History

Cuba, the largest of the Caribbean islands, was first inhabited by Amerindian peoples known as the Taíno and Ciboney. On 27 October 1492, Christopher Columbus sighted the island during his first voyage of discovery and claimed it for Spain. Cuba subsequently became a Spanish colony to be ruled by the Spanish governor in Havana, though in 1762 the colony was briefly annexed by Britain before being returned in exchange for Florida. A series of rebellions during the 19th century failed to end Spanish rule, but increased tensions between Spain and the United States, resulting in the Spanish-American War, led finally to Spanish withdrawal, and in 1902 Cuba gained formal independence.

American trade dominated Cuba during the first half of the 20th century, aided by US government policy measures assuring influence over the island. In 1959, de facto leader Fulgencio Batista was ousted by revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro. Deteriorating trade relations with the US led to Cuba's alliance with the Soviet Union and Castro's transformation of Cuba into a declared socialist republic. Castro has remained in power since 1959, first as Prime Minister then from 1976 as President of Cuba.

Pre-Columbian Cuba

Guanajatabeyes

The earliest inhabitants of Cuba were the Guanajatabey people, who migrated to the island from the forests of the South American mainland as long ago as 5300 BC. The Guanajatabeyes, who numbered about 100,000, were hunters, gatherers, and farmers. They were to cultivate cohiba (tobacco), a crop upon which the island's economy would one day depend. Spanish conquistador Diego Velázquez later observed that the Guanajatabeyes were "without houses or towns and eating only the meat they are able to find in the forests as well as turtles and fish". Though the Guanajatabeyes are now considered to be a distinct population, early anthropologists and historians believed that they were the Ciboney people who occupied areas throughout the Antilles islands of the Caribbean. More recently, researchers have speculated that the Guanajatabeyes may have migrated from the south of the United States, evidenced by similarities of artefacts found in both regions. Some studies ascribe a role to these original inhabitants in the extinction of the islands' megafauna, including condors, giant owls, and eventually ground sloths.

Further evidence suggests that the Guanajatabeyes were driven to the west of the island by the arrival of two subsequent waves of migrants, the Taíno and Ciboney. These groups are sometimes referred to as neo-Taíno nations. The new arrivals had migrated north along the Caribbean island chain from the Orinoco delta in Venezuela. These two groups were prehistoric cultures in a time period during which humans created tools from stone, yet they were familiar with gold (caona) and copper alloys (guanín).

Taíno and Ciboney Cultures

The Taíno and Ciboney were part of a cultural group commonly called the Arawak, which extended far into South America. Initially, the new arrivals inhabited the eastern area of Baracoa before expanding across the island. Travelling Dominican clergyman and writer Bartolome de las Casas estimated that the Cuban population of the neo-Taíno people had reached 200,000 by the time of the late fifteenth century. The Taíno cultivated the yucca root, harvested it and baked it to produce cassava bread. They also grew cotton and tobacco, and ate maize and potatoes. According to Las Casas they had "everything they needed for living; they had many crops, well arranged".

The Taíno agriculturalist and the Ciboney were a self-sufficient society, although their development was not limited to fishing and hunting, farming and production of wooden structures. Taínos and Ciboney took part in similar customs and beliefs, one being the sacred ritual of smoking, often nasally inhaled, narcotized tobacco vapours and particulates called cohoba. Residues of their poetry, songs, sculpture and art are found today throughout the major Antilles.

Conquest of Cuba

Early Spanish Colonisation

The first sighting of a Spanish boat approaching the island was on October 28, 1492, probably at Baracoa on the eastern point of the island. Christopher Columbus, on his first voyage to the Americas, sailed south from what is now The Bahamas to explore the northeast coast of Cuba and the northern coast of Hispaniola. During a second voyage in 1494, Columbus passed along the south coast of the island, landing at various inlets including what was to become Guantánamo Bay. With the Papal Bull of 1493 Pope Alexander VI commanded Spain to conquer, colonise and convert the Pagans of the New World to Catholicism. On arrival, Columbus observed the Taíno dwellings, describing them as "looking like tents in a camp. All were of palm branches, beautifully constructed".

