessmen continued to travel to Cuba, and as late as March 1957, US Navy Admiral Arleigh Burke visited Batista to advise him strategically in view of the increasingly hopeless situation.

Nevertheless, skepticism about Batista’s ability to break the workers’ movement also spread in Washington:

“Liberal American opinion, exemplified by the New York Times and progressive elements within the CIA, had looked favourably on Castro, while the Eisenhower government, as much from inertia as from conservatism or anti-Communism, had contentedly gone on supporting Batista, although with a growing lack of conviction. While continuing to supply weapons, it never provided enough to allow Batista a military victory, nor indeed would his army and airforce have been technically equipped to cope with an influx of more sophisticated weapons.” (Richard Gott)[49]

Smallest of Evils

For Batista, the very small number of rebels around Castro, never exceeding 2000[50], became the biggest problem in combating them. His army of 40,000 was inefficient, the police weak, voluntary support non-existent, and the officer corps blocked by Tabernilla and other corrupt generals.

Moreover, the small number of rebels prevented Batista from acting with full force in the mountainous Sierra Maestra region, where the guerrillas were quartered, without exposing his own propaganda (to the few who still believed it). Batista’s regime proved incapable of effectively confronting a well-entrenched revolutionary movement with peasant support. Nevertheless, by mid-1957, it was not necessarily doomed to collapse – guerrillas had existed for decades in other countries without victory. Decisive for Batista’s fall was not the Sierra alone, but above all the struggle in Havana, Santiago, and in Washington, where the role remained contradictory with the waning confidence in Batista:

“After just two years in the mountains, Castro had dominated his rivals elsewhere and was on the verge of victory. He had been fortunate in his field commanders, a mere bunch of amateurs two years earlier. Guevara, Cienfuegos and his brother Raúl had all shown exceptional qualities of leadership and strategic vision and were rewarded by the affection and loyalty of their men. Castro had also been fortunate, or perhaps skilful, in ensuring that United States policy towards his guerrilla band had remained divided and uncertain.” (Richard Gott)[51]

2.2 General Strike and Popular Front

In the course of the armed conflict, marked by Castro’s growing guerrilla campaign in the Sierra Maestra and the steadily increasing number of attacks and acts of sabotage against state organs and economic institutions, the majority of the population joined Castro’s emerging victorious side, as Batista’s military defeat became increasingly obvious and inevitable.

Besides the obvious military defeat, the excessive violence pushed the majority of Cubans, of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds, towards the opposition – arbitrary police executions, mass “disappearances” of any opponents, and arbitrary deportations of entire villages to the “Los Tigres” concentration camps became ubiquitous (see above):

“Whatever the wider doubts about the exact state of the economic and societal crisis in Cuba in the 1950s, the repression of the Batista years was a reality that provoked cries of revenge as well as demands for a better future. The struggle against the dictator, for most activists in the July 26 Movement, was motivated as much by a desire to get rid of a foul oppressor as by hopes of a better society to come. This was why Castro initially received such wide support across the deep divisions in Cuban society. When visiting Princeton in April 1959, Castro attributed the success of the Revolution to the widespread ‘fear and hatred of Batista’s secret police’ […].” (Richard Gott)[52]

Failed General Strike

On the morning of April 9, 1958, an unnamed fighter of the 26th of July Movement (MR-26-7) called for a “revolutionary general strike” over Cuba’s radios:

“Attention Cubans, this is the 26th of July Movement calling to a Revolutionary General Strike! Today is the day of freedom, the day of the Revolutionary General Strike. Forward, Cubans, as from this moment the final struggle begins in all of Cuba that will only end with the overthrow of the dictatorship! Workers, students, professionals, bosses, join the revolutionary general strike, from this moment.”[53]

Preliminary deliberations for the general strike began after students had led a successful education strike a few months earlier – Faustino Pérez, third in command of the MR-26-7, thus saw the time ripe for a general strike that would usher in the revolution. Preparations for the strike, namely the planned takeover of the unified trade union CTC, procurement of weapons and logistics, and coordination with relevant worker representatives in key industries, were made in advance – the rebels were ready.[54]

Nevertheless, the general strike failed miserably: In Havana, preparations and communication were lacking, many workers were surprised by the sudden call and did not feel responsible for the action. The MR-26-7 had little experience in trade union work, pursued a military view of the strike, and often ignored concrete class-based demands, such as those raised by the Communist Party. Instead of relying on the self-activity of the workers, they placed excessive emphasis on sabotage and armed actions, overestimated their own strength, and ultimately failed due to the military superiority of the regime.

Moreover, the distrust of the anti-communist members of the MR-26-7 towards the PSP led to a lack of unity in the opposition; joint strike committees were not formed, and the PSP was excluded from most of the planning.

Batista reacted as expected; police and army shot indiscriminately at protesting civilians, prominent MR-26-7 activists, namely Antonio Sánchez, were executed – Batista’s police chief explicitly ordered not to take any “wounded or prisoners.”[55] Nevertheless: From the failure of the April strike grew the insight that closer cooperation between MR-26-7 and PSP was necessary, which laid the foundation for later successes.[56]

3. Strategic Reorientation and Victory

The failed April strike marked a turning point for the Cuban Revolution and forced the rebels to fundamentally rethink their strategy. It became clear to both the MR-26-7 and the PSP that their previous tactics were insufficient and that the relationship between the two needed to be readjusted.

Faustino Pérez, who had borne overall responsibility for the strike, later explained that the success of the 1957 education strike had created a misjudgment of the balance of power and thus significantly contributed to the failure. The April strike showed that the “guiding will of the center” could not be effective without the broad participation of the masses.[57]

At a meeting in Los Altos de Mompié in the Sierra Maestra on May 3, 1958, the revolutionary leadership drew the consequences from this failure – On the one hand, guerrilla warfare was established as the primary form of resistance; on the other hand, the rebels decided to deepen their cooperation with the Communist Party within the workers’ movement: The rapprochement between MR-26-7 and PSP eventually led to the founding of the Frente Obrero Nacional Unido (FONU), which organized two large workers’ congresses in rebel-controlled areas. These congresses gave the movement additional legitimacy in workers’ circles and prepared a general strike that was to take place at the start of the next sugar harvest in January 1959 to achieve the greatest possible economic impact.

In parallel, the rebels achieved far-reaching military successes. By August 1958, they repelled Batista’s large-scale “Summer Offensive,” which not only strengthened the morale of the opposition but also confirmed the MR-26-7 as the leading force in the fight against the regime. Raúl Castro opened a second front in the Sierra Cristal in March 1958, while Juan Almeida held a third front north of Santiago for the first time.[58]

Guevara advanced into the central province of Las Villas, and Camilo Cienfuegos was sent to the western province of Pinar del Río. These military advances, combined with the growing confidence of the population, led more and more workers to pledge their active support to the rebels. By the end of 1958, David Salvador estimated the membership of the “Sector Obrera” of the MR-26-7, i.e., those members who represented their respective workplaces at the FONU congresses, at 15,000.[59] Added to this were the fighting units, which never exceeded 3000 even at the time of the revolution’s victory. How many sympathizers the MR-26-7 had would become apparent in the upcoming general strike.

3.1 Batista’s Flight

As early as March 1958, the United States had stopped their arms shipments to Batista, and by the end of the year they completely withdrew their political backing. Eventually, the Cuban economic elite also turned away from Batista. Large landowners and businessmen, who had originally supported him to secure their profits, now realized that he could neither crush the massive popularity of the rebels nor secure their economic order. As sugar magnate Julio Lobo put it: “It didn’t matter to us who got rid of Batista, as long as someone did it.”

In this isolation and after military defeat, Batista fled on December 31, 1958, with his family and confidants from Camp Columbia airfield into exile in the Dominican Republic to dictator Trujillo. In response to Batista’s flight, the rebels immediately called a general strike to prevent a possible military coup that could have prevented the MR-26-7 from taking power. On the morning of January 1, 1959, Fidel called on workers over Radio Rebelde from Santiago de Cuba to follow the rebels’ call, occupy all union offices, and bring the country to a complete standstill. The strike was instantly followed nationwide; public life came to a halt, and the remaining army generals had to abandon their coup plans.

On January 2, Fidel Castro triumphantly entered Santiago de Cuba, while Camilo Cienfuegos reached Havana and occupied the most important military camp, Camp Columbia. In parallel, revolutionary union leaders Ñico Torres and Conrado Bécquer flew to Havana to take control of the headquarters of the previously pro-government trade union federation CTC in the name of the M-26-7. On the same day, the FONU called for a mass rally in Parque Central to support the revolution.

From a balcony in Santiago, Castro announced the victory of the revolution on the evening of January 2: “The Revolution begins now […] This time it will not be like 1898, when the North Americans came and made themselves masters of our country. This time, fortunately, the Revolution will truly come to power.”[60]

A few hours later, Castro had dinner with the US consul and his wife[61]; what was discussed at this dinner is unknown – it is, however, quite clear that the United States, at the time of the revolution, still hoped they could continue to represent their interests on the Caribbean island – How one would have liked to be a fly on the wall then.   

On January 3, Che Guevara arrived in Havana and took over the La Cabaña fortress at the harbor entrance. Throughout the strike week from January 1 to 8, the general strike paralyzed normal life and the economy, while M-26-7 militias secured the streets of Havana and prevented looting or lynching. During this time, Fidel Castro traveled triumphantly across the island towards the capital. Finally, on January 8, he entered Havana, held a historic speech at Camp Columbia, and led another mass rally of workers. Having secured his power, he ordered the formal end of the general strike and the return of the population to their workplaces.

Steve Cushion summarizes the path here in his work “A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution” as follows:

“From Batista’s coup in March 1952 until the fraudulent elections of November 1954, little changed from the days of Batista’s predecessor, President Carlos Prío Socarrás. The fall in the price of sugar caused a crisis in the economy, and from the end of 1954 until the end of 1956, there was a concerted effort by the government and the employers to increase productivity by reducing workers’ wages and decreasing staffing levels. This was achieved by a combination of collaboration with the trade union bureaucracy and relatively low levels of state repression, with police habitually beating workers with clubs and dousing them with fire hoses but with very few deaths. The arrival of the Granma and the start of the rebel insurgency was a crisis for the regime, whose approach changed in early 1957 as the forces of the state began to confront the armed guerrillas in the mountains. From this point in time, the regime used death squads, routine torture, and ‘disappearances’ in an attempt to make organized resistance cower to its rule. April 1958 proved to be a crisis point for the rebels as their attempt at a general strike failed disastrously. This crisis caused both the Movimiento Revolucionario 26 de Julio (MR-26-7, Revolutionary Movement 26 of July) and the communist Partido Socialista Popular (PSP, Popular Socialist Party) to rethink their tactics and their relationship with each other. It also gave increased confidence to the government and, during the summer and autumn of 1958, Batista launched a full-scale military attack on the rebels in their mountain strongholds. The failure to destroy the rebel army was the regime’s final crisis and created a situation in which a successful general strike would force the dictator from office.”[62]

Part 3: The Socialist State of Cuba

The Cuban Revolution began with the claim to enforce political independence and social justice. It drew on a broad spectrum of ideas, encompassing both reformist and radically transformative currents.

While some supporters merely demanded an end to corruption and authoritarian arbitrariness and a return to constitutional order, others pushed for profound social changes that challenged the foundations of bourgeois society itself.

