During the 1970s through the late 1980s, Cuba intervened in numerous conflicts in support of anti-colonial and Marxist governments or movements across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. According to a CIA declassified report, Cuba had received $33 billion in Soviet aid by 1984. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced a severe economic downturn in the 1990s, known as the Special Period. In 2008, Castro retired after 49 years; Raúl Castro was elected his successor. Raúl retired as president of the Council of State in 2018, and Miguel Díaz-Canel was elected president by the National Assembly following parliamentary elections. Raúl retired as First Secretary of the Communist Party in 2021, and Díaz-Canel was elected thereafter, becoming Cuba's first leader to have been born after the Cuban Revolution.
Cuba has one of the world's few command economies, and its economy is dominated by tourism and the exports of skilled labor, sugar, tobacco, and coffee. Cuba has historically—before and during communist rule—performed better than other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in literacy. After the 1959 revolution, Cuba performed better than other Latin American countries in infant and maternal mortality, and life expectancy. According to a 2012 study, Cuba is the only country in the world to meet the conditions of sustainable development put forth by the WWF. Cuba has a universal health care system that provides free medical treatment to all Cuban citizens, although challenges include low salaries for doctors, poor facilities, poor provision of equipment, and the frequent absence of essential drugs. (Full article...)
Cuban businesses in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami (1978), home of the mythologized successful Cuban American business sector.
The Cuban success story, sometimes referred to as the myth of the golden exile, is the idea that Cuban exiles that came to the United States after the 1959 Cuban Revolution were mostly or exclusively political exiles who were white, largely conservative, and financially successful. The idea garnered traction starting in the 1960s via rags-to-riches stories of Cuban exiles in the US news media, and became widely promoted within the Cuban American community. The idea has been criticized as an inaccurate depiction of Cuban Americans that ignores historical fact. (Full article...)
The following are images from various Cuba-related articles on Wikipedia.
Image 1Fidel Castro at the first congress of the Communist Party of Cuba. (from History of Cuba)
Image 2Defense of a train attacked by Cuban insurgents (from History of Cuba)
Image 3The city walls of Havana, 1848 (from History of Cuba)
Image 4Rebel leaders engaged in extensive propaganda to get the U.S. to intervene, as shown in this cartoon in an American magazine. Columbia (the American people) reaches out to help oppressed Cuba in 1897 while Uncle Sam (the U.S. government) is blind to the crisis and will not use its powerful guns to help. Judge magazine, 6 February 1897. (from History of Cuba)
Image 25Depiction of an engagement between Cuban rebels and Spanish Royalists during the Ten Years' War (1868–78) (from History of Cuba)
Image 26Capablanca playing chess with his father José María Capablanca in 1892 (from Culture of Cuba)
Image 27A 1736 colonial map by Herman Moll of the West Indies and Mexico, together comprising "New Spain", with Cuba visible in the center. (from History of Cuba)
Image 34Protests against the visit of soviet diplomat Anastas Mikoyan, dispersed by a policeman firing his gun. (February 5, 1960) (from History of Cuba)
... that the 1919 foxtrot song "I'll See You in C-U-B-A" was an example of Cuba being perceived as "America's playground"?
... that Cuban swimmer Rafael Polinario had to defect to Canada instead of Spain after Fidel Castro's brother got on his plane?
... that Cuba's Girardinus fish may have evolved into different species because the island's rivers are often interrupted by waterfalls or vanish underground?
... that Indonesian diplomat Linggawaty Hakim assisted the Bahamas government in determining its maritime border with Cuba?
... that Bob Barrabee studied tobacco farming in Cuba and played in the NFL in the same year?
... that after his movement's victory in the Cuban Revolution, television broadcasts showed Camilo Cienfuegos freeing parrots from birdcages, declaring that the birds had "a right to liberty"?
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Spanish pronunciation:[aˈlea]; December 11, 1928 – April 16, 1996) was a Cuban film director and screenwriter. Gutiérrez Alea wrote and directed more than twenty features, documentaries, and short films, which are known for his sharp insight into post-Revolutionary Cuba, and possess a delicate balance between dedication to the revolution and criticism of the social, economic, and political conditions of the country.
Gutiérrez's work is representative of a cinematic movement occurring in the 1960s and 1970s known collectively as the New Latin American Cinema. This collective movement, also referred to by various writers by specific names such as "Third Cinema", "Cine Libre", and "Imperfect Cinema," was concerned largely with the problems of neocolonialism and cultural identity. The movement rejected both the commercial perfection of the Hollywood style, and the auteur-oriented European art cinema, for a cinema created as a tool for political and social change. Due in no small part to the filmmakers’ lack of resources, aesthetic was of secondary importance to cinema's social function. The movement's main goal was to create films in which the viewer became an active, self-aware participant in the discourse of the film. Viewers were presented with an analysis of a current problem within society that as of that time had no clear solution, hoping to make the audience aware of the problem and to leave the theater willing to become actors of social change. (Full article...)
... that Baracoa in eastern Cuba (pictured) is located on the spot where Christopher Columbus landed in Cuba on his first voyage, and is not only the oldest Spanish settlement in Cuba but also its first capital?
...that the Guanajatabey were indigenous inhabitants of Cuba, that lived on the island since at least 1000 B.C.? And that they were forced to the western point of the island by the arrival of the Ciboney people?
Here the chief urgency is negroes ... We pray license for each citizen to bring four Negroes and Negresses, free of all duty
”
Spanish settlers' urgent appeal to the authorities in Santiago de Cuba for more slaves, 1542. Hubert H. S. Aimes: A History of Slavery in Cuba, 1511 to 1868 p.11
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