The Spanish began to create permanent settlements on the island of Hispaniola, east of Cuba, soon after Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean, but it wasn't until 1509 that the coast of Cuba was fully mapped by Sebastián de Ocampo. In 1511 Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar set out with three ships and an army of 300 men from Hispaniola to form the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, with orders from Spain to conquer the island. The settlement was at Baracoa, but the new settlers were to be greeted with stiff resistance from the local Taíno population. The Taínos were initially organised by cacique (cheiftan) Hatuey, who had himself relocated from Hispaniola to escape the brutalities of Spanish rule on that island. After a prolonged guerrilla campaign Hatuey and successive chieftains were captured and burnt alive, and within three years the Spanish had gained control of the island. In 1514, a settlement was founded in what was to become Havana.

Clergyman Bartolomé de Las Casas observed a number of massacres initiated by the invaders as the Spanish swept over the island, notably the massacre near Manzanillo of the inhabitants of Caonao. According to his account, some three thousand villagers had travelled to Manzanillo to greet the Spanish with loaves, fishes and other foodstuffs and were "without provocation, butchered". The surviving indigenous groups fled to the mountains or the small surrounding islands before being captured and forced into reservations. One such reservation was Guanabacoa which is today a suburb of Havana.

In 1513, Ferdinand II of Aragon issued a decree establishing the encomienda land settlement system that was to be incorporated throughout the Spanish Americas. Velázquez, who had become Governor of Cuba relocating from Baracoa to Santiago de Cuba, was given the task of apportioning both the land and the indigenous Cubans to groups throughout the new colony. The scheme was not a success however, as the Cubans either succumbed to diseases brought from Spain such as measles and smallpox, or simply refused to work preferring to slip away into the mountains. Desperate for labour to toil the new agricultural settlements, the Conquistadors sought slaves from surrounding islands and the continental mainland. But these new arrivals followed the indigenous Cubans by also dispersing into the wilderness or suffering a similar fate at the hands of disease.

Despite the difficult relations between the local Cubans and the new Europeans, some cooperation was in evidence. The Spanish were shown by the Native Cubans how to nurture tobacco and consume it in the form of cigars. There were also many unions between the largely male Spanish colonists and indigenous women. Their children were called mestizos, but the Native Cubans called them Guajiro, which translates as "one of us". Although modern day studies have revealed traces of Taíno DNA in individuals throughout Cuba, the population was effectively destroyed as a culture and civilisation after 1515. The local Indian population left their mark on the language and place names of the island, however. The name of Cuba itself and Havana were derived from neo-Taino dialect, and Indian words such as Tobacco, Hurricane and Canoe continue to be used today.

Arrival of African Slaves

The Spanish established sugar and tobacco as Cuba's primary products, and the island soon supplanted Hispaniola as the prime Spanish base in the Caribbean. The expansion of agriculture tempered by the rapid erosion of the native populations meant that further field labour was required. African slaves were then imported to work the plantations as field labour. However, restrictive Spanish trade laws made it difficult for Cubans to keep up with the 17th and 18th century advances in processing sugar cane pioneered in British Barbados and French Saint Domingue (Haiti). Spain also restricted Cuba's access to the slave trade, which was dominated by the British, French and Dutch. One important turning point came in the Seven Years' War, when the British conquered the port of Havana and introduced thousands of slaves in a ten month period. Another key event was the Haitian Revolution in nearby Saint-Domingue, from 1791 to 1804. Thousands of French refugees, fleeing the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue, brought slaves and expertise in sugar refining and coffee growing into eastern Cuba in the 1790 and early 1800s.

In the 1800s, Cuban sugar plantations became the most important world producer of sugar, thanks to the expansion of slavery and a relentless focus on improving the island's sugar technology. Use of modern refining techniques was especially important because the British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and after 1815 began forcing other countries to follow suit. By the end of the nineteenth century, slavery was abolished.

However, leading up to the abolition of slavery, Cuba gained great prosperity from its sugar trade. Originally, the Spanish had ordered regulations on trade with Cuba, which kept the island from becoming a dominant sugar producer. The Spanish were interested in keeping their trade routes and slave trade routes protected. Nevertheless, Cuba's vast size and abundance of natural resources made it an ideal place for becoming a booming sugar producer. When Spain opened the Cuban trade ports, it quickly became a popular place. New technology allowed a much more effective and efficient means of producing sugar. They began to use water mills, enclosed furnaces and steam engines to produce a higher quality of sugar at a much more efficient pace than elsewhere in the Caribbean.

