Word: cuba
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Americans between 1898 and 1960 had had textbooks on imperialism, Cuba would have been a textbook case. Cuba's main industry was always sugar production, and whoever controls Cuba's sugar has a large measure of control over most Cubans' earnings, the Cuban government--traditionally a government of the educated and well-to-do--and most Cubans' lives. In the 20th century, more and more Cuban sugar mills were bought by Americans, protected by occasional U.S. military intervention, and Cuban owners of small and inefficient mills were forced out of business. Large mill owners--many American--came to have...
...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 importing sugar--700,000 tons a year--from Cuba. (The Soviet Union and China agreed to buy 1,20,000 tons a year at a somewhat lower price.) The United States applied an embargo on all exports to Cuba except medicines and some foodstuffs, and arranged for the Organization of American States to throw Cuba out. A couple of years...
Yugoslavia has a weaker national tradition than Cuba, and in the years preceding its struggle for independence, it wasn't dominated by a single neighbor. Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia all took an interest in Yugoslavia's mineral resources and in transporting goods along the Danube River. But after the Second World War the Soviet Union achieved a position of dominance, largely because of the assistance and inspiration it had lent to the Yugoslav Partisans--commanded by Josip Tito, a Croatian Communist--who led the only active resistance to the Nazis. The United States and the other western powers seemed...
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...
...Yugoslavia and Cuba succeed in achieving independence? Why didn't their respective patrons suppress their independence movements, as they did in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile? Certainly the Yugoslavs and the Cubans were brave, certainly their leaders were astute. But Hungary and Guatemala had their heroes too, and Dubcek and Allende were certainly remarkable politicians. Answers based on countries' different political situations are bound to seem unpleasant, for they discourage belief in the imminent self-rule of all peoples in all situations; and with just two cases to go on, they're bound to be inaccurate as well...