Word: castros
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some people may find it hard to imagine Fidel Castro going down the line with anyone, remembering his swagger after defeating the U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs exile invasion, his white fury when the Russians pulled their missiles out of Cuba, his vows that "we will never be anyone's satellite." But that was years ago, before cockeyed Communist economics, compounded by an almost willful Latin mismanagement, brought Castro's revolution to its present state of decay. "We are now," says one Havana observer, "watching the slow decline of Cuba into another Bulgaria...
...Bureau. Nowhere does the decay show more vividly than in Fidel Castro himself. The old Castro was a swinger, an extrovert who enjoyed yakking with Western newsmen or moving along the embassy cocktail circuit. He gunned around town in a souped-up Oldsmobile, showing up everywhere for spur-of-the-moment rallies, TV talkathons, hilarious games of beisbol in Havana's public parks, spearfishing at Varadero beach and interminable gabfests with the students at Havana University, where he would often hold court until 4 or 5 a.m. No more. Today's Fidel Castro has a dull, grey look...
...like Castro, everybody else in Cuba is getting dull. Younger Brother Raul, Cuba's armed forces chief, who used to give a pretty noisy speech, now works in the background as quietly as any Russian general. President Osvaldo Dorticos sometimes does not even bother to accept the credentials of new ambassadors, shunting the chore instead to an assistant. As Russification grows, Cuba's bureaucracy is now overlaid by yet another bureaucracy. Two years ago, the P.U.R.S., Cuba's Communist Party, organized a special branch to provide political commissars in the military, factories and national education system...
...Happy City. In the early years of the revolution, Havana retained much of its irrepressible, boisterous humor. Four years after Castro, the place still bustled, its hundreds of bars thronged with noisy knots of people guffawing over the latest rumors, its streets snarled with ill-tempered, horn-honking traffic jams. Today there are hardly any rumors, and the streets are so empty that even impoverished La Paz, Bolivia, teems with traffic by comparison. The armed militiamen and -women once standing guard in truculent excitement before virtually every public building have disappeared. Life has become predictable, its Latin impulse governed...
Seven years after the revolution, Cuba has hardly any industry to speak of. At the start, Castro opted to diversify Cuba's sugar-based economy and ordered a vast program of industrialization at the expense of agriculture. Within 39 months, practically every food was rationed. Meantime the sugar crop, representing 90% of the country's foreign exchange, dropped from 6,800,000 tons...