The boom in Cuba's sugar industry in the nineteenth century made it necessary for Cuba to improve its means of transportation. Planters needed safe and efficient ways to transport the sugar from the plantations to the ports, in order to maximise their returns. Many new roads were built, and old roads were quickly repaired. Railroads were built early and changed the way that perishable sugar cane is collected and allowing more rapid and effective sugar transportation. It was now possible for plantations all over this large island to have their sugar shipped quickly and easily. The prosperity seen from the boom in sugar production is a major reason that Cuban ethnicity became further enriched by new influx of Spanish migrants. Many Spaniards immigrated to Cuba, calling it a place of refuge.

Cuba Under Attack

Cuba had long been a target of buccaneers, pirates and French corsairs seeking Spain's new world riches. Repeated raids meant that defences were bolstered throughout the island during the 16th century and Havana was furnished with the Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos del Morro (El Morro fortress) to deter potential invaders which included English privateer Francis Drake, who sailed within sight of Havana harbour but did not disembark on the island. Havana's inability to resist invaders was dramatically exposed in 1628, when a Dutch fleet led by Piet Heyn plundered the Spanish fleet in the city's harbour. In 1662, on the eastern part of the island, English admiral and pirate Christopher Myngs captured and briefly occupied Santiago de Cuba in an effort to open up Cuba's protected trade with neighbouring Jamaica.

Nearly a century later, the English were to invade in earnest taking Guantánamo Bay during the War of Jenkins' Ear with Spain. Edward Vernon, the British Admiral who devised the scheme, saw his 4,000 occupying troops capitulate to local guerrilla resistance, and more critically, debilitating disease, forcing him to withdraw his fleet to British owned Jamaica. Seven years later, in 1748, tensions between the three dominant colonial powers; Britain, France and Spain, were transported to the Caribbean. A skirmish between a British squadron and a Spanish squadron of the coast of Cuba became known as the Battle of Havana.

The Seven Years' War, which erupted in 1754 in three continents, eventually arrived at the Spanish Caribbean. Spain's alliance with the French pitched them in direct conflict with the British, and in 1762 an expedition set out from Portsmouth of 5 warships and 4000 troops to capture Cuba. The English arrived on June 6, and by August had Havana under siege. When Havana surrendered, British Admiral of the fleet George Keppel, the 3rd Earl of Albemarle, entered the city as conquering new governor, taking control of the whole western part of the island.

The arrival of the British immediately opened up trade with their North American and Caribbean colonies, causing a rapid transformation of Cuban society. Food, horses and other goods flooded into the city, and thousands of slaves from West Africa were transported to the island to work on the under manned sugar plantations. Though Havana, which had become the third largest city in the new world, was to enter an era of sustained development and closer ties with North America, the British occupation was not to last. Pressure from London by sugar merchants fearing a decline in sugar prices forced a series of negotiations with the Spanish over colonial territories. Less than a year after Havana was seized, the Peace of Paris was signed by the three warring powers thus ending the Seven Years' War. The treaty gave Britain Florida in exchange for Cuba on the recommendation of the French, who advised that declining the offer could result in Spain losing Mexico and much of the South American mainland to the British.

Independence from Spain

Cuban independence from Spain was gained by a complex of three larger wars (with the second, La Guerra Chiquita (aka the Small War; 1879-1880) overlapping the end of the first), including La Guerra de los Diez Años (aka Ten Years' War; 1868-1878), and a number of other actions.

On 10 October 1868, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves and thus started the Ten Years' War when other plantation owners and guajiros joined in the guerrilla fighting in the Eastern regions. The Spanish were able to exploit the mistrust among the rebels to reach a settlement on 10 February 1878 with the Pact of Zanjón. After that, José Martí, who was exiled after an attempt to back up the rebels in the West, started campaigning in the United States, where there was a sizeable community of Cuban exiles. In 1880, there was another significant rising, the so called 'Guerra Chiquita', but poor coordination between Antonio Maceo and Calixto Garcia doomed it to failure.