In the early years, a strongly voluntarist ethos characterized development: redistribution measures such as land reform and rationing combined with comprehensive popular mobilization, for example through the nationwide literacy campaign, the establishment of mass organizations, and the fundamental reform of the healthcare system:

“The July 26th Movement began its experiment at governance on January 1st, 1959, with an enormous popular support and legitimacy. Its diverse supporters, though, had very different ideas about what kind of new system should replace the old. Some wanted merely an end to Batista’s corrupt rule and a restoration of constitutional order, with little fundamental social change. Others saw a more revolutionary opportunity in the collapse of the old order and the overwhelming popular mandate behind the new government. Could a revolution overcome dependency, poverty, and underdevelopment? Could it create a new society, and a new man?” (Aviva Chomsky)[63]

Within the first months after the revolution, it increasingly moved towards a line of national self-determination and economic control. The MR-26-7 and the communist PSP moved closer together and finally merged in 1965 to form the Communist Party of Cuba (Partido Comunista de Cuba, PCC).

Within this process, from 1959, Ernesto “Che” Guevara first as President of the National Bank and later as Minister of Industries took on the task of developing an independent economic strategy. The goal was to overcome Cuba’s historical dependence on sugar exports and create a new, independent economic foundation through industrialization.

In the 1970s, a deeper institutionalization followed the Soviet model: Cuba joined COMECON in 1972, developed five-year plans from 1975 onwards, and oriented itself towards a centralized planning model understood as an instrument of economic modernization. The first party congress of the PCC in 1975 and the constitution of 1976, which created a system of “People’s Power,” consolidated the socialist state-building and simultaneously created institutional structures for controlling opposition and political deviation.

Immediately after the victory of the revolution, hundreds of soldiers and functionaries of the Batista regime were executed by firing squads in summary trials. The death penalty, nominally abolished in 1940, was reintroduced for “political crimes” to enforce “revolutionary justice.” Anarchists and independent union leaders were pushed out of leadership, branded as “hostile agents of Yankee imperialism,” imprisoned, or forced into exile. The trials against war criminals of the Batista regime were held in Havana’s sports stadium and broadcast live on television. The sight of the “passionate masses” in the post-revolutionary persecution of Batista functionaries convinced many “foreign correspondents”[64] to leave the country in the first years after the revolution:

“Several hundred former Batista associates, policemen and torturers were shot by firing squad after perfunctory trials. Portrayed as ‘a bloodbath’ in the American press, this post-war settling of scores was hardly an unusual phenomenon in Cuban history. The passions aroused during the war were deeply rooted, and similar events had occurred within living memory. Thirty years earlier, the hirelings of the Machado regime deemed guilty of similar crimes were simply ferreted out by the mob and killed,” recalled Philip Bonsal, the new US ambassador, in his memoirs.[65]

One could simply claim that a revolution is not a dinner party; more interesting, however, is the insight of then CIA director Allen Dulles, which he presented at a meeting of the “senate foreign relations committee”:

“When you have a revolution, you kill your enemies. There were many instances of cruelty and repression by the Cuban army [Batista], and they have the goods on some of those people. Now there will probably be a lot of justice. It will probably go much too far, but they have to go through this.”[66]

Especially the “Military Units to Aid Production” (UMAPs) established in 1965 served to house men considered deviant, including political dissidents and homosexuals. The re-examination of the persecution of homosexuals as “bourgeois elements” later led in Cuba to one of the most progressive and emancipatory legal and social situations for queer people, but it was nevertheless a grave error of the revolution. The public acknowledgment of this error caused many parts of the Western intelligentsia, who had previously been in solidarity with the Cuban project, to turn away from the revolution.

Confronted with this criticism, Castro commented in a 2010 interview with the Mexican Jornada, held shortly after the third national day against homophobia:

“Those were moments of great injustice, a great injustice! Whoever committed them. I try to define my responsibility in all of this. It’s true that I didn’t concern myself with this matter at that time […] I was mainly occupied with the October Crisis, the war, and political issues […] Evading the CIA, which recruited so many traitors, sometimes even from our own ranks, was anything but easy; but if I have to take responsibility, then I take mine. I won’t blame anyone.”[67]

In response to the interviewer Carmen Lira Saade’s remark that the persecution of homosexuals “could take place everywhere with lesser or greater protest,” but surely not in revolutionary Cuba, Castro replied:

“I understand: It’s like a saint sinning, right? … It’s not the same as a sinner sinning, is it? That our image was damaged was fair.”[68]

1. Battlefield Mentality and Victory

The United States met Cuban developments with open hostility. Their concerns were less about the political forms in Havana than about the economic interests of American investors and the potential influence of the Cuban Revolution as a model for the region:

“In the early years of the Revolution the issues of Soviet influence, human rights, or military threat to the United States rarely surface in U.S. diplomatic correspondence. Instead, what the State Department and the diplomats on the ground worried about was what kind of economic model Cuba was going to pursue, and in particular, how U.S. businesses in Cuba would be affected. Further, they were quite concerned about how the Cuban example might inspire other Latin American countries to attempt similar economic transformations to the detriment of U.S. investors.” (Aviva Chomsky)[69]

Washington feared that other Latin American countries might see in Cuba a model for independent development, thereby challenging the openness of their markets to US capital and US access to strategic raw materials.

Within just a few months of Batista’s fall, the USA decided to actively fight the new government. The openly aggressive attitude of the United States created a climate of constant threat on the island, which strengthened the revolutionary leadership in its mobilization and accelerated the domestic political course of revolutionary radicalization.

Counterrevolution is the Priority

Latin America historian Aviva Chomsky describes the social climate of the Cuban working class in the first decade after the revolution as a “battlefield mentality”[70], in which the immense pressure on the Cuban Revolution manifested itself.

After the agrarian reform of 1959, which limited the size of private farms to approx. 1.3 hectares and expropriated and redistributed the rest, the United States entered into the first open verbal conflict with the Cuban Revolution. Many of the large sugar plantations, where slave labor still prevailed before the revolution, belonged to US corporations, which complained to their State Department following the agrarian reform:

“The State Department concurred that ‘agrarian reform law causing great consternation in U.S. Government and American sugar circles.’ Thirty of the 34 U.S.-owned sugar mills sent representatives to meet with the U.S. Ambassador the following day, protesting that their businesses would be severely affected by the reform.” (Aviva Chomsky)[71]

After failed attempts to cooperate with “moderate” forces in Cuba, i.e., counterrevolutionaries, the United States decided that the revolution had to be stopped as quickly as possible. The strategies developed by the CIA ranged from sabotaging key production sectors, especially the sugar industry, which formed the core of national value creation and at the same time the most important export good, to open military intervention.

1.1 Bay of Pigs Fiasco

The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, which JFK advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger called the “greatest fiasco” in the history of American foreign policy, was the absolute turning point for the course and direction of the Cuban Revolution:

The plan envisioned 1,300 Cuban exiles landing at the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), located between Havana and Trinidad, and holding the local airstrip only long enough for the US-officials-picked “exile government” of pro-American Cubans from Miami to be flown in. This government was then supposed to kill Castro and seize power in Cuba – American investors would thus get their plantations back, the revolution would be broken, all’s well that ends well – If this plan sounds absurd and somewhat stupid, it’s because it was absurd and rather stupid.

In the week before the landing, CIA-financed counterrevolutionary forces in Cuba intensified their attacks: a sugar factory was destroyed in Pinar del Río, and the El Encanto department store was blown up in central Havana. On April 15, two small planes also attacked the Camp Columbia bases and air force bases in Havana and Santiago, destroying most of the Cuban air force and killing several civilians.

These events made the imminent invasion clear to Castro and the revolutionary leadership – In a eulogy for the victims, he declared for the first time the explicitly “socialist” character of the revolution and contrasted the achievements of the Soviet Union, embodied by Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space, with the behavior of the USA, which, as he emphasized, bombed “the facilities of a country that barely has an air force.”[72]

When the ground invasion began on April 17, 1961, the CIA-organized exile troops landed on the beaches of Playa Girón and Playa Larga, where local militias took on the main part of the defense. Castro mobilized the few remaining aircraft of his air force, while the exile troops came under fire from improvised training planes and “Sea Furies.”

Castro moved his headquarters from Havana to the Australia sugar mill, from where he directed the countermeasures. Within three days, the invasion was crushed: of the 1,500 participating Cuban exiles, over 100 died, and about 1,200 were taken prisoner. Many commanders of the failed coup were officers from Batista’s army, some of them students of General José Ramón Fernández, who was now fighting for the revolution.[73]

The victory significantly boosted the popularity of the revolution and, at the same time, made the government more suspicious of internal opposition and led to increased foreign policy protection, especially through rapprochement with the Soviet Union.

In December 1961, Fidel Castro openly declared his Marxist-Leninist position, definitively positioning Cuba geopolitically against the USA. The defeat of the invasion was celebrated internationally as the “first defeat of Yankee imperialism in Latin America” and directly led to the development of “Operation Mongoose” by the Kennedy administration; a large-scale covert action to destabilize and overthrow the Cuban Revolution, which we will detail a little later:

“From a larger Latin American perspective, the Bay of Pigs is just one in a long, dreary list of U.S. invasions and occupations of their countries, largely unknown in the United States itself. These include, since 1898, the numerous troop landings in Cuba; the lengthy occupations of Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic; the 1954 overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala; counterinsurgencies and ‘low intensity conflicts’ in Central America in the 1980s; and so on. The only thing that makes the Bay of Pigs unique is that the invasion did not succeed.” (Aviva Chomsky)[74]

1.2. Consolidation of the Revolution

The victory at the Bay of Pigs was not only a military rejection of US intervention but also marked a decisive moment for the consolidation of the revolution and the strengthening of Cuban nationalism. Broad sections of the population experienced this success as proof that the revolution was not only capable of asserting itself but also represented a real alternative to decades of dependence on the United States.

Groups within society that had previously hoped for a political or economic integration into Washington’s sphere of influence lost all social legitimacy and support. In this context, the “Second Declaration of Havana,” published in February 1962, gained central importance as it explicitly placed the revolutionary process in a continental context, emphasized the duty to continue the upheaval, and staged Cuba symbolically and practically as the spearhead of the anti-imperialist struggles in Latin America:

“For many Latin Americans, the Bay of Pigs reinforced their ingrained belief that the United States could never be trusted; it showed that their northern neighbour was not as all-powerful as it had once seemed. The grip of ‘geographic fatalism’, so long an embedded element in Latin America’s outlook on the world, was broken. Political groups all over the continent now took Cuba seriously as a model and sought to follow the Cuban road, in the belief that the defeat of US imperialism was possible.” (Richard Gott)[75]

The rest of the world, which had previously had little clear picture of the actual support for the Castro government, now realized that the claims of the Cuban exile community did not correspond to reality: The revolution was by no means doomed. Even with US support, the exiles had failed to turn their opposition to Castro into a broad, government-toppling movement.

Castro would stay. Concrete evidence of private discussions of the Soviet leadership does not exist, but they must have come to the same conclusion. If they had initially considered Castro an outsider, he now appeared as someone worth betting on.[76]

2. “Operation Mongoose”: Terror and Embargo

After the failed direct military invasion of the Bay of Pigs, about 400 CIA officials developed a plan for the internal destabilization of Cuba, aiming to break the revolution by separating it from its base.

