Thanks to U.S. blockade, Cuba’s economic situation more desperate than ever
July 7, 2022 10:26 AM CDT BY W. T. WHITNEY JR.
Yuliet Colon, center in tank top, waits her turn outside an agricultural market in Havana, Cuba. Colon is among several Cubans who, with more ingenuity than resources, help their compatriots cope with shortages with Facebook posts of culinary creations designed around the limited number of foods they're actually likely to find at the market or with government rations. Shortages are growing acute, and inflation has soared by 70% for some items. | Ramon Espinosa / AP.
Friends of socialist Cuba like good news about that country. Now bad news has its use. Grief and hardship currently are such that, clearly, the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba must end at once.
The harsh details of the current situation testify to potential destabilization in Cuba, danger to Cuba’s socialist project, and the nefarious role of the blockade. A major mobilization against the blockade is due; the need for action is obvious.
The blockade, a 60-year-old relic of history, places few heavy demands on the U.S. public. No governmental funding is required. The Treasury Department issues fines, and presidents make ritualistic declarations. People dodge travel restrictions. It’s a slow-motion affair.
Distracted pro-Cuba activists may lose track of harassment details. Here, we provide a refresher course for motivation toward action. It emphasizes the blockade’s effects on people’s lives.
In the beginning
Cuba’s vulnerability is the result mainly of U.S. policies directed at “denying money and supplies to Cuba…to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.” The words are those of a State Department memorandum of April 6, 1960.
A woman waits to be shown a dress in a private clothing and craft store in Havana, Cuba. After five years of waiting, a new legal system took effect last fall that expanded the scope of legal private businesses in Cuba. So far, over 1,000 new small private businesses have been established. | Ramon Espinosa / AP
The flow of money to Cuba—international loans and export income—has long been feeble. International banks, financial institutions, and corporations handling dollars on Cuba’s behalf risk big U.S. Treasury Department fines. U.S. legislation blocks Cuba from importing the products of multinational companies with branches in the United States—even food and medical supplies.
For almost 30 years, third-country ships docking in Cuba have been prohibited from entering a U.S. port for the six months that follow. Since 2019, the U.S. government has sanctioned Venezuelan ships carrying oil to Cuba.
The U.S. government harasses Cuba’s tourism industry, the source of most of the country’s foreign currency. Restrictions, variably regulated, operate against U.S citizens’ travel to the island. Why? They would spend money there. To discourage potential investors, U.S. legislation enables the heirs of properties nationalized in Cuba to take legal action in U.S. courts against investors who make use of such properties.
Cuba’s commerce with the United States has been nil for 60 years, except for heavily regulated Cuban agricultural exports. The northern neighbor used to be and still could be Cuba’s most convenient trading partner, but Cold War anti-communism and imperialism stand in the way.
Cuba’s people are hurting
The U.S. blockade constitutes the main impediment to Cuba’s industrial production and overall economic development. Trade with the socialist nations of Eastern Europe, chiefly the Soviet Union, formerly provided relief. But since the end of socialism in those places, strictures placed on imports have caused shortages of raw materials, replacement parts, consumer goods, new tools and machines, and reagents for drug and vaccine manufacture.
The blockade recently has complicated lives already beleaguered by the COVID-19 pandemic and a 1% economic recession resulting from the pandemic.
An Associated Press report of June 22 highlights a lack of new housing and impediments to repairing existing houses. In 2019, 44,000 homes were built; in 2000, 32,000 homes; and in 2021,18,000. Building materials are in short supply, and hurricanes and the pandemic have aggravated the situation.
Elderly Cubans experienced isolation and lack of supplies during the pandemic. For two years, they’ve confronted weakened cultural and support services and reduced housing options. Fuel shortages in late 2021 led to fewer bus runs in Havana. Wait times were even longer. And pharmacies in 2020 had available only 35% of their normal stock.