On 24 February 1895, events beginning a few days before culminated to resurrect the insurrection. Several important Cuban independence fighters landed near Baracoa, starting the second major War of Cuban Independence, commonly called the War of '95. Soon, Martí was killed, but Máximo Gomez and Antonio Maceo fought on, defeating the Spanish Governor Arsenio Martínez Campos, himself the victor of the Ten Year War, and killing his most trusted general at Peralejo. In a brilliant cavalry campaign, they invaded every province.

Maceo was killed in Havana province while returning from the west, but Calixto Garcia, escaped to Spain. As the war went on, the major limit to Cuban success was weapons supply. Although the weapons and funding came from within the US, the supply operation violated American laws which were enforced by the US Coast Guard; of 71 re-supply missions only 27 got through, 5 were stopped by the Spanish but 33 by the US Coast Guard.

Riots in Havana by rowdy pro-Spanish 'Voluntarios' gave the United States a reason to send in the warship USS Maine to indicate high national interest. American opinion was outraged at news of Spanish atrocities, and President William McKinley demanded reforms or independence. When the US battleship Maine blew up on 15 February 1898, tensions escalated, and the US would no longer accept Spanish promises of eventual reform. The US declared the Spanish-American War. American naval and military forces were immediately successful, as the Spanish put up a weak resistance. On 17 July 1898, the Spanish surrendered and, on 10 December 1898, they signed the Treaty of Paris recognising Cuban independence and giving to the US Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The US Army took over the island on a temporary basis and began a massive public health program to eradicate disease, and a complex modernisation program of upgrading the infrastructure of ports, roads and communications.

Cuba in the Early 20th Century

In 1902, the United States handed over control to a Cuban government that as a condition of the transfer had included in its constitution provisions implementing the requirements of the Platt Amendment, which among other things gave the United States the right to intervene militarily in Cuba. Land that was in ruins was acquired by US investors, enabling the United States to control roughly three-quarters of the Cuban sugar, the foundation of the Cuban economy. Havana and Varadero became tourist resorts, adorned with casinos and strip-clubs. The Cuban population gradually recovered economic power from both Spanish and US interests, and enacted civil rights anti-discrimination legislation that ordered minimum employment quotas for Cubans.

President Tomás Estrada Palma was elected in 1902, and Cuba was declared independent, though Guantanamo Bay was leased to the United States as part of the Platt Amendment. The status of the Isle of Pines as Cuban territory was left undefined until 1925 when the United States finally recognised Cuban sovereignty over the island. Estrada Palma, a frugal man, governed successfully for his four year term; yet when he tried to extend his time in office, a revolt ensued. In 1906, the United States representative William Howard Taft, notably with the personal diplomacy of Frederick Funston, negotiated an end of the successful revolt led by able young general Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, who had served under Antonio Maceo in the final war of independence. Estrada Palma resigned. The United States Governor Charles Magoon assumed temporary control until 1909. In this period in the area of Manzanillo, Agustín Martín Veloz, Blas Roca, and Francisco (Paquito) Rosales founded the embryonic Cuban Communist Party.

For three decades, the country was led by former War of Independence leaders, who after being elected did not serve more than two constitutional terms. The Cuban presidential succession was as follows: José Miguel Gómez (1908-1912); Mario Garcia Menocal (1913-1920); Alfredo Zayas (1921-25).

President Gerardo Machado was elected by popular vote in 1925, but he was constitutionally barred from re-election. Machado, who determined to modernise Cuba, set in motion several massive civil works projects such as the Central Highway, but at the end of his constitutional term held on to power. The United States, despite the Platt Amendment, decided not to interfere militarily.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s a number of Cuban action groups, including some Mambí, staged a series of uprisings that either failed or did not affect the capital. After much complex rebellion, Machado was asked to leave by the Cuban Army and senior Cuban civil leaders in 1933. After Machado was deposed there was a confused short interregnum.