“A presidential directive of November 1961, establishing the Mongoose project, declared that the United States would ‘help the people of Cuba overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.’ Lansdale presented an operational plan to the White House in January 1962 that called for ‘a six-phase effort’ to undermine Castro from within. His project was designed to conclude ‘with an open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime’ in October 1962.” (Richard Gott)[77]

General Edward Lansdale, an experienced specialist in counterinsurgency, took over the leadership of the project, which was under the strict supervision of Robert Kennedy. A presidential directive from 1961 stipulated that the project should be completed by October 1962, whereupon an open uprising was to bring about the overthrow of socialist rule by the end of 1962. Despite the deployment of over 400 CIA employees in Washington and Miami, the results initially remained modest:[78]

Even before the missile crisis, the president’s dissatisfaction with the slow progress became clear; the operation was officially (“in everything but name”)[79] dissolved and transferred to a coordination committee.

In fact, however, covert activities intensified further, confirming in Havana the impression of an ongoing threat and significantly contributing to Castro’s decision to station Soviet missiles on Cuban territory:

“In April 1964 Johnson called for an end to sabotage raids. Johnson was later quoted as complaining that ‘we had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean.’ Dean Rusk argued that sabotage had a ‘high noise level’ and that it was too difficult to cover up U.S. involvement. The last major CIA-organized raid of the Johnson era was in December 1963, when Cuban exiles mined Cuban waters near a naval base, blowing up a number of boats and killing and injuring several people.” (Aviva Chomsky)[80]

Between 1960 and 1965, at least eight assassination plots against Castro can be documented, ranging from poisoned cigars and contaminated diving suits to collaboration with US Mafia syndicates – The goal was to achieve political destabilization by eliminating the revolutionary leader.

In Europe, too, attempts were made to subtly undermine Cuba’s economic infrastructure. Shipments were sabotaged, machinery destined for export to Cuba was deliberately damaged or rendered unusable, and even ball bearing manufacturers in Frankfurt received instructions to deliberately produce faulty products. In Miami, the CIA established an operations base with a multi-million dollar budget, from which armed attacks on oil refineries, industrial plants, and transport infrastructure were organized. Exile groups like “Alpha 66” carried out attacks on hotels, merchant ships, and Soviet military advisors, putting economic and military pressure on Cuba simultaneously. Until October 1962, the strategy included repeated attempts to destroy the Matahambre copper mine.[81]

“The most important attempt was the failed attack at the Matahambre copper mine. A first attempt failed in late 1961 when technical problems prevented the boat carrying the commandos from arriving; the second attempt, in the summer of 1962, was met by a Cuban militia patrol and forced to flee. The third attempt, in October 1962, was also repelled by Cuban troops – on October 22nd, just as President Kennedy was announcing the presence of Soviet missiles on the island, and denying that Cuba could possibly have any need to defend itself from U.S. aggression. One participant in the raid heard Kennedy’s speech from his boat off the shores of Pinar del Río, where he was waiting for two missing infiltrators to return.” (Aviva Chomsky)[82]

2.1 The Embargo

The main pillar of US policy against Cuba was (and is) the embargo imposed in November 1960, which, with the exception of a few food items and medicines, to give the appearance of humanitarian responsibility, prohibited all shipments from the United States to Cuba.

Away from direct imports from the United States, the embargo to this day means that it is nearly impossible for companies wishing to trade with Cuba to remain entirely outside the reach of US authorities.

Any company with assets or business activities in the USA runs the risk of being subject to sanctions, including asset confiscation, if it engages in Cuban business. In practice, this means that international corporations must regularly weigh between two markets: on the one hand, the United States with its hegemonic market and central role in the global financial system; on the other hand, the small Caribbean island of Cuba with only eleven million inhabitants – It is obvious that in this constellation, companies almost without exception choose access to the US market.

Ships or aircraft that call at Cuban ports are prohibited from entering US ports for a period of six months – executives of such companies are denied entry to the USA, existing assets are confiscated; why should a company, regardless of its ownership structure, take the risk when the Cuban market is so small?

The US-dominated multilateral economic institutions, namely the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were likewise prevented by specific clauses of the embargo from managing other trade possibilities.[83] Nevertheless, it is fundamentally possible for non-American companies to trade with Cuba despite the US embargo, even if this trade is risky and cumbersome – Nonetheless, Spain and Canada are among Cuba’s most important trading partners today:

An example of how such trade is possible despite the restrictions is the “Havana Club Rum Company” as a joint venture between the French company Pernod Ricard and the Cuban company Cuba Ron S.A. – The Cuban rum cannot be exported directly to the US market, which is why Bacardi produces the rum for the USA in Puerto Rico. Using US banks or US logistics for Cuban exports would be risky for Pernod Ricard, as the embargo could otherwise trigger secondary sanctions.

The risk of these “secondary sanctions” goes so far that airlines like Air France or Iberia, which fly to Cuba, may not include any aircraft parts from American companies in their respective planes.

Imagine: A traditional Bavarian butcher, let’s call him Markus, buys cooling compressors for his solar cooling systems from Italy; the solar chips for these cooling compressors happen to come from California. Our butcher now sells his cooled sausages to a market stall owner in Cuba – Markus’s butcher shop may no longer transfer money in US dollars, may not transport his sausages by plane that contains even a tiny US-produced screw, and must change his sausage packaging supplier because the ink on that packaging is covered by a US patent.

Ultra-reactionary media, such as the libertarian “Daily Economy,” often try to attribute Cuba’s relative poverty to socialism, “not the Embargo”; “the primary cause of Cuba’s poverty is its repressive socialist regime, with just 10 percent of the gap resulting from the trade embargo.” (Daily Economy)[84]

In these analyses (here using the example of the article cited above), the effect of secondary sanctions is almost always ignored: By relying exclusively on trade data and synthetic control groups, the authors negate the reality of the capitalist world economy – the embargo does not just act as a bilateral barrier between Cuba and the USA, but unfolds its actual impact through the global financial and trading system, which is under US hegemony.

Banks, shipping companies, insurers, and international corporations withdraw from trade with Cuba precisely for economic rationality, namely the fear of repression by the strongest imperialist power.

The goal of the embargo was and is to worsen Cuba’s supply situation so that hunger, rationing, and economic setbacks generate political discontent – documents from that time openly speak of wanting to “keep bread out of the shops” to discredit the revolutionary process.

Besides the economic consequences, the embargo exacerbated diplomatic isolation, which culminated in 1962 with Cuba’s exclusion from the Organization of American States, increasingly isolating the revolutionary government on the international stage. At the same time, promoting emigration and the targeted support of opposition groups served as additional means to weaken internal stability. Emigration was intended to paint a picture of growing opposition, while dissident groups were supplied with financial resources:

“The US government paid for the flights and provided a $100 dollar grant to each family. The total expenditure for the six-year period was $50 million and during that time 3,000 flights had brought more than a quarter of a million Cubans (260,561) into exile in the United States. By the end of the 1980s the total Cuban migration was close to a million, roughly 10 per cent of the population.” (Richard Gott)[85]

Throughout all these attempts at foreign policy isolation and starvation, the United States routinely continued to send sabotage teams to Cuba, who carried out terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, and acts of sabotage on key and civilian industries – including the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 (1971) with 73 civilian deaths; “Until September 11, 2001, the attack on the Cubana flight was the most devastating terrorist attack in aviation in the western hemisphere.”[86]

Since 1992, the UN General Assembly has annually introduced a resolution condemning the US embargo against Cuba. The overwhelming majority of member states regularly vote in favor (The process could almost be automated: 187 yes votes, only the USA and Israel against)[87]. The reasoning for the routine resolution: “The embargo contradicts fundamental principles of the UN Charter, particularly the prohibition of unilateral economic coercive measures and the duty of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.” (UN)[88]

The damage of the embargo in purely monetary terms amounts to approximately 1.5 trillion since its imposition (as of 2024) – equivalent to about 15 years of Cuban GDP.[89] In the UN press release on the latest resolution against the embargo, the UN News Centre reports, quoting Cuban Foreign Minister Parilla:

“Imperialism is warning the whole world that any nation daring to firmly defend its sovereignty and to build its own future will pay a price for that rebelliousness (…) The right to food is a human right,” he went on to say, adding that the accumulated cost of four months of economic blockade is equivalent to $1.6 billion. That amount would be enough to guarantee for an entire year the “delivery to all Cuban families a ration food basket”.  With $12 million, Cuba could buy the insulin necessary to treat all its diabetic patients. The losses incurred by the blockade within a single day exceed that amount. “The United States government is perfectly aware of the direct and indirect impact that its policy has on the Cuban health system,” and the “consequences of incomplete treatments, delayed treatments and postponed surgeries,” he said.[90]

2.2     Torricelli and Helms-Burton

Between 1960 and 1992, the embargo remained largely static, focusing on directly prohibiting trade between US companies and Cuban state enterprises.

The collapse of the socialist bloc, which until then had borne the overwhelming part of Cuban foreign trade, prompted the United States to significantly tighten the embargo with the “Cuba Democracy Act” (1992) and later the “Helms-Burton Act” (1996), in order to wear down Cuba in the context of the new world order.

The “Cuba Democracy Act,” also known as the “Torricelli Act,” strictly prohibited US subsidiaries from trading with Cuba, introduced the “180-Day Rule” whereby ships that had called at Cuban ports could not enter a US port for 180 days, banned US citizens from sending money to their families in Cuba, and largely restricted the previously existing humanitarian exceptions through which Cuba could obtain aid and medicines from US companies.[91] The initiator of the law in the House of Representatives, Robert Torricelli, justified the tightening of the embargo with the goal; “to wreak havoc on that island.”[92]

A few years later, the Clinton administration definitively tightened US policy towards Cuba with the Helms-Burton Act: The law explicitly allowed US citizens, including naturalized Cubans who had been expropriated after 1959, to file lawsuits for damages against foreign companies using “confiscated property,” i.e., almost any piece of land, in Cuba. At the same time, it provided that managers and owners of these companies, as well as their family members, could be denied visas and entry into the USA.

The embargo, previously based on presidential executive orders, was codified into law, meaning a president could no longer unilaterally ease or lift it. Sanctions against third countries were significantly expanded: foreign banks and companies trading with Cuba were openly threatened with exclusion from the US market, while at the same time pressure on international financial institutions was increased to deny Cuba loans or support.[93]

The Helms-Burton Act is not only completely illegal under international law but also violates numerous US laws – in the legal analysis of the decree, Ariadna Cornelio Hitchman (et al.) writes:

“From the point of view of American law, the act violates two core constitutional principles: the tri-partition of powers, by limiting the functions of the president in foreign policy and interfering with judicial powers; and the due-process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments […], rendering the Helms-Burton Act effectively unconstitutional. It also ignores the Doctrine of Act of State upheld by the Supreme Court, demonstrating a double standard for foreign countries […]. Additionally, the Helms-Burton Act contradicts principles of international law, including sovereign equality of States and self-determination as enshrined in the UN Charter […].”[94]

The consequences for Cuba were devastating: Between 1981 and 1984, Cuba still recorded an average annual growth of 7.3 percent – a clear contrast to the general downward trend in Latin America, where GDP fell by about 10 percent during this period. Average per capita income rose to over US$3,500 in 1986, while the regional average was around US$2,200.