In recent times, infant death rates in Cuba matched the favorable rates of well-resourced countries and were lower than U.S. rates. Astoundingly, Cuba’s infant mortality rate in 2021 was 7.6 infant deaths per 1000 births, up from 4.9 in 2000 and 5.0 in 2019. Cuba’s 2021 rate of mothers dying from pregnancy and childbirth difficulties was 176.6 out of 100,000 mothers giving birth—up from 40.0 mothers in 2000 and 37.4 in 2019.
The increases stem from COVID-19 infection mortality added to deaths in non-COVID times. Experts say the deaths of children and mothers can reflect social factors—mothers’ low educational levels, reduced access to healthcare and other services, and poor nutrition. Therefore, the U.S. blockade, which has been affecting social well-being for decades, has likely imposed an additional toll in this area, too.
Cuba’s food supply is unstable, with reduced food production, inefficient distribution, marketing based on income levels, and quality variations. At an annual cost of $2 billion, Cuba’s government still must import 60-70% of the food consumed in Cuba.
Production levels remain low despite reforms introduced after 2008, among them: land distribution, allowances for farmers’ permanent use of land, marketing reforms, governmental assistance to individual farmers and agricultural cooperatives, new distribution systems, local decision-making on assistance and policies, and ecologically sustainable methods.
The U.S. economic blockade is not responsible for soil deficiencies, officials’ inaction, drought conditions, overgrowth of invasive plants, and the appeal of urban life for rural youth. Blockade effects do show up in farmers’ reduced access to credit and lack of funds for fertilizer, seeds, breeding stock, spare parts, new equipment, and fuel, however.
A day laborer carries a sack of potatoes during harvest time in Guines, Cuba, March 26, 2021. Authorities are promoting the production of basic staple foods while many essential vegetables have disappeared from markets, triggered by the coronavirus pandemic’s effect on the country’s already compromised economy and the ongoing U.S. blockade. Government reforms of the agricultural sector meant to spur more private production have reportedly yielded less than satisfactory results. | Ramon Espinosa / AP
Inflation holds sway in Cuba now, as in most areas of the world. Prices, rising for two years, are up now by 70% and more. Access to essential goods is impaired. Frustration at high prices and shortages helped trigger island-wide protests on July 11, 2021, and has contributed to record emigration.
The U.S. blockade set the stage for inflation. After losing its commercial partnership with the Soviet Bloc, which disappeared in 1991, Cuba was in trouble. The blockade blocked access to international loans and interfered with income derived from exports, the latter effect stemming from export restrictions. Consequently, funds have been short for importing essential products and for developing the economy.
Cuba desperately needed foreign currency and therefore brought tourists to the island to spend money that would end up with the government. From 1993 on, their money was captured via a new currency called the Cuban convertible peso (CUC). Tourists surrendered their own currencies in exchange for the CUCs.
Cubans, not all of them, acquired CUCs and were able to buy goods and dollars unavailable to Cubans without CUCs. Inequalities emerged. Responding, the government gradually withdrew CUCs from circulation, beginning in January 2021. Anticipating hardships, it raised salaries and pensions payable in Cuba’s “national peso.”
New money in circulation stimulates inflation, especially when goods for sale are in short supply, as in Cuba. The national currency lost value. Tourists, who disappeared during the pandemic, returned in late 2021. Their money, circulating, added to inflationary pressures. CUCs with a prominent role in Cuba’s informal economy, and still circulating, did likewise. The role of CUCs suggests the blockade’s indirect contribution to inflation.
Persevering
Those defenders of Cuba worried about diminished Cuban-government commitment to bettering people’s lives may need reassurance. Of note:
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on June 21 addressed a meeting which elevated the role of social work. Discussion centered on mothers living in cities in “situations of vulnerability.”
Support programs are in place for elderly Cubans experiencing isolation, for example, the “Accompany Me (Acompáñame)” project of telephone assistance and the National Program for Comprehensive Attention to Elders.
As of 2021, 423 so-called Projects of Local Development promoted food production, small workplaces, and tourism along with socio-cultural, environmental, and research programs.