Military Coup

About six months later, in September 1933, there was a successful mutiny by enlisted soldiers and non-commissioned officers, taking the lower ranks of the Cuban Army to power. A key figure in the process was Fulgencio Batista, an army sergeant holding a key post as a telegraph officer. He gradually assumed total command. As part of this revolutionary process, and because it would limit Batista's power, the Platt Amendment was repealed. Still, American pressure forced Cuba to reaffirm the agreement which was imposed on the country in 1903 which leased the Guantanamo Bay naval base to the United States for a nominal sum, under terms which many Cubans at the time found (and some still find) objectionable and colonialist.

In 1940, Batista became the country's official president in an election which many people considered to be rigged. Batista was voted out of office in 1944.

Elections in Cuba

Batista was succeeded by Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín, a populist physician, who had briefly held the presidency in the 1933 revolutionary process. President Grau passed a number of populist measures favouring workers and also had been instrumental in passing the 1940 Constitution, which has been widely regarded as one of the most progressive ever written in terms of worker protection and human rights.

Grau was followed by Carlos Prío Socarrás, also elected democratically, but whose government was tainted by increasing corruption and violent incidents among political factions. Around the same time, Fidel Castro had become a public figure at the University of Havana. Eduardo Chibás was the leader of the Partido Ortodoxo (Orthodox Party), a liberal democratic group, who was widely expected to win in 1952 on an anticorruption platform. Chibás committed suicide before he could run for the presidency, and the opposition was left without its major leader.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Batista, who was running for president in the 1952 elections, but was only expected to get a small minority of votes, seized power in an almost bloodless coup three months before the election was to take place. President Prío was forced to leave the island. Due to the corruption of the past two administrations, the general public reaction to the coup was somewhat accepting at first. However, Batista soon encountered stiff opposition when he temporarily suspended the balloting and the constitution, and attempted to rule by decree. Elections were held in 1953 and Batista was elected. Opposition parties mounted a blistering campaign, and continued to do so, using the Cuban free press during all of Batista's tenure in office.

The Cuban Revolution

Fidel Castro, a young lawyer from a wealthy family, who was running for a seat in the Chamber of Representatives for the Partido Ortodoxo, circulated a petition to depose Batista's government on the grounds that it had illegitimately suspended the electoral process. However, the petition was not acted upon by the courts. On July 26, 1953 Castro led a historic attack on the Moncada Barracks near Santiago de Cuba, but failed. Many soldiers were killed by Castro's forces. Castro was captured, tried and sentenced to 15 years in prison. However, he was released by the Batista government in 1956, when amnesty was given to many political prisoners, including the ones that assaulted the Moncada barracks. Castro subsequently went into exile in Mexico where he met Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.

While in Mexico, he organised the 26th of July Movement with the goal of overthrowing Batista. A group of over 80 men sailed to Cuba on board the yacht Granma, landing in the eastern part of the island in December 1956. Despite a pre-landing rising in Santiago by Frank Pais and his followers of the urban pro-Castro movement, most of Castro's men were promptly killed, dispersed or taken prisoner by Batista's forces. Castro managed to escape to the Sierra Maestra mountains with about 12-17 effectives, aided by the urban and rural opposition, including Celia Sanchez and the bandits of Cresencio Perez's family, he began a guerrilla campaign against the regime. Castro's main forces supported by numerous poorly armed escopeteros, and with support from the well armed fighters of the Frank Pais urban organisation who at times went to the mountains the rebel army grew more and more effective. The country was soon driven to chaos conducted in the cities by diverse groups of the anti-Batista resistance and notably a bloodily crushed rising by the Batista Navy personnel in Cienfuegos. At the same time rival guerrilla groups in the Escambray Mountains also grew more and more effective.

With a corrupt and ineffective military Batista dispirited by a US Government embargo on weapons sales to Cuba, Batista fled on January 1, 1959. Within months of taking control, Castro moved to consolidate power by brutally marginalising other resistance groups and figures and imprisoning and executing opponents and former supporters. As the revolution became more radical and continued its persecution of those who did not agree with its direction, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled the island.

In July 1961, the Integrated Revolutionary Organisations (ORI) was formed by the merger of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Revolutionary Movement, the People's Socialist Party (the old Communist Party) led by Blas Roca and the Revolutionary Directory March 13th led by Faure Chomón. On March 26, 1962 the ORI became the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution (PURSC) which, in turn, became the Communist Party of Cuba on October 3, 1965 with Castro as First Secretary.