Life expectancy in the mid-1980s was around 74 to 75 years, under-five child mortality fell to about 20 per 1,000, and infant mortality was between six and eleven per 1,000 live births, lower than in the United States (15.19 at the beginning of the 1980s)[95].

With about 219 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants, Cuba already had one of the highest doctor densities in the world in 1986, and the country was also able to consolidate its progress in education: the illiteracy rate at the end of the 1980s was only 3.8 percent. However, the situation in Cuba in the 1990s was to be fundamentally different from that in the 1980s – the “fat years” were over.

3. The Disaster of the “Special Period”

The abrupt end of Cuba’s trade relations with the post-Soviet states was not a law of nature obviously linked to the end of real socialism: The United States had been pressuring Gorbachev since the beginning of the Glasnost policy to buy Cuban sugar at the world market price instead of the significantly higher friendship price, in order to secure favorable deals for themselves with US companies.[96]

The Communist Party of Cuba had previously opposed the reform policy dictated by Moscow. At the third congress of the PCC (1986), the PCC decided not to follow the reform course of European state socialism[97] – for Cuba, a reform policy also seemed unnecessary; Havana was still achieving far-reaching successes until the end of the 1980s:

“In 1989, Cuba had the most collectivized, centralized, egalitarian, [but] externally dependent and Soviet-subsidized economy within the socialist camp.” (ScienceDirect)[98]

Thus, the disappearance of this “big brother” led to an unprecedented economic collapse: Trade fell by 80 percent, the economy probably even more than the officially reported 35 percent, import capacity shrank by 70 percent between 1989 and 1992, and the country suffered almost overnight from massive shortages of fuel, spare parts, and fertilizers, so that Cuba was mentioned in the same breath as Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, for the first time since the 19th century:[99]

“Though unprepared for a calamity of this magnitude, the authorities rejected major economic reform, declaring instead the program of austerity and sacrifice known as the Special Period (período especial). In crisis, internally disrupted, and bereft of international partners, Cuban socialism now had to find new allies and adjust practices to face the competitive market realities and the tumultuous economic globalization of the last part of the twentieth century.” (Mauricio A. Font)[100]

Faced with the collapse of trade relations and the lack of international partners, Cuba had to find new ways to adapt to the competitive conditions of the world market. The Fourth Congress of the PCC in 1991 approved initial measures: legalization of the US dollar, self-employment, farmers’ markets, expansion of tourism, remittances from abroad, and joint ventures with foreign companies.

Drawing on Lenin’s NEP, the share of state control in agriculture was reduced from 75 to 30 percent, and new cooperatives (UBPC) received permanent land use rights, autonomous decision-making powers, and the possibility to link wages to productivity.[101]

Sugar production collapsed, while informal activities and small privately-run restaurants (“Paladares”) increased sharply. The state deliberately invited foreign investors into tourism and mining, while the population increasingly resorted to improvised, local survival strategies and the shadow economy. Thus, sugar and agriculture lost their (absolutely) central role, and the service sector grew significantly.[102]

Cuban GDP shrank by 35 percent between 1989 and 1992, agricultural output by 47 percent, construction by 74 percent, and production capacity by 90 percent.[103] The energy supply, which had previously relied on oil deliveries from the Soviet Union, collapsed completely due to the impossibility, forced by the embargo, of obtaining energy resources elsewhere. Spare parts for machinery, chemicals for fertilizers, and medicines had to be procured on the world market – at exorbitant prices, as the supplying companies, on the one hand, calculated the risk of possible US sanctions and, on the other hand, exploited Cuba’s plight for their profits.[104]

The social consequences of this transformation were significant. The previously tightly constrained income inequality exploded: while the ratio between the lowest and highest incomes before 1989 was about 5:1, it grew to 829:1 in 1995 and reached a range of 12,500:1 in 2001, making the split between those with access to US dollars and the private sector and those living solely on state salaries dramatic:[105]

“Cuban jokes reflected the economic distortions. A woman brought her husband, a renowned brain surgeon, into the psychiatric ward. ‘He’s hallucinating! He thinks that he got a job as a taxi driver and we’ve become rich!’ […] The government could no longer guarantee employment, even to young people who graduated with fine credentials. Before the 1990s, almost everybody who graduated received a job placement with their diploma. In 2001, only 72 percent did.” (Aviva Chomsky)[106]

In this context, phenomena that the revolution had overcome in the 1960s reappeared, such as prostitution and begging, which now expressed a return to precarious survival strategies. Women were disproportionately affected, as they were forced to secure their families’ survival through additional activities, reviving old gender roles – The younger generation also grew more distant from the achievements of the revolution, which were perceived as less relevant to the current contradictions, leading to a noticeable increase in cynicism and resignation.

In 1994, the US-sanctioned “migration crisis” reached a new quality when the US government announced that Cubans wishing to enter without authorization (entry permits were de facto no longer issued) would be taken to the US military base at Guantánamo, where they – like Haitian migrants before them – would be housed in temporary camps. The aim of the artificially created “migration crisis” was to bring about a counter-revolution by those who were unable to leave the country due to the blockade on migration to the United States.

Average daily calorie intake fell by about 27% between 1990 and 1996[107] – Yet significantly: Unlike, for example, in the DPRK, where the disappearance of the USSR as the main trading partner brought massive famines, Cuba saw no massive crisis in the health sector or widespread famines – quite the opposite:

“Despite the economic collapse, Cuba’s child mortality rates actually dropped, and life expectancy inched up from 75 years in 1990 to 75.6 in 1999. Although an increase of six months may appear trivial, it would have been reasonable to expect a drop under the circumstances — something that did occur in ex-Communist European states like Russia, where life expectancy fell by 6 years between 1991 and 1994.” (Jacobin)[108]

Manuel Franco of Johns Hopkins University wrote in the Guardian in 2007 based on his research findings:

“This is the first, and probably the only, natural experiment, born of unfortunate circumstances, where large effects on diabetes, cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality have been related to sustained population-wide weight loss as a result of increased physical activity and reduced caloric intake.”[109]

Between 1997 and 2002, deaths caused by diabetes fell by 51%, mortality from coronary heart disease by 35%, and stroke mortality by 20%.

The fact that a widespread humanitarian crisis was avoided was based, on the one hand, on Cuba prioritizing its social security systems in the face of the crisis – The share of GDP allocated to social and health spending increased by 29 percent between 1990 and 1994.[110] And on the other hand, on the fact that the Cuban health and supply system before the crisis, particularly during the 1980s, had already built up considerable resilience:

“Until the Special Period, the distribution system – along with other changes that increased food availability on and off the ration – contributed to a drastic shift in Cuba’s health profile. Instead of the malnutrition that had plagued the poor prior to the Revolution, the most common diet-related diseases became obesity, hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes. An informant explained to one health researcher what Cubans like to eat: ‘Meat!! We like to eat pork. Beans and rice of course. But here we cook the beans and rice with lard and oil also. Everything has to be fried – chicken, plantains, malanga, and potatoes. We eat lots of food with flour – bread, spaghetti, pizza, crackers … We use lots of salt and sugar in our food. And we don’t eat many vegetables or fruits. And then there is the alcohol and the sodas.'” (Aviva Chomsky)[111]

3.1 New Friends and a Ray of Hope

The first rays of hope from the disaster of the “Special Period” came from the mid-1990s: The number of international tourists rose from around 800,000 in 1993 to about 1.2 million in 1995, while revenues from joint ventures and foreign investments between 1994 and 1996 already accounted for about 15% of total exports. Overall, real GDP is estimated to have grown by one to two percent per year between 1994 and 1996, marking the first phase of economic recovery.

To generate foreign currency, Cuba began to export its exceptionally resilient health sector; thus, Cuba began to expand its “medical internationalism,” which was in principle free of charge for the recipient nation, on a large scale.

Through its “doctor export,” Cuba was thus able to gain not only foreign currency but also economic cooperation:

“This has become a key plank of Cuban foreign policy, directly challenging established notions of the medical profession and the function of development aid in the leading capitalist states. While Cuba does now receive payment for its medical assistance, its commitment to providing free healthcare abroad still endures: nearly half of the sixty-two countries that housed Cuban medical brigades in 2017 paid nothing for their services.” (Jacobin)[112]

This included, among others, Venezuela, where tens of thousands of Cuban doctors have led the “Barrio Adentro” mission since 1999 in exchange for cheap Venezuelan oil – an initiative by Hugo Chávez to provide free medical care to people in Venezuela’s poor neighborhoods – by 2012, the program had provided “free medical consultations in 500 million cases.” (Amerika21)[113]

Thus, in the 1990s, Venezuela rose to become Cuba’s most important trading partner – the special trade relationship between the two states is important insofar as without it, the end of the Cuban Revolution might have been inevitable. Upon Chávez’s death in March 2013, Fidel wrote:

“On the 5th of March, in the afternoon hours, died the best friend the Cuban people had in their history. We have the honor of having shared with the Bolivarian leader the same ideals of social justice and of support for the exploited.”[114]

Richard Gott describes the relationship between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez as follows:

“He found a soulmate in neighbouring Venezuela, establishing a close friendship with Colonel Hugo Chávez and sending 10,000 Cuban doctors to help out in the shanty towns. A guarantee of a regular supply to Cuba of Venezuelan oil was not the least of the advantages of this relationship.” (Richard Gott)[115]

Besides Venezuela, Cuba expanded trade relations with Iran, whose sanctions have also been tightened recently:

“Looking further afield, he travelled in May 2001 to the home of Muslim fundamentalism in Tehran, to tell students at the university of his belief that ‘the imperialist king will fall’. He was assured by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Iran and Cuba together could ‘overcome the United States’.” (Richard Gott)[116]

Besides Venezuela and China, Russia, Brazil, Canada, and Spain are Cuba’s most important trading partners today. With new trading partners and the reforms of the Special Period, the economy was able to recover from its fall from 1995 onwards.

Somewhat later (1998), the “Battle of Ideas” campaign began, the “largest mass mobilization ever to take place in Cuba”[117], which responded to the new contradictions of the (partial) liberalization of the Special Period:

“Fidel Castro lent his personal leadership and charisma to the insistence on the soundness of Cuban socialism—state control, emphasis on consciousness and ideas, and such forms of internationalism as barter transactions with Venezuela and other partners perceived as important political allies (Azicri, 2009). China and Vietnam had by then fully joined the embrace of market policies that fundamentally transformed socialism, but Cuban socialism would remain closely tied to the more traditional approach defended by its leader.” (Mauricio A. Font)[118]

During this “Battle of Ideas,” nationwide, grassroots democratic discussions about the wishes for the future development of the Cuban Revolution were held via the “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution” (see 4.1), trade unions, and student federations, through whose decisions the reforms after the “Special Period” were decided (see 4.):

By 2001, in the spirit of “socialist reorientation,” 150 new “social plans”[119] were enacted: financial resources in the education sector were significantly expanded, teacher training was intensified, university lectures were broadcast on television, and the number of students rose from 22% in 2000 to almost the entire age cohort by 2007. Also in 2005, youth brigades were formed to combat the black market for fuel – In the following year, similar brigades were mobilized to help expand and renovate the severely outdated energy supply – a program that became known as the “Energy Revolution.”[120]

4. Democracy in Cuba

When Batista’s government was overthrown on January 1, 1959, not only did an authoritarian regime collapse in Cuba, but at the same time a fundamental transformation of the political and social system took place.

