Cuba

Former dictator-president of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. This photograph was taken in 1959, after the Castro-led rebellion had ousted Batista on 1 January that year.

Smiling US soldiers prepare to board a train in Tampa, Florida, USA. They are bound for Cuba, during their successful 1898 war with Spain. This established the US as a colonial power (with the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico ceded to them), while Cuba was given its independence.

Truckloads of Cubans celebrate Fidel Castro's victory. After two abortive attempts (in 1953 and 1956), he overthrew the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. In this photograph, his supporters are seen entering the Cuban capital Havana on 1 January 1959.

The coastline of downtown Havana, Cuba. With over 5,200 km/3,250 mi of coastline, Cuba is a popular destination for scuba divers and water sports enthusiasts. This stretch of seafront is occupied by the major hotels of the city.

Founded in 1515, Havana still retains much of its 16th-century Spanish architecture. During this period, it thrived as the main stop for Spanish ships weighed down with gold on their way back to Spain. The gold attracted the attentions of pirates, so Havana developed as a very well-fortified city.

Island country in the Caribbean Sea, the largest of the West Indies, off the south coast of Florida and to the east of Mexico.

Government

Cuba has a communist political executive and is dominated by the ruling Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). Its 1976 constitution created a socialist state with the National Assembly of People's Power as its supreme organ. It consists of 609 deputies elected by universal suffrage for a five-year term. It meets twice a year and elects 31 of its members to form the Council of State which holds legislature power between these sessions. It also elects the head of state, who is president of the council, head of government, and first secretary and chair of the political bureau of the only authorized party, the PCC. The PCC dominates the community-based Committees for the Defence of the Revolution which coordinate public projects and act as the eyes, ears and voice of the ruling regime.

History

The first Europeans to visit Cuba were those of the expedition of Christopher Columbus in 1492, who found Arawak Indians there. From 1511 Cuba was a Spanish colony, its economy based on sugar plantations worked by slaves, who were first brought from Africa in 1523 to replace the decimated Indian population. Slavery was not abolished until 1886. Cuba was ceded to the USA in 1898, at the end of the Spanish-American War. Under US administration, roads, communications, and health services were improved. A new judicial system was set up on the US model. However, early enthusiasm after independence from Spain soon faded. A republic was proclaimed in 1901, but the USA retained its naval base and asserted a right to intervene in internal affairs until 1934.

Batista dictatorship

In 1933 an army sergeant, Fulgencio Batista, seized and held power until he retired in 1944. In 1952 he regained power in a bloodless coup and began another period of rule that many Cubans found oppressive. In 1953 a young lawyer and son of a sugar planter, Dr Fidel Castro Ruz, tried to overthrow him but failed. He went into exile to prepare for another coup in 1956 but was again defeated. He fled to the hills with Dr Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and ten others to form a guerrilla force.

Revolution

In 1959 Castro's force of 5,000 guerrillas deposed Batista, to great popular acclaim. The 1940 constitution was suspended and replaced by a ‘Fundamental Law’, power being vested in a council of ministers with Castro as prime minister, his brother Raúl as his deputy, and Che Guevara, reputedly, as the next in command. In 1960 the USA broke off diplomatic relations after all US businesses in Cuba were nationalized without compensation. In 1961 it went further, sponsoring a full-scale (but abortive) invasion, the Bay of Pigs episode. In December of that year Castro proclaimed a communist state whose economy would develop along Marxist-Leninist lines.

Cuban missile crisis

In 1962 Cuba was expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS), which initiated a full political and economic blockade. A US trade embargo was also imposed. Castro responded by tightening relations with the USSR which, in the same year, supplied medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles with atomic warheads for installation in Cuba. This led, in 1962, to the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the USA and the USSR to the brink of nuclear war. Conflict was averted when the USSR agreed to dismantle the missiles at President Kennedy's insistence.

With Soviet help, Cuba made substantial economic and social progress 1965–72. In 1975 the Organization of American States (OAS) lifted sanctions against Cuba. In 1976 a referendum approved a socialist constitution, and Fidel Castro and his brother were elected president and vice-president.

Foreign policy

During the following five years Cuba played a larger role in world affairs, particularly in Africa, to the disquiet of the USA. Castro emerged as a leading spokesman for ‘anti-imperial’ governments in developing countries, and Cuba provided military manpower to a number of pro-Soviet movements in Africa and the Middle East. In return, the USSR provided Cuba with increasing economic aid.