Revolutionary Cuba

Relations between the United States and Cuba deteriorated rapidly as the Cuban government, in reaction to the US refusal to refine Soviet oil in refineries located in Cuba, expropriated US properties, notably those belonging to the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) and the United Fruit Company. In the Castro government's first agrarian reform law on May 17, 1959 it sought to limit the size of land holdings, and to distribute that land to small farmers in 'Vital Minimum' tracts. In compensation, the Cuban government offered to pay the landholders based on the tax assessment values for the land, in reality little or no compensation was paid.

In response to the seizure of American properties, the continued executions and violations of human rights, the US broke diplomatic relations on January 3, 1961 and imposed the US embargo against Cuba on February 3, 1962. The embargo is still in effect as of 2007, although some humanitarian trade in food and medicines is now allowed.

The establishment of a Socialist system in Cuba led to the fleeing of many hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles to the United States and other countries since Castro's rise to power. One major exception to the embargo was made on November 6, 1965 when Cuba and the United States formally agreed to start an airlift for Cubans who wanted to go to the United States. The first of these so-called Freedom Flights left Cuba on December 1, 1965 and by 1971 over 250,000 Cubans had flown to the United States. Currently, there is an immigration lottery allowing 20,000 Cubans seeking political asylum to go to the United States legally every year. Perhaps a thousand or more take the risk of travelling by sea on small crafts.

Bay of Pigs Invasion

The United States then sponsored an unsuccessful attack on Cuba, using conservative political groups as the main source of support. The attack began on April 15, 1961, when exiles, flying planes provided by the United States bombed several Cuban air force bases. This attack did not succeed in destroying all of Castro's air force.

Castro declared Cuba a socialist state in a speech on April 16, 1961.

On April 17, 1961, a force of about 1,500 Cuban exiles, financed and trained by the CIA, landed in the south during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The CIA's assumption was that the invasion would spark a popular rising against Castro. Castro's forces were forewarned of the invasion and had arrested hundreds of thousands of suspected 'subversives,' before the invasion landed. Castro executed high level defectors from his own ranks notably William Morgan and Sori Marin. There was no popular uprising. Most of the invasion force made it ashore, however all their supplies did not, despite some initial advances during which thousands of Castro militia died, the CIA's forces were quickly defeated. Many believe that the invasion, instead of weakening Castro, actually helped him consolidate his grip on power.

The Organization of American States, under pressure from the United States, suspended Cuba's membership in the body on January 22, 1962 and the US Government banned all US-Cuban trade a couple of weeks later on February 7. The Kennedy administration extended this on February 8, 1963 making travel, financial and commercial transactions by US citizens to Cuba illegal.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

Tensions between the two governments peaked again during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The United States had a much larger arsenal of long-range nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union, as well as medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) in Turkey, whereas the Soviet Union had a large stockpile of medium-range nuclear weapons which were primarily located in Europe. Cuba agreed to let the Soviets secretly place SS-4 Sandal and SS-5 Skean MRBMs on their territory. Reports from inside Cuba to exile sources questioned the need for large amounts of ice going to rural areas, which led to the discovery of the missiles, confirmed by U-2s. The United States responded by establishing a cordon in international waters to stop Soviet ships from bringing in more missiles (designated a quarantine rather than a blockade to avoid issues with international law).

At the last moment, the Soviets called back their ships. In addition, they agreed to remove the missiles already there in exchange for an agreement that the United States would not invade Cuba. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union was it revealed that another part of the agreement was the removal of US missiles from Turkey. It also turned out that some submarines that the US Navy blocked were carrying nuclear missiles and that communication with Moscow was tenuous, effectively leaving the decision of firing the missiles at the discretion of the captains of those submarines. In addition, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian government revealed that FROGs (Free Rocket Over Ground) armed with nuclear warheads and IL-28 Beagle bombers armed with nuclear bombs had been deployed in Cuba to be used in the event of a US invasion.

The United States has honoured this agreement by not attacking Cuba again, but the CIA has continued to support anti-Castro groups by mounting an extensive international campaigns and several botched assassination attempts throughout the 1960s.