With the victory of the revolution, a new state emerged whose central goal was to transfer political and economic power to those who had previously been excluded, disenfranchised, and exploited: A break occurred with the old order, which was shaped not only by the domestic oligarchy but also significantly by the influence of US capital.

Even before the new constitution came into force in 1976, a system had developed in Cuba that went far beyond Western liberal forms of democracy. This system, known as “Poder Popular” (People’s Power), is based on a combination of elections, mass organizations, and continuous consultation. While in capitalist democracies popular participation is usually limited to periodic electoral acts and political decisions in between are determined by parliamentary committees, lobby groups, and executives, Cuba developed a form of democracy based on permanent participation and collective decision-making. 

The electoral system itself is organized in three stages. At the neighborhood level, regular assemblies take place (cf. CDR, see 4.1), in which residents deliberate on candidates deemed suitable based on their daily practice, commitment, and proximity to the people. Each neighborhood can nominate between two and eight candidates who stand in free and secret elections. A mandate requires at least 50 percent of the votes; otherwise, a runoff election occurs.

In this way, the 169 local parliaments are filled, comprising a total of over 14,500 delegates. Delegates perform their duties unpaid, remain in their previous occupations, and receive no additional salary or financial privileges. They are directly accountable to their voters and can be recalled at any time if they lose confidence.

The next level consists of the provincial parliaments and the National Assembly. Here, candidates are partly nominated by the local assemblies and partly by the large mass organizations, in which the majority of the population is organized: the trade unions, the women’s organization, the “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution,” the peasant associations, and pupil and student organizations.

These mass organizations have a dual function: they ensure that all social groups are represented, and at the same time they serve as central places for political education and discussion. Through them, a social dialogue is organized that goes far beyond elections and aims to enable as many people as possible to participate in the political process.[121]

The National Assembly, elected every five years, in turn elects the Council of State and the Council of Ministers as well as the head of state. It is endowed with extensive powers, including the ability to amend the constitution, approve economic plans, and determine fundamental issues of foreign policy. Its composition reflects broad representation of society: around 43 percent of deputies are women, and one-third are not members of the Communist Party.[122]

This model gained particular importance during the “Special Period” (see 3.), which began after the collapse of the Soviet Union and plunged Cuba into a deep economic crisis. Between 1989 and 1993, economic output fell by more than a third, caloric intake dropped dramatically, and at the same time, the USA tightened its blockade policy.

In this situation, the leadership decided not to implement fundamental reform measures without extensive consultations – Within the framework of the so-called “Workers’ Parliaments,” three million people discussed the necessary steps in over 80,000 assemblies, including joint ventures with foreign capital, the authorization of self-employment, and the reduction of subsidies. These debates made it clear that the political legitimacy of the Cuban system lay precisely in involving the population actively in decision-making, not just informing them, even in times of crisis.

Thus, democracy in Cuba understands itself as a process concerned not only with institutional procedures but with the active shaping of social relations by the majority. It is therefore not conflict-free or static, but subject to constant change, which also includes adaptation to new conditions – be it through the constitutional debates of 2002, the economic updates of the 2010s, or the recent reforms under President Miguel Díaz-Canel.[123]

An ideal example of how Cuban democracy works is the 2019 constitutional reform: To draft this new constitution, which was intended to respond to Raúl’s reforms and the tightened blockade under Trump, the National Assembly set up a separate commission, which published a first draft constitution by spring 2019:

“From August 13 to November 15, 2018, the draft constitution was discussed in about 135,000 assemblies and forums across the island, and comments and suggested amendments were submitted. Cuban exiles abroad were also allowed to submit their proposals online.”[124]

In 135,000 assemblies, mostly held in the CDRs (see 4.1), around 90% of all Cubans participated in amendment drafts, comprehensive critiques, comments, and adjustments, each of which was voted on in the respective assembly.

“According to Arnaldo Tamayo, a deputy of the Cuban parliament for the Baracoa administrative district in Guantánamo province, the constitution is said to have more than 80 new articles. ‘Most of them have to do with social rights and protective measures for the population as well as social services,’ Tamayo said in an interview with Amerika21. It is important that the entire project is put up for debate, ‘so there are discussions with workers, peasants, students, women, intellectuals.’ In the course of this discussion process, it is very likely that the current draft text will be changed again, according to Tamayo’s assessment, who became known in 1978 as the first Latin American cosmonaut.”[125]

And indeed, numerous changes, including “the recognition of various forms of property, the strengthening of municipal autonomy, and term limits for leadership positions in the state apparatus”[126], as well as the opening of the constitution for “marriage for all” (which was decided shortly afterwards in an equally popular democratic process), were included in the document.

When the final draft, after nearly four months of nationwide “popular discussions,” was finalized in February 2019, it was put to a referendum, where “around 6.8 million people, or 86.8 percent of voters, voted in favor of the constitutional reform, as the electoral commission in Havana announced.”[127]

4.1 CDR: “Revolution in Every Neighborhood!”

Arguably the most significant and at the same time most misunderstood component of the Cuban Revolution are the “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution” (Comités de Defensa de la Revolución, CDR) – that institution which is probably more responsible than any other for the survival of Cuban socialism.

In this respect, they are not only an object of Cuban development but also provide significant insights into the failure of other socialist societies – and why Cuba survived. The CDR are still considered the “heart of the revolution” today; 8.5 million Cubans, i.e., 92.6 percent of Cuban citizens with a minimum entry age of 14 years, are organized in one of the 779,000 committees.[128]

Founded immediately after the victory of the revolution, they served on the one hand for revolutionary vigilance, and on the other hand took on central social tasks, such as organizing the first national vaccination campaign or supporting the literacy offensive:

“The Revolution called on everybody to participate in creating the new society. The CDR carried out the country’s first vaccination campaign, in 1962. They supported the implementation of the Literacy Campaign […] Groups of enthusiastic citizens went ahead and organized their own committees without much attention to procedural niceties. Like so many other institutions of the early years of the Revolution, the first CDR displayed more energy than order, more enthusiasm than discipline.” (Aviva Chomsky)[129]

A central task of the CDR is the political surveillance of the immediate neighborhood – Members carefully observe whether activities or behaviors occur that could potentially harm the Cuban Revolution or the state, and report suspicious incidents to the competent local leadership bodies.

However, the notion that the CDR are the “eyes and ears of the Communist Party of Cuba,” as stated, among others, on the relevant Wikipedia article, is far too simplistic, if not entirely incorrect.

It is true that the members of the CDR, i.e., those who actively and voluntarily commit to the survival and development of the Cuban Revolution, naturally keep an eye on opponents of that revolution – but no more than that. Defining the CDR as “surveillance institutions” is wrong and based on anti-communist myths that the United States spread against Cuban people’s democracy in the 1960s.

This “surveillance” is much more significant in terms of (self-)awareness of neighborhood development, in order to act precisely here, at the base of the revolution. CDR member and expert Claudia Thalía Suárez Fernández wrote in this sense regarding the task of the CDR in combating drug crime in Granma:

“We CDR members have to deal with everything that concerns a community, and illegality is part of that whole, so it is our task to keep an eye on it as well. Take the issue of drugs, for example. There are people who are worried because we are beginning to see a phenomenon that we didn’t know for a long time or that was practically insignificant in our country compared to other regions of the world, but their concern is completely justified, because drugs are a phenomenon that affects the whole world. You cannot allow someone to profit from such a vice at the expense of the safety, peace of mind, or health of our own family members. And where does the phenomenon of someone selling drugs occur? In a neighborhood, a block, a community. So we are not uninvolved in this problem.”[130]

The CDR take an active role in organizing community measures aimed at improving the living conditions and social development of the population; these include blood drives, cleanliness campaigns, vaccination programs, and literacy courses.

The democratic dimension of the CDR is particularly evident in the involvement of members in assemblies at the neighborhood level, where suggestions for candidates for local political offices are discussed and decided upon. These assemblies are accessible to the entire community and serve not only for the exchange on local matters but also for the collective determination of common goals and activities.[131]

As detailed in section 4, the CDR provide the space for grassroots democratic determination on significant social reforms, such as the new 2019 constitution – but beyond that, also space for neighborhood exchange that goes far beyond the political.

Everyday Life in a CDR

Typical daily life within a CDR often begins with assemblies or planning meetings where the organization and sequence of community measures are coordinated. Throughout the day, members engage in social services, such as neighborhood help for the elderly or security services at public events.[132]

Regular meetings also provide space for discussing current social and political issues and for developing common solutions. In the evening or on scheduled dates, members meet again to exchange experiences, reflect on the effectiveness of activities carried out, and plan new projects:

“The CDR is a deeply political organisation in a way that is underused [elsewhere] – in the sense that it is involved in real-world organising and providing practical services to the local people […] The CDR, are explicitly political in the way the Black Panther Party’s breakfast programme was a political act because it was a practical act of solidarity as well as the wellspring of profound revolutionary theory.” (Morning Star)[133]

In a Morning Star article, Lewis Hegwood describes his visit to a CDR festivity in the spring of 2022:

“As we saw that night, a CDR is many things: a CDR is a political engagement in a community, it is drinking, singing, eating and chatting with neighbours, it is a love of one’s community, a pride in one’s country and the help it gives to other countries, it is local kids shouting about football and superheroes, old men sounding off about politics, one guy at the back drinking slightly more than he should, and a community of talented musicians, organisers, caregivers and families.” (Morning Star)[134]

Following the model of the CDR, almost identical “Comités de Défense de la Révolution” were later founded in revolutionary Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara.

5. BRICS and Import Dependence

The Cuban economy, despite its recent accession to the expanded BRICS alliance[135], is in its worst crisis since the 1990s: Since 2019, gross domestic product has fallen by a total of around eleven percent, with a further decline of 1.1 percent recorded in 2024 alone, while foreign currency earnings collapsed by about thirty percent over the same period, significantly limiting the state’s ability to finance imports of food, medicine, and fuel.[136]

This decline is particularly drastic on the production side: agricultural output, livestock farming, and mining have fallen by over fifty percent within a few years, while the manufacturing industry recorded a decline of almost a quarter.[137]

“The [cuban economy] minister was quoted as saying that this year and last had been marked ‘by the intensified impact of the blockade, the fierce persecution of financial flows, and barriers to international transactions that have hindered payments to suppliers.'” (Reuters)[138]

In parallel, financial instability worsened due to persistently high inflation and the devaluation of the Cuban peso, whose official exchange rate was still fixed by the state in 2024, but whose black market value fell to around 365 pesos per US dollar by spring 2025, massively undermining the population’s purchasing power and further complicating the import of urgently needed goods:

“Monreal believes that the impact of the category ‘food and non-alcoholic beverages’ on total inflation was over 50% during most of 2023 and 2024, highlighting the vulnerability of the Cuban market to shortages and rising prices of basic goods.” (Cibercuba)[139]

Added to this is a profound energy crisis triggered by the decay of outdated infrastructure and the decline in oil shipments from Venezuela and Mexico – While the two countries supplied Cuba with an average of 55,000 barrels of oil per day in earlier years, this amount has fallen by more than thirty percent since 2023, leading to daily power deficits of over 1,200 megawatts and blackouts of up to 18 hours in 2024. Furthermore, the vast majority of Cuban oil is sourced from Venezuela.[140]

Although Russia has promised the delivery of around 1.6 million tons of oil per year as well as technical support for expanding energy and agricultural infrastructure, this aid has so far been insufficient to close the supply gaps. The most important development in the Cuban energy sector is the deepening cooperation with China to expand photovoltaics across the country. Since joining the Chinese “Belt and Road Energy Partnership” in spring 2021, Cuba, with China’s help, has built 55 “solar farms,” corresponding to 1200 megawatts. By 2028, the number is expected to grow to 82 (or 92, depending on the source):

“The Chinese aid helps Cuba’s plan to build 92 solar installations by 2028, adding about 2,000 megawatts to the island’s power grid and help reduce dependence on fossil fuel imports. Once completed, the project would significantly boost Cuba’s strained power system, which currently has a capacity of 7,264 MW.” (Chinadaily)[141]

Cuba’s import dependence further exacerbates structural fragility, as more than sixty percent of food and over half of the oil requirement must be sourced from abroad, while at the same time, due to the embargo, there is a lack of hard foreign currency – Although there are close relations with BRICS states such as China, Russia, or Brazil, their trade volumes are mostly in the range of one to two billion US dollars annually, which, given the scale of the crisis, does not allow for substantial stabilization.