Re-elected in 1981, Castro offered to discuss foreign policy with the USA but Cuban support for Argentina, against Britain, and for leftist rebels seeking to overthrow the repressive US-backed government of El Salvador caused continuing strains with the USA.

The collapse of the USSR

Castro reaffirmed his communist orthodoxy in the light of events in eastern Europe 1989–90. The advent of the USSR's reform-communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the USSR's abandonment of its policy of supporting revolutions in the developing world led to a curtailment of Cuba's foreign military interventions in 1989. In September 1991 the USSR announced the withdrawal of all Soviet troops, and in December 1991 the USSR was dissolved.

The ‘special period’

The collapse the USSR was a major economic blow to Cuba. It had relied on the USSR for key supplies, particularly cheap oil, and for 80% of its trade, receiving, in effect, $6 billion in subsidies. In particular, the USSR had provided a market for Cuba's sugar. The period after the fall of the USSR became known in Cuba as the ‘special period’, involving food and energy rationing.

During 1993, Cuba's economy deteriorated as the USA tightened it 32-year-old trade embargo against Cuba in the hope that it would led to the overthrow of Castro. In response, in September 1993, Castro legalized some private enterprise, in retail and light manufacturing and tourism, followed by a crackdown on consequential black market activity.

During the summer of 1994 there was an exodus of Cuban refugees to Florida in dangerous circumstances. In response, in September 1994 the USA signed an accord with Cuba ending its policy of granting immediate residency to Cuban asylum-seekers and committing itself instead to accepting a minimum of 20,000 legal Cuban immigrants each year. In return, Cuba agreed to take steps to deter its citizens from fleeing the island by sea and to prevent unsafe departures.

To stimulate food production, Cuba introduced agricultural reforms. Some further, although limited, market-orientated reforms were introduced in November 1994 by the Cuban government and in September 1995 the government passed legislation permitting foreign ownership in nearly all parts of the economy.

The early to mid-1990s were a challenging period for the Castro regime and in 1994 there was a popular uprising, known as the Maleconazo. However, in February 1998 Castro was confirmed as president for another five-year term by the National Assembly. In April 1998 the UN Human Rights Commission declined to censure Cuba; a number of countries abstained.

Emigration problems

In late 1999 relations between the USA and Cuba deteriorated to their lowest point for twenty years as a bitter political crisis escalated. Cuba demanded the return of illegal immigrants, centring around the repatriation of Elian Gonzalez, a six-year-old boy who survived the shipwreck that killed his mother as they attempted to migrate to Florida. The federal government ruled that Gonzalez had to be returned to his father in Cuba, despite his relatives in the USA demanding residency for the boy. In April 2000, there were violent protests by the Cuban community in Miami when US federal agents took Elian from his relatives' home in Miami to reunite him, two months later, with his father in Cuba.

Economic stabilization

From the late 1990s Cuba's economy began to stabilize. The country was helped by aid and support from communist China, but also by new allies in Latin America, notably Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, which provided cheap gas and oil. By 1996 tourism had become a larger source of hard currency for Cuba than the sugar industry, and over the next decade it continued to grow rapidly, while the latter declined.

In July 2000, US economic sanctions against Cuba were eased slightly when the US Congress agreed a deal to exempt sales of food and medicine to Cuba from the economic sanctions which remain in place on other goods.

In October 2001, Cuba reacted angrily to Russia's announcement in that it would close, in January 2002, its remaining spy base on the island, saying no such agreement had yet been reached. The Cubans accused Russian president Vladimir Putin of wanting to please US president George W Bush, his new-found ally against terrorism. Cuba also stood to lose out financially, as the site had been leased to Russia for around US$200 million per year.

In November 2004, the government introduced a ban on transactions in US dollars, and imposed a 10% tax on dollar-peso conversions.

Handover of power to Raúl Castro

In July 2006, wth his health deteriorating, Fidel Castro transferred his duties as president and communist party leader to his youngest brother, Raúl, who had long been the country's second in command. The transfer was meant to be temporary, while Fidel recovered from intestinal surgery, but he remained increasingly frail and effectively the transfer was permanent. In February 2008, Fidel announced he would not seek another term.and the National Assembly formally elected Raúl as the country's president. Raúl lacked Fidel's charisma and was known for his determination to maintain the Communist Party's political dominance, but also who might be willing to allow more free-market reform, on the Chinese model. On becoming president, Raúl announced the lifting of a number of economic restrictions, such as the ban on buying computers and DVD players.

Cuba (redirected from Republic of Cuba)