Word: castros
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...late '50s, Fidel Castro led a guerrilla revolt against the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. At first, his profession of democratic principles won him considerable support among the Cuban middle class and in the United States (though one American ambassador asked Batista if he wanted a CIA or FBI agent sent to assassinate him), even though the core of his army came from the peasantry. But when Castro began to talk about nationalizing industry and collectivizing agriculture, and failed to hold the elections he'd promised, the United States and many Cuban liberals became alarmed. First the United States stopped...
When Tito declined to accede to Soviet pressure, Stalin reacted in almost the same way Eisenhower and Kennedy were to react to Castro. Just as Cuba was expelled from the OAS, Yugoslavia was thrown out of the Cominform. Just as the United States sponsored and trained bands of Cuban refugees, the Soviet Union and its supporters sponsored and trained "Free Yugoslavia" movements of emigres. Just as the United States imposed a boycott on trade with Cuba, the Soviet Union and its supporters cut off trade with Yugoslavia, then dependent on these countries for half its imports including nearly all forms...
...both countries, the governments that successfully resisted imperialism came to power primarily on their own, by armed, popular struggle. Unlike Allende, Castro wasn't chosen in a conventional election. As a result, his followers had a strong army of their own. Tito didn't ride into office on the coattails of the Red Army, as most other East European Communists did. As a result, his followers, too, had a mass army, the Partisans, and didn't need to rely on the Soviet army to keep him in power...
...both countries, the most important supporters of the government were small peasants, not middle class people or urban workers. Partly because the countryside was still as important as the cities in these countries, guerrilla warfare was a possibility any would-be conquerer had to take into account. Both Castro's and Tito's insurgents began as guerrilla fighters. Besides, this predominantly agricultural, relatively undeveloped, largely peasant economy is probably less vulnerable to outside pressure than a more developed but not self-sufficient urban economy...
...force was only one of a two-edged sword. Economic aid and investment, the other edge, would finance the construction of factories and cities, give birth to stable urban working and middle classes, and thereby reduce the threat to U.S. domination of the country posed by men like Fidel Castro leading rural peasants to power. Representative democracy was the optimal form of government for Latin American nations, but the United States has had few qualms dealing with even the harshest military dictatorships if American hegemony is protected...