While BRICS membership opens up long-term perspectives, for example through easier access to loans from the “New Development Bank,” through the expansion of bilateral investments, or through the possibility of conducting trade in national currencies, these are processes that require longer-term implementation and therefore provide little immediate relief for the current crisis.

The combination of US sanctions, intensified by secondary sanctions against third-country companies (see 2.1), the absence of stable foreign currency earnings, dilapidated infrastructure, and the structural deficits of the domestic economy means that BRICS accession has so far not been able to bring about any noticeable improvement in the overall economic situation.

The tightening of the US embargo, including for medicines from third countries in January 2025, recently led to a drastic deterioration in healthcare:

“Only 30 percent of the basic range of medicines are available; in pharmacies, only 32 percent of the required medicines are in stock. Antibiotics are particularly scarce. Health Minister Portal Miranda criticized the US economic blockade in this context, which makes it difficult to acquire medical products. Infant mortality rose to 8.2 per 1,000 live births (2024: 7.4). Maternal mortality climbed to 56.3 per 100,000 births (2024: 37.4).” (Cubaheute)[142]

This same tightening of the embargo, which again made it impossible for US citizens to travel to Cuba, led to a 6 percent drop in tourism to just 71% of the target.[143] This decline in tourism, combined with the energy crisis, which Cuba’s National Assembly recently called the “most urgent problem for Cuba,” had a dramatic impact on the transport sector in the first half of this year:

“By April, 894 million passengers were transported nationwide, 32 percent less than planned and 114 million fewer than in the same period in 2024. The situation is particularly difficult for local bus services, which are 65 percent below target. Quick help is not in sight.” (Cubaheute)[144]

5.1 Internal Paths Out of the Crisis

The Cuban government is trying to overcome the economic crisis primarily through a comprehensive macroeconomic stabilization program, which has been revised several times since the end of 2023 and aims to eliminate structural distortions:

“As Finance Minister Vladimir Regueiro Ale was able to report, efforts towards macroeconomic stabilization and fiscal consolidation are bearing initial fruit: the budget deficit fell significantly last year – from 10.9 percent (2023) to 6.5 percent (2024) of GDP. The relationship between expenditure and revenue is developing towards a healthier balance, which has reduced the need to take on new debt and favored the decline in inflation.” (Cubaheute)[145]

Central elements are the expansion of partial dollarization with the aim of later de-dollarization, the creation of closed currency circuits also in the agricultural sector, and the introduction of a flexible exchange rate to facilitate access to foreign currency for all economic actors; flanking this, the expansion of cashless payment methods is being pushed forward, while price caps for basic foodstuffs are maintained.

In parallel, the attractiveness of foreign investment is to be increased through accelerated approval procedures, less bureaucracy, and new possibilities such as “100 percent foreign-owned tourism businesses”[146], while in agriculture, investors are to receive genuine usage rights for the first time, including the employment of workers.

At the institutional level, a profound reform of company law and the strengthening of the autonomy of state-owned enterprises are planned, complemented by the establishment of a new institute for state-owned enterprises, a uniform wage policy, and the reduction of bloated management structures.

At the same time, legal foundations are being created for joint ventures between state and private actors, and approval processes for private companies are being decentralized, thereby expanding the scope for action of municipalities; these are also to build new agro-industrial structures to secure the food supply and consolidate existing local development projects.[147]

Other measures concern the full allocation of foreign currency earnings from health services to the Ministry of Health, the selective use of financial instruments such as “swap transactions,” the expansion of possibilities for receiving remittances from abroad, and the reduction of social inequalities.

These economic steps are flanked by a series of legal reforms, including the adoption of a new company law, a modern children and youth law, a first sports law, the reform of civil status law, and an update of the regulatory offenses law.

Foreign policy requires…

“the ‘growing aggression of the US government’ […] a clear focus on the ‘defense of independence, the revolution and socialism,’ said Rodríguez. He named the US economic blockade, which has existed for over six decades, and the renewed designation as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ by the Trump administration as central challenges. Both measures significantly contribute to ‘suffering and shortages in Cuban families,’ he said. A focus is on opening up new opportunities for ‘exports, imports, investments, financial relations and international cooperation,’ Rodríguez said. The participation of Cuban delegations in international forums and bilateral visits serves to purposefully deepen economic ties. Cuba also wants to expand its leadership role in alliances of the Global South – particularly the Group of 77 plus China and the Non-Aligned Movement.” (Cubaheute)[148]

Thus, by July 2025, the reforms have already shown initial positive effects: through fiscal consolidation and tax reforms, the deficit has been significantly reduced, contributing to a much more stable financial situation.

The increase in tax revenues and tighter control of expenditure have strengthened the public budget, and for the first time in over a decade, the state’s current account shows a positive balance.

6. Maximum Strangulation

In February 2026, Cuba finds itself in a state of total economic and infrastructural strangulation, the intensity of which overshadows the crisis years of the 1990s.

The origin of this acute phase lies on January 3, 2026, when US special forces violently kidnapped and detained Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, resulting in the immediate halt of oil shipments from Caracas, which are vital for Cuba’s survival. In Washington’s attack, 32 Cuban soldiers serving as Maduro’s bodyguards died. While Cuba was still receiving about 35,000 barrels of oil per day from Venezuela in the last quarter of 2025 – representing about 70 percent of total Cuban oil imports – this flow was now completely cut off by Washington.

This blockade was cemented on January 29, 2026, by a presidential decree from Trump, imposing draconian punitive tariffs on any third country and any company that supplies oil or fuel to the island.[149] Consequently, not a single drop of imported fuel has reached Cuban soil since then.[150] The loss of Mexican shipments is also particularly critical: Under massive pressure from Washington and the threat of jeopardizing bilateral trade with the USA through tariffs, Mexico halted its oil exports.[151] President Claudia Sheinbaum, following Trump’s executive order of January 29 threatening punitive tariffs against all oil suppliers to Cuba, felt compelled to stop shipments from the state-owned company Pemex. Pemex had previously still been delivering around 20,000 barrels per day, but under the massive tariff threat and the review of the T-MEC free trade agreement, Mexico had little room for maneuver.

This leaves the Cuban energy grid short of around 45,000 barrels of oil per day – the absolute minimum required to maintain a minimal state order.[152]

Venezuela exported not only crude oil for further processing, but also refinery products like diesel and kerosene. Cuba can currently cover about a third of its own oil needs with domestic production, but Cuban oil (similar to Venezuelan) is heavy and high in sulfur, and Cuba’s refining capacity is insufficient to process it independently.

The impact on daily life is devastating and is classified by UN Secretary-General António Guterres as a looming “humanitarian collapse.”[153] In Havana and the provinces, power outages of more than 20 hours a day have become the new normal.[154] These “Apagones” lead to a domino effect: as the electric pumps in waterworks stand still, the drinking water supply collapses in large parts of the country. In hospitals, the lack of fuel for emergency generators endangers the cold chains for medicines, the operation of dialysis stations, and the production of medical oxygen.[155] Marta Hurtado, spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office, stated…

“We are extremely worried about Cuba’s deepening socio-economic crisis amid a decades-long financial and trade embargo, extreme weather events, and the recent US measures restricting oil shipments […] Intensive care units and emergency rooms are compromised, as are the production, delivery, and storage of vaccines, blood products, and other temperature-sensitive medications.” (TRT)[156]

Economically, the country faces a standstill. Inflation has reached dimensions that devalue the state salary structure: while the average income is about 4,000 pesos, a liter of gasoline on the black market trades for over 1,000 pesos. For the equivalent of a month’s salary, Cubans in Havana currently receive only a crate of 30 eggs and a bottle of cooking oil.[157] Lines at gas stations stretch for days; waiting times of up to 40 hours for the smallest amounts of fuel are documented. The tourism sector, the last remaining source of foreign currency, has effectively collapsed. Since mid-February 2026, refueling of international aircraft has been completely suspended for an initial month, bringing air traffic to a halt.[158] Jorge Piñón, director of the Latin America and Caribbean energy program at the University of Texas, says:

“[Cuba] expects a blackout – not only from the point of view of electricity, but a blackout from the point of view of energy overall, especially now with liquid fuels, such as diesel […] Because diesel powers transport – public transport, road transport –, diesel powers trains, diesel powers the generators, the water pumps of the Cuban aqueduct system. Diesel also powers the sugar mills; one of them in Granma province has already announced that due to fuel shortages they cannot use the machines for cutting sugar cane and must now again seek machete workers to cut the cane. So we are not only focusing on crude oil shipments, but particularly on diesel shipments, because diesel is the critical fuel with which we observe how Cuba will survive.” (martinoticias)[159]

State hotels have already had to close and relocate tourists to emergency shelters, as neither the energy supply nor food logistics could be maintained. Analysts give the Cuban economy a maximum of two months before a complete halt of social production occurs.

How long Cuba can continue like this is assessed differently by analysts. Some speak of two weeks[160], others of two months[161] – what is clear, as corny as it sounds: A society without fuel, foreign currency, trade, and a fragile food infrastructure does not continue to live, it only survives as long as it can.

6.1 War Communism

To counter the imminent collapse, the Cuban leadership put a contingency plan into effect on February 5, 2026, operating under the historical name “Opción Cero” (Option Zero).[162] This plan, originally designed for the case of a total supply collapse in the 1990s, envisions a radical transformation of social and economic life to survive with effectively zero fuel supply. Cuba’s last card up its sleeve.

Since February 7, 2026, the sale of diesel to private individuals has been suspended nationwide. Gasoline is only available in small quantities of a maximum of 20 liters via the digital platform “Ticket” – and this exclusively for foreign currency. The state administration has been reduced to a four-day week (Monday to Thursday), while public transport has been massively curtailed.[163] National passenger trains now run only every eight days; ferry connections to the Isle of Youth have been halved to two trips per week. In agriculture and logistics, the fuel shortage is being compensated for by the large-scale use of draft animals to ensure field work and local transport of essential goods.[164]

In parallel to these defensive measures, Havana is pushing the conversion of energy infrastructure towards renewable sources to permanently and rapidly break dependence on fossil imports. In February 2026, with an installed photovoltaic capacity of around 1,000 megawatts, Cuba already covers 38 percent of its daytime electricity demand.[165] However, renewable energies do not replace liquid fuel in the long term, so “Opción Cero” should not be understood as a long-term conversion of the Cuban energy sector, but as an interim solution for the strongest external pressure in its history.

