Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After the Republican collapse Grimau fled, worked as a Communist agent in Czechoslovakia, Russia, Mexico and Cuba. A member of the central committee of the outlawed Spanish Communist Party, he was living in France when he slipped across the frontier in 1959 to reorganize the Spanish Communist underground. After several trips in and out of Spain since 1959, an informer gave him away to police in Madrid last November. Franco's cops clapped him in jail and began a lengthy interrogation. During one session, Grimau leaped, fell, or was pushed from a first-floor window, fracturing his skull...
...second revolution occur? Draper denies that United States policy towards Cuba was "the "causative, operative factor.... The decision to turn Cuba into a Communist state was of such fundamental magnitude that it cannot be ascribed to a mere reactive response." In Draper's view, the second revolution resulted from Castro's refusal to permit any reductions or restrictions of his personal power...
...sought to carry them out. The argument is that Castro attempted to realize them, lost middle class support as a result, and had to call in the Communists or forfeit his entire revolutionary effort. Draper does not comment on this analysis, or upon any of the arguments citing Cuba's economic problems at the time Castro assumed power...
...author's view of American attitudes and their effect on relations with Cuba also neglects some issues damaging to his thesis. Draper says that the collaboration between the Communists and Castro began in 1959, "long before any overt American action was taken against the Castro regime." This matter of overt governmental hostility appears more than once in the book, but other sources of grumbling, complaint, and denunciation are never mentioned. Draper obviously has read almost everything written on Cuba since Castro. He certainly knows the reports of bewilderment and anger in Cuba over the steady criticism from certain quarters...
These substantive shortcomings are compounded by further ailments in method and data. Draper has a subtle and insidious way of making speeches and proclamations from Cuba illustrate his thesis only, when they could do the same for other theses as well. He occasionally uses his opponents' weakest arguments to prove by invidious comparison his most difficult points. He uses lightly loaded words to hedge his way through some difficult arguments. And some of his data simply do not agree with that in other works on the revolution...