Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Castro primarily has himself to blame for Cuba's current travails. Some reforms he instituted since mid-1993 had begun to pull the country back from the brink of disaster after the collapse of the Soviet bloc cut Moscow's aid from a torrent to a trickle and then to nothing. When he legalized individual private business last September, Havana suddenly sprouted plumbers, hairdressers, restaurateurs, repairmen and other overnight entrepreneurs permitted to work for themselves. But the July 1993 legalization of dollar holdings was a two-edged sword. It brought much needed hard currency into Cuba, but also split what...
...Only recently did they learn the truth. Aldrich Hazen Ames, a career CIA officer, was arrested in February and sentenced to life in prison after he admitted taking $2.5 million from the KGB, starting in 1985, in return for secrets that included the identities of many Soviet and East bloc citizens spying for the CIA. At least 10 of these people are believed to have been executed...
...from-the-hip populism has enabled him to bully his way into the small group of candidates vying to be the next President of Russia. "There is a great danger that someone like Zhirinovsky could take over," says Yuli Guzman, a parliamentary Deputy from the democratic Russia's Choice bloc. "He is not just a clown in the eyes of ordinary folk...
...country's democratic institutions just as quickly. As early as ! 1991 he proclaimed, "I say it quite plainly -- when I come to power, there will be a dictatorship." Such high-handedness is already causing problems among his supporters. In March, four Deputies from the L.D.P.'s 64-member parliamentary bloc pulled out. Among them was Victor Kobelev, once second to Zhirinovsky in the party hierarchy. A fifth dissident was later expelled from the party and, just last month, six more members broke ranks to create their own faction...
Forty-five years after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed to combat the Soviet threat, Russia joined NATO'S Partnership for Peace. Although NATO'S security umbrella does not cover the partnership's 21 members, mainly countries formerly in the East Bloc, it allows them to hold joint military exercises with NATO forces. Meanwhile, Russia and the U.S. also announced that President Boris Yeltsin and President Clinton will hold a summit in Washington in late September. And in a cementing of relations with other Western allies, Yeltsin signed a trade treaty with the European Union. The deal involves...