Through an accelerated agreement with China, a further 160 megawatts from new solar parks are to be connected to the grid within eight weeks. To this end, around 5,000 Chinese photovoltaic modules are to be placed at “important sites” “to provide services to the population,” President Díaz-Canel explained:

“Priority facilities include 161 maternity homes, 121 households with technology-dependent sick children, 156 nursing homes, 305 senior centers, 56 polyclinics, 336 bank branches, and 349 administrative offices. A further 5,000 photovoltaic systems are to benefit households in remote regions as well as doctors and teachers, who can acquire them through a long-term loan. In addition, new battery storage with a capacity of 200 megawatts will be installed.” (amerika21)[166]

At the same time, China, besides an $80 million emergency aid package, has sent around 90,000 tons of rice.[167] Of course, it is naive to think that China’s gifts are based purely on international solidarity; China naturally also pursues geopolitical interests in keeping the struggling island state afloat – nevertheless: Unlike Russia, China, particularly with the expansion of Cuba’s energy grid, provides the prerequisites for “Opción Cero” and thus actual material support.

Internationally, growing resistance to the US blockade policy is forming. In mid-February, Mexico dispatched the naval vessels “Papaloapan” and “Isla Holbox” with a total of 814 tons of humanitarian goods – including rice, beans, powdered milk, and hygiene items – to Havana.[168] Russia has not only promised crude oil deliveries but is reportedly also considering military protection for its tankers by warships to prevent US intervention on the high seas. In light of Russia’s apparent retreat from its sphere of influence in Latin America, ultimately due to the “betrayal” of Venezuela, Russia’s promises must be viewed with skepticism. While Spain, as the first EU country, has pledged direct aid shipments via the UN system[169], the international solidarity flotilla “Nuestra América” is preparing to break the sea blockade in March 2026 to increase the supply of medicines and food. The aid supplies to be transported there are, of course, a drop in the bucket; the aim is to create awareness and solidarity.

This crisis must be viewed very soberly and distinguished from past crises. Unlike the “Special Period” of the 1990s, when the survival of Cuban social order could ultimately be secured by winning over Chávez’s Venezuela and thus an oil supplier opposing US imperialism, there is currently no new Chávez waiting in the wings. On the contrary, the end of the (at least nominal) successor to Chávez has just led to this new crisis.

The following can be stated: A fall of Cuba would be detrimental to both China and Russia simply based on its unique geostrategic position. Cuba’s symbolic effect, which garners sympathy even outside traditionally internationalist circles, is reason enough for China, Russia, and even European states to politically value keeping Cuba alive. On the other hand, it is a fact that Cuba will never stand on its own feet without an end to the US blockade; that is precisely the purpose of the embargo.

Demands like “Unblock Cuba” seem almost naive in light of the fact that maintaining the blockade brings no disadvantages to the hegemon. Then people like to refer to international law and that the blockade contradicts it – these arguments, like all references to international law, lead nowhere. International law does not apply to the highest instances of the world, namely the United States, but to those beneath them. And yet: As we have demonstrated in extreme detail in this article; Cuba cannot stand on its own two feet and survive independently without an end to the US blockade. This may change in the future through stronger BRICS integration, but to be able to use the opportunities of BRICS trade productively, a relaxation of the blockade is necessary – and that is precisely not in the interest of the United States.  

All other options amount to at least partial subordination to US imperialism. Will it come to that? That will likely become clear through the success of “Opción Cero” and the further support, particularly from China.

6.2. Summary: What Does America Want?

To summarize once again the concrete current material interests of the United States in its offensive against Cuba:

First, it should be noted that the United States has a central interest in neutralizing Cuba as a potential strategic bridgehead for its main global rivals, China and Russia. The Caribbean is viewed in Washington as a security policy backyard, control of which is considered a prerequisite for the United States’ freedom of movement in its own sphere of influence. In this context, American policy is particularly directed against China’s growing presence in Latin America and the Caribbean.

China has significantly expanded its economic influence in the region in recent decades, becoming the most important trading partner for large parts of South America and one of the most significant partners in the Caribbean. Against this backdrop, the United States has a clear interest in limiting Beijing’s access to regional structures as well as possible logistical or intelligence cooperation with Cuba. In parallel, Russian-Cuban cooperation is also perceived as a strategic risk in Washington. From the American perspective, this is a form of politico-military cooperation in which Russia trades energy and security support for diplomatic backing and regional influence. The tightening of the blockade policy aims, among other things, to make this partnership economically unattractive and to make it more difficult for Russia to provide an asymmetric response to the American presence in Eastern Europe.

Cuba has significant deposits of strategically important minerals, including large reserves of nickel and cobalt, which are of growing importance for high-tech industries and energy transition technologies. We also considered cobalt and nickel as central resource interests of an imperialist intervention in our Venezuela article.

A key interest of the United States is to secure long-term access for American companies to these resources, which are currently partially controlled by companies from third countries. The energy and tourism sectors are also seen as potential fields for future economic expansion. American firms have repeatedly shown interest in developing possible offshore oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico and in developing high-quality tourist infrastructure in Cuba’s coastal regions.

Furthermore, American policy towards Cuba pursues the long-term goal of consolidating the Western Hemisphere as an exclusive sphere of influence. The grab against Venezuela must be understood as the first blow to secure hegemony in the “backyard”; a blow against the consequently weakened Cuba is the logical conclusion.

At the same time, however, there is a certain security policy interest in avoiding a complete collapse of the Cuban state. An uncontrolled collapse could trigger a massive flight movement towards Florida, thereby causing domestic political and administrative problems for the fascistoid Trump administration. Against this background, selective exceptions to the sanctions policy can be explained, as well as informal contacts with economic and political actors within Cuba aimed at a long-term, controlled transformation under American conditions.

Finally, US policy towards Cuba is also closely linked to domestic political factors, particularly the political importance of the state of Florida. The Cuban-American diaspora in South Florida is considered an influential and financially significant voting bloc that has traditionally supported a hard line towards Havana. A tightening of the blockade policy therefore also serves to stabilize this political base. Moreover, in American domestic politics, Cuba fulfills a symbolic function as a projection surface for a demonstrative demarcation from socialist development models, which it aims to destabilize and sabotage with the blockade, while simultaneously being able to point to the consequences of the blockade as “consequences of socialism.”

7. Despite It All: The Significance of Cuba

The material conditions in Cuba, as now outlined, have been and are characterized by targeted and precise sabotage – almost unchanged since 1960, or 1992. It is therefore precisely because of socialism in Cuba that the massive consequences of sabotage, from embargo and isolation to terror, are cushioned for the people of Cuba.

No one claims that life in Cuba is better than the life of a well-off German – and how could it be? A state that reproduces itself without capital export and exploitation of the global south, confronted by the most dramatic embargo in modern history and excluded from any possibility of global trade – all while the material conditions of its revolutionary transformation were not those of a colonial power, but those of a colonized one.

It is precisely for this reason that the Cuban system, with its adaptability, lived solidarity internally and externally, and incredible resilience, represents such a significant milestone in social development.

The paradigmatic comparison is between Cuba and Haiti – both share the colonial legacy of plantation economy, exploitation, and corrupted revolution – yet while Haiti remained trapped in permanent poverty due to imperialism, interventions, and US-financed dictatorships (Duvalier), Cuba broke with this model at the cost of isolation. Today, the average woman in Haiti lives 13 years less than in Cuba, has a 38% lower literacy rate, a 119% higher probability of contracting HIV, and a 1763% higher chance of dying from tuberculosis; for treatment, she has barely a fortieth of the chance of finding a doctor as in Cuba:[170]

“I talked to a guy in Havana who says to me ‘All I used to see here in Havana, you call this drab and dull, we see it as a cleaner city. It’s true, the paint is peeling off the walls, but you don’t see kids begging in the streets anymore and you don’t see prostitutes.’ Prostitution used to be one of the biggest industries. And today this man is going to night school. He said ‘I could read! I can read, do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read?'” (Michael Parenti)[171]

The national literacy campaign of 1961, which mobilized around 250,000 people from the cities – including about 100,000 students – to teach the rural population to read and write, gave Cuba one of the highest literacy rates in the world at 99% and by far the highest in Latin America.  

“Cuba has one of the highest doctor-to-population ratios in the world, with about 8.4 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants. For comparison: in the USA it is 2.6 and in Italy 4.1. […] Cuba spends 23% of its state budget on health and 30% on education. At the same time, the country’s international medical aid services account for 46% of Cuban exports and 6% of GDP (in 2019 alone). This mechanism has brought excellent success to the health sector of the Caribbean island state.”[172]

With the revolution, the black population received universal access to education, work, sports, and housing in previously exclusive neighborhoods for the first time. Fidel Castro’s “Proclamation against Discrimination” lifted institutional barriers and recognized Afro-Cuban culture as part of the national identity. Women benefited from the expansion of daycare centers and programs that integrated formerly marginalized women into productive roles. Afro-Cuban culture was democratized. The Conjunto Folklórico Nacional of 1962 promoted Afro-Cuban music and dance, thus elevating local traditions that had previously been considered “low.”

It is precisely socialism in Cuba that protected and protects people from the otherwise fatal consequences of the embargo: As recently as 2025, during the massive economic crisis (see 5.), the minimum pension was doubled from 1528 to 3056 pesos – benefiting 438,572 Cuban pensioners.[173] At the same time, the export of medical services continues to expand; currently, 24,000 Cuban doctors are on foreign assignment – hundreds of millions of people worldwide have benefited from these overseas assignments without ever having to pay a cent. In 2019, 87% of Cubans voted in favor of the constitution they themselves had shaped.

The current blow against Cuba is the hardest in its history; nevertheless, Cuba will stand and survive. Not every problem in Cuba is an immediate consequence of US imperialism – but none of these problems would have reached even remotely their current severity without it.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npkeecCErQc

[2] https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/05/19/letter-to-manuel-mercado/

[3] https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h147.html

[4] https://tocororocubano.com/el-grito-de-baire-y-el-24-de-febrero-de-1895-inicio-de-la-guerra-necesaria/

[5] https://www.mgar.net/cuba/weyler2.htm

[6] https://hackneybooks.co.uk/books/337/562/MontecristiManifesto.html

[7] https://hackneybooks.co.uk/books/337/562/MontecristiManifesto.html

[8] https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/1898/Baltimore-Sun-3-24-1898-2.bmp

[9] https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/reconcentrado.htm

[10] https://idw-online.de/en/event37849

[11] Rockoff, Hugh. 2012. America’s Economic Way of War: War and the US Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War. New Approaches to Economic and Social History. New York: Routledge, 83.

[12] https://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_journalism.html

[13] Rockoff, Hugh. 2012. America’s Economic Way of War: War and the US Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War. New Approaches to Economic and Social History. New York: Routledge, 16.