The government promotes its program known as “micro, small, and medium [size] businesses.” These mostly privately-owned enterprises, numbering 1,188 last year, produce food products, building materials, furniture, textile products, footwear, cleaning supplies, computer accessories, and more.
In April 2021, the government approved 43 measures directed at increased agricultural production and food availability. Results are far from ideal, however, an observer notes.
Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz, on June 24, visited a district in Cardenas to assess progress toward “improvements of roads, water supply, housing construction, and social work.”
What to do
Resistance to the U.S. blockade within the United States has been constant for decades but to no avail. Thanks to the Helms-Burton Law of 1996, the hurdle now is forcing Congress to act. For that to happen, masses of people must stand up together and weigh in.
But that won’t happen, it seems, as long as activists continue to view the blockade as an isolated issue. What’s needed is collective action on many issues toward changing the direction of the U.S. government itself. The common ground would be justice and decent lives for all people everywhere, Cubans among them.
Also required would be a new understanding that the U.S. assault on Cuba happens as part of the larger U.S. project of capitalist and imperialist domination worldwide. The big mobilization to end the blockade would be part of a larger mission to take apart that U.S. project. Oppressed and plundered nations would be rescued, Cuba among them.
One adjustment: U.S. progressives ought to reject that old dictum that “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” It sends the message that solidarity with and struggle for oppressed peoples overseas doesn’t matter. That’s not so.
By no means will these suggestions bear fruit in time to end the blockade soon. Hope and struggle will remain. U.S. public opinion favors ending the blockade. People in the United States now fighting the blockade are experienced and want to enlarge the movement.
Maybe the chaos attending capitalism’s failures, new wars, and international divisions will distract the U.S. government from bothering with Cuba. Maybe international solidarity with Cuba will continue growing.
Revolutionary Cuba, with unity and effective leadership, is known for overcoming challenges. Right now, it faces some of the greatest challenges in decades.
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/th ... 4f0d67d419
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Cuba: Putting on the Boots
By Randy Alonso Falcón on July 3, 2022
It is a dilemma for Cubans to make ends meet. Wages are not enough to face the very high prices that the lack of offers, real inflation and speculation bequeath to us.
What we know well at the household level, we sometimes fail to understand at the level of the larger dwelling that is the country. Even at that scale, finances are not enough for everything we aspire to and especially for what we need.
As the heads of the nuclei in each household, the leadership of the country has to draw up accounts and more accounts of how it is going to solve the most urgent needs and define priorities in the midst of all that is lacking.
Drawing up accounts every day at pencil point to know how to acquire food, fuel, medicines, spare parts, raw materials, services and other things that are required is not an easy task.
Especially because these accounts must be drawn for the needs of 11 million Cubans. Where others solve with satisfying the elites, and the rest…we already know, the socialist state has to look for solutions for all or for the majorities.
Add to these additions and subtractions the money to pay what we can of the debts we have and the obligations of the contracts signed. And in this world, if you don’t pay, nobody will sell you or give you credit again. Even less in the midst of such a complicated international economic crisis.
The calculations are becoming more complex after two years of high expenses due to the pandemic and little income from exports of goods or services.
To get an idea of the dimension of our economic challenges: the country’s total foreign currency income for the first quarter of 2022 exceeded 493 million dollars, a figure similar to that achieved in the same period of the previous year, but much lower than what we had before March 2020. However, imports of goods amounted to more than US$2 billion, US$688 million higher than in the same period of 2021.
Such an imbalance between what we take in and what we buy in hard currency implies new debts and more challenges. And it does not mean that more spending equals more goods. Generally, more has been spent to acquire the same or fewer quantities. Inflation is not just here at home; it is now a growing global process.
If the price of oil in June 2021 was at $71 a barrel today it exceeds $118 a barrel. In June 2020 it was around 38 dollars. In other words, in just two years, the country has to spend 80 dollars more for each barrel of oil if it acquires it on the international market. We are not talking about transportation costs or the permanent harassment by the United States against shipping companies that risk transporting fuel to Cuba.