Castro did stop openly supporting insurrectionary movements against Latin American governments, although pro-Castro groups continued to fight the military dictatorships which then controlled most Latin American countries. The insurgency in Nicaragua which lead to the demise of the Somoza dynasty in 1979, was openly supported by the Cuban government, who provided aid, training, military weapons and refuge to Sandinista fighters. Cuba supported the Sandinista government, providing medical aid and soldiers with the support of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations. Castro lost the support of the Nicaraguan government when the Sandinistas were defeated by the pro US party in the 1990 election.

Cuba after the Soviet Union

When the Soviet Union broke up in late 1991, a major boost to Cuba's economy was lost, leaving it essentially paralysed because of the Cuban economy's narrow basis, focused on just a few products with just a few buyers. Also, supplies (including oil) almost dried up. Over 80% of Cuba's trade was lost and living conditions worsened. A 'Special Period in Peacetime' was declared, which included cutbacks on transport and electricity and even food rationing. In response, the United States tightened up its trade embargo, hoping it would lead to Castro's downfall. But Castro tapped into a pre-revolutionary source of income and opened the country to tourism, entering into several joint ventures with foreign companies for hotel, agricultural and industrial projects. As a result, the use of US dollars was legalised in 1994, with special stores being opened which only sold in dollars. There were two separate economies, the dollar-economy and the peso-economy, creating a social split in the island because those in the dollar-economy made much more money (as in the tourist-industry). However, in October 2004 the Cuban government announced an end to this policy: from November US dollars would no longer be legal tender in Cuba, but would instead be exchanged for convertible pesos (since April 2005 at the exchange rate of $1.08) with a 10% tax payable to the state on the exchange of US dollars cash - though not on other forms of exchange.

Extreme shortages of food and other goods as well as electrical blackouts led to a brief period of unrest, including numerous anti-government protests and widespread increases in crime. In response, the Cuban Communist party government formed hundreds of 'rapid-action brigades' to confront protesters. According to the Communist Party daily, Granma, "delinquents and anti-social elements who try to create disorder and an atmosphere of mistrust and impunity in our society will receive a crushing reply from the people".

Some non-violent initiatives have been launched by Cubans in the island, aiming at political reform. In 1997, a group led by Vladimiro Roca, a decorated veteran of the Angolan war and the son of the founder of the Cuban Communist Party, sent a petition, entitled La Patria es de Todos ('the homeland belongs to all') to the Cuban general assembly requesting democratic and human rights reforms. As a result, Roca and his three associates were sentenced to jail, from which they were eventually released.

In 2001, a group of activists collected thousands of signatures for the Varela Project, a petition requesting a referendum on the island's political system. The process was openly supported by former US president Jimmy Carter during his historic 2002 visit to Cuba. The petition gathered sufficient signatures, but was rejected on an alleged technicality. Instead a plebiscite was held in which it was formally proclaimed that Castro's brand of socialism would be perpetual.

In 2003, seventy-five anti-government activists were arrested and summarily sentenced to long jail terms. Cuban officials described it as a response to provocative actions by the head of the US interests section in Cuba, who had been travelling around the country holding publicised meetings and press conferences with the dissidents. Castro's action was widely criticised by mainstream human rights organisations and even by US leftists generally otherwise sympathetic to his government.

2006 Cuban Transfer of Presidential Duties

On July 31 2006, Fidel Castro delegated his duties as President of the Council of state, President of the Council of Ministers, First Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party and the post of commander in chief of the armed forces to his brother and First Vice President, Raúl Castro. This transfer of duties has been described as temporary while Fidel Castro recovers from surgery undergone after suffering from an 'acute intestinal crisis with sustained bleeding'. Fidel Castro was too ill to attend the nationwide commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Granma boat landing on December 2, 2006, which fuelled speculations that Castro had stomach cancer, though Spanish doctor Dr. García Sabrido stated that his illness was a digestive problem and not terminal.

On January 31, 2007, footage of Castro meeting with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was broadcast, where, according to international media reports, Castro 'appeared frail but stronger than three months ago', and the Cuban leader made a lengthy surprise appearance by phone on Chávez's radio talk show Aló Presidente the following month. Though Castro loyalists in the Cuban government have maintained that he will stand in the 2008 elections to the Cuban National Assembly, speculation has continued as to whether he will ever return to power.