[14] http://kpd-ml.org/doc/lenin/LW22.pdf, p.349

[15] https://www.grin.com/document/95601?srsltid=AfmBOor2btdcOEhizcB2aRxc44iPWMgKXswEz2sHU57ev2N_P-gQN8TQ

[16] https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/wp.towson.edu/dist/b/55/files/2019/12/Spring-1973-Adams-and-Cortada.pdf

[17] https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/wp.towson.edu/dist/b/55/files/2019/12/Spring-1973-Adams-and-Cortada.pdf

[18] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/kuba-und-die-usa-woher-die-feindschaft-zwischen-kuba-und-den-usa-kommt-1.2917128

[19] https://web.archive.org/web/20100516062344/http://library.thinkquest.org/18355/bartolome_maso.html

[20] https://books.google.co.th/books?id=LRmj4wHv-kIC&pg=PA98&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

[21] http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/race/RaceWar1.htm

[22] http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/race/RaceWar1.htm

[23] https://original-ufdc.uflib.ufl.edu/UF00029010/01960

[24] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 141.

[25] https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/kuba-despot-batista-freiheitskaempfer-mit-folterkammer-a-947510.html

[26] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 142.

[27] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 141.

[28] https://teresa.cce.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/In-Place-Part-Five.pdf

[29] Fernández, Frank. 2001. Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement. Tucson, AZ: Sharp Press, 94.

[30] Fernández, Frank. 2001. Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement. Tucson, AZ: Sharp Press, 94.

[31] Fernández, Frank. 2001. Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement. Tucson, AZ: Sharp Press, 95.

[32] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 145.

[33] Thomas, Hugh. 1971. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 760.

[34] Thomas, Hugh. 1971. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 855.

[35] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 146.

[36] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 146.

[37] Thomas, Hugh. 1971. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 855.

[38] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 146.

[39] Thomas, Hugh. 1971. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 140 ff., 144 ff.

[40] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 149.

[41] https://amerika21.de/dokument/265054/castro-geschichte-wird-mich-freisprechen

[42] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 156.

[43] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 150 ff., 157 ff.

[44] Thomas, Hugh. 1971. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 140 ff., 111 ff.

[45] https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/kuba-despot-batista-freiheitskaempfer-mit-folterkammer-a-947510.html

[46] Thomas, Hugh. 1971. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 901.

[47] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 173.

[48] Cushion, Stephen. 2016. A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 103.

[49] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 164.

[50] https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/kuba-despot-batista-freiheitskaempfer-mit-folterkammer-a-947510.html

[51] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 167 f.

[52] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 166.

[53] http://www.cubanews.acn.cu/cuba/17026-the-strike-of-april-9-brought-final-victory-closer

[54] Cushion, Stephen. 2016. A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 147 ff.

[55] Cushion, Stephen. 2016. A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 131.

[56] Cushion, Stephen. 2016. A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 147 ff.

[57] Cushion, Stephen. 2016. A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 147 ff.

[58] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 328 ff.

[59] Cushion, Stephen. 2016. A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 125.

[60] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 165.

[61] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 164.

[62] Cushion, Stephen. 2016. A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 15.

[63] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 37.

[64] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 168.

[65] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 168.

[66] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 168.

[67] https://www.jornada.com.mx/2010/08/31/index.php?section=mundo&article=026e1mun

[68] https://www.jornada.com.mx/2010/08/31/index.php?section=mundo&article=026e1mun

[69] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 34.

[70] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 106.

[71] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 54.

[72] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 193.

[73] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 50 ff.

[74] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 53.

[75] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 191.

[76] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 191.

[77] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 194.

[78] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 195.

[79] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 64.

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[81] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 58 ff.

[82] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 60.

[83] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 197.

[84] https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/socialism-not-the-embargo-explains-nearly-all-of-cubas-poverty/

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[86] https://lateinamerika-nachrichten.de/artikel/kubas-staatsfeind-nr-1/

[87] https://amerika21.de/2023/11/266656/un-fordert-ende-der-us-blockade

[88] https://press.un.org/en/2024/ga12650.doc.htm

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[90] https://press.un.org/en/2024/ga12650.doc.htm

[91] https://www.baltimoresun.com/1994/08/30/the-politics-behind-clintons-cuba-policy/

[92] https://www.baltimoresun.com/1994/08/30/the-politics-behind-clintons-cuba-policy/

[93] https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/intejcubastud.16.1.0058

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[95] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/752863/umfrage/kindersterblichkeit-in-den-usa/

[96] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 287 ff.

[97] Font, Mauricio A., and Carlos Riobó, eds. 2013. Handbook of Contemporary Cuba: Economy, Politics, Civil Society, and Globalization. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 36.

[98] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X98000205

[99] Font, Mauricio A., and Carlos Riobó, eds. 2013. Handbook of Contemporary Cuba: Economy, Politics, Civil Society, and Globalization. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 36.

[100] Font, Mauricio A., and Carlos Riobó, eds. 2013. Handbook of Contemporary Cuba: Economy, Politics, Civil Society, and Globalization. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 36

[101] Font, Mauricio A., and Carlos Riobó, eds. 2013. Handbook of Contemporary Cuba: Economy, Politics, Civil Society, and Globalization. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 32.

[102] Font, Mauricio A., and Carlos Riobó, eds. 2013. Handbook of Contemporary Cuba: Economy, Politics, Civil Society, and Globalization. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 36.

[103] https://jacobin.com/2021/01/we-are-cuba-review-socialism-soviet-union

[104] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 138 ff.

[105] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 121.

[106] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 121.

[107] Data varies by study; https://www.academia.edu/965534/THINGS_BECAME_SCARCE_FOOD_AVAILABILITY_AND_ACCESSIBILITY_IN_SANTIAGO_de_CUBA_THEN_AND_NOW

[108] https://jacobin.com/2021/01/we-are-cuba-review-socialism-soviet-union

[109] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/27/cuba.international

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[111] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 138 ff.

[112] https://jacobin.com/2021/01/we-are-cuba-review-socialism-soviet-union

[113] https://amerika21.de/meldung/2012/04/51893/neun-jahre-barrio-adentro

[114] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/with-death-of-chavez-castro-says-cuba-has-lost-its-best-friend-idUSBRE92A0FU/

[115] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 338.

[116] Gott, Richard. 2005. Cuba: A New History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 338.

[117] http://www.cubanews.acn.cu/cuba/19704-battle-of-ideas-the-largest-mass-mobilization-ever-to-take-place-in-cuba

[118] Font, Mauricio A., and Carlos Riobó, eds. 2013. Handbook of Contemporary Cuba: Economy, Politics, Civil Society, and Globalization. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 36.

[119] https://cubasi.cu/en/news/cuba-and-permanent-battle-ideas

[120] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 153.

[121] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/cuba-democracy

[122] https://www.sdaj.org/2021/07/26/kubas-politisches-system/

[123] Information in this section from:
https://www.sdaj.org/2021/07/26/kubas-politisches-system/
https://www.liberationschool.org/ch-14-workers-democracy-in-cuba/
https://amerika21.de/dokument/204765/kubas-revolutionaere-demokratie
https://lateinamerika-nachrichten.de/artikel/ein-ja-zu-mehr-vielfalt/

[124] https://www.kas.de/de/laenderberichte/detail/-/content/verfassungsreform-in-kuba

[125] https://amerika21.de/2018/08/209951/kuba-verfassung-reform-lesung

[126] https://amerika21.de/2019/04/225063/kuba-neue-verfassung

[127] https://www.dw.com/de/klare-mehrheit-f%C3%BCr-neue-verfassung-in-kuba/a-47687827

[128] https://www.granma.co.cu/2013/03/14/pdf/todas.pdf

[129] Chomsky, Aviva. 2010. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 42.

[130] https://de.granma.cu/cuba/2024-05-08/womit-beschaftigen-sich-die-komitees-zur-verteidigung-der-revolution-heute

[131] https://de.granma.cu/cuba/2024-05-08/womit-beschaftigen-sich-die-komitees-zur-verteidigung-der-revolution-heute

[132] https://cubaheute.de/2012/09/13/erneuerung-der-CDR-eine-politische-aufgabe-in-kuba/

[133] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/cuba-committees-defence-revolution-up-close

[134] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/cuba-committees-defence-revolution-up-close

[135] https://worldcrunch.com/business-finance/cuba-joins-brics-trump/

[136] https://en.cibercuba.com/noticias/2025-07-17-u1-e135253-s27061-nid307205-escenario-desolador-gobierno-admite-economia-cubana

[137] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuban-economy-continues-five-year-decline-economy-minister-says-2025-07-14/?

[138] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuban-economy-continues-five-year-decline-economy-minister-says-2025-07-14/?

[139] https://en.cibercuba.com/noticias/2025-02-24-u1-e199370-s27061-nid297697-inflacion-dispara-cuba-2025?utm_

[140] https://horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu/news/cuba-ten-consecutive-years-macroeconomic-deterioration/

[141] https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202502/12/WS67ac3d69a3104d9e68a7a4f4.html

[142] https://cubaheute.de/2025/07/18/erneute-waehrungsreform-kuba-parlament-zur-lage-der-nation/

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[149] https://cubaheute.de/2026/02/06/us-energieblockade-kuba-aktiviert-fidel-castros-notfallplan/

[150] https://amerika21.de/2026/02/282607/kuba-notfallplan-energieembargo

[151] https://taz.de/Mexiko-stoppt-Oellieferung-nach-Kuba/!6149298/

[152] https://www.morgenpost.de/politik/article411190436/kuba-vor-dem-kollaps-kein-sprit-fuer-flugzeuge-hotels-machen-dicht.html

[153] https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/02/1166895

[154] https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/517444.unblock-cuba-kontra-gegen-us-blockade.html

[155] https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/ausland/kuba-usa-oel-embargo-humanitaere-krise-venezuela-100.html

[156] https://www.trtworld.com/article/6fcf932ef260

[157] https://taz.de/Desolate-Lage-in-Kuba/!6154979/

[158] https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/ausland/kuba-usa-oel-embargo-humanitaere-krise-venezuela-100.html

[159] https://www.martinoticias.com/a/qu%C3%A9-va-a-pasar-en-cuba-con-cero-combstible-hay-un-plan-b-experto-en-energ%C3%ADa-eval%C3%BAa-las-opciones/444709.html

[160] https://www.ft.com/content/f15ac8c6-c76b-40a1-bb41-95abbed7d8aa

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[162] https://www.thepioneer.de/originals/thepioneer-expert/articles/kuba-embargo-trump-rubio-usa-krise-oel

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[164] https://www.thepioneer.de/originals/thepioneer-expert/articles/kuba-embargo-trump-rubio-usa-krise-oel

[165] https://amerika21.de/2026/02/282607/kuba-notfallplan-energieembargo

[166] https://amerika21.de/2026/02/282607/kuba-notfallplan-energieembargo

[167] https://cubaheute.de/2026/01/21/china-kuba-80-millionen-dollar-nothilfepaket/

[168] https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/517444.unblock-cuba-kontra-gegen-us-blockade.html

[169] https://www.prensa-latina.cu/2026/02/16/cuba-reitera-a-espana-voluntad-de-reforzar-nexos/

[170] https://www.laenderdaten.info/laendervergleich.php?country1=CUB&country2=HTI

[171] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNu13KEfqN8&t=744s

[172] https://www.vietnam.vn/de/thay-gi-o-quoc-gia-co-he-thong-y-te-tot-nhat-the-gioi

[173] https://cubaheute.de/2025/07/18/erneute-waehrungsreform-kuba-parlament-zur-lage-der-nation/