Word: cuban
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Vietnamese war raised new questions about Cuban solidarity between third world peoples and relations with America and Russia...
Before the revolution, Cuba's close proximity to America worked as a double edged sword. America supported the Cuban economy but in turn tied down the island. In the early 1900's U. S. trade took 40 per cent of Cuban exports. Later the American Tobacco Co. controlled 90 per cent of the tobacco exports. Reciprocal trade agreements forced Cuba to flood herself with imported products, primarily American consumer goods. With such a balance of trade, the agricultural specialization in sugar, geared toward the American market, prevented indigenous industrialization and development of an independent economy...
While purchase agreements kept cane cutting prosperous, the Cuban economy was only as healthy as the American. In 1932 Cuban unemployment registered an all time high of 50 per cent! It did not recover fully until the 1952 Korean boom when cane production reached a record seven million tons. This mark was surpassed only last year when eight and one half million tons were processed due to a national mobilization. In such a situation, America's termination of sugar contracts, under the Kennedy administration, dealt a particularly severe blow to the guerrilla government...
...viable strategy for Cuba, to the Russian doctrine of peaceful coexistence, Karol stresses this was a heresy. The Castrcists also believed that "Latin America lacked the basis for the peaceful transfer to socialism": their second theoretical violation of Russian doctrine according to Karol. Regis Dubray who theorized the Cuban strategy in Revolution in the Revolution? emphasized that only a unique Latin American solution would liberate the area; in other words, the Russian orthodox model was as obsolete for aspiring Latin American revolutionaries as it was for Cuba earlier...
Dumont concludes that Castro inherited an economy based on under-utilization of land, managed by a weak corrupt bureaucracy that never channeled funds back into Cuban development, and relied on improvisational economic policies. This heritage, Castro has yet to overcome. According to the recommendations which Dumont submitted to Castro after his three trips to Cuba, the author suggested a policy based on national diversification accompanied with regional specialization of crops employing a plan of concentric circles to the capital: perishable fruits and vegetables would grow nearby and sugar in far out regions...