In order to continue to ensure basic foodstuffs for our diet, such as rice and wheat for bread, as well as other components of the standard basic food basket, which is sold to every citizen of the country without distinction, the government and our importing companies not only have to deal with an increasingly restrictive and protectionist market, but also have to pay more money for the same amount of products.
We must remember that guaranteeing a pound of rice for each Cuban means acquiring 5,200 tons of rice. And so on for each product of the standard basic food basket: 5,200 tons to guarantee one pound.
The country needs about 700,000 tons of rice for its consumption, most of which is imported. The trend of rice prices in the world market has been upward in the last five months and already exceeds US$430 per ton. And prices are expected to rise due to increased demand, in the face of insufficient supply and high prices of other basic foodstuffs.
The value of many food commodities, from wheat and other grains to meat and oils, has soared. That has been driven by a number of factors, including rising fertilizer and energy costs over the past year, as well as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The UN food price index shows that prices are 75% above pre-pandemic levels.
In its latest Food Outlook report, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) explained that an additional $49 billion will be spent worldwide on food imports this year due to higher prices.
Chicken, the lifeline of these times, has also seen its prices rise.
Sources from which to obtain the money to meet these rising prices are scarce. In our case, the rise in nickel prices since March, after the beginning of the war in Europe, is remarkable, but it does not compensate the growing liquidity needs of the country.
Tourism, the activity that makes the country’s cash box ring the loudest in terms of fresh money, has given a lift, registering 564,847 visitors up to May, according to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information of Cuba (ONEI). That’s as much, as all the visitors recorded in all of 2021.
But it is nothing comparable to 2017, when already on May 3 of that year 2 million visitors had accumulated in Cuba; or 2018, when the same figure was reached on May 18 .
The sugar harvest was the leanest of this century, marked by low agricultural yields and insufficient technical availability of the industry. Rising sugar prices on the world market would have benefited us had we had a better harvest.
Our income from service exports is also lower than in previous years. And this is not offset by the slight growth in exports of goods in the first four months of the year.
With that less money, we have to do the math to decide how much to buy chicken, oil, cytostatics, parts for thermoelectric plants and agricultural inputs.
Add to this the fact that the U.S. is pursuing to its heart’s content any money that Cuba moves around the world and the banks are more than frightened by the high fines that Washington has imposed on the financial sector for transactions with Cuba. This implies additional efforts to receive export revenues or to make export payments. There are operations that have taken weeks or months because they have not been able to find ways to collect or make payments. And this has been worse since January 2021 when Trump felt like foisting on us the fallacious label of State sponsor of terrorism.
Each day of blockade costs the country about 12 million dollars at current prices. Can you imagine how much more can be done? How much less complicated would the accounts be?
◊ “Can you imagine that every day of the year a different municipality in the country could be given 12 million dollars so that it could invest them in its economic and social development?
◊ “The year, with the generosity of its 365 days (366 this leap 2020) would even allow that amount of money to be given twice in the year to each municipality (we have 168); and there would still be days left to give a third round of 12 million to the 14 provincial capitals and the 15 municipalities of Havana.
◊ “Can you imagine if we injected that financial capacity to what we already have in the plan and what each municipality collects through the territorial contribution?
The most recent accounts of the costs of the blockade for one year put the losses to Cuba in the order of 5,570.3 million dollars. More than twice what we import in food for one year; a figure that multiplies by 10 times what the country can allocate this 2022 for investments in agriculture (more than 13,734 million pesos -around 572 million dollars).
It would be interesting to see a few network opinion-makers and narrow-minded theoreticians put on their boots and battle with insufficient finances, a resurgent blockade, unexpected climatic variables, world inflation and battered logistic chains to guarantee the needs of an entire people.
To lead in times of crisis, one must be decisive, be creative, summon collective intelligence, use science. You have to walk all the time with your boots on and with a clear compass. That is what the Cuban government is devoted to; although it is not always accompanied by enough businessmen, intermediate or grassroots leaders, officials.
Dealing with a blocked economy, without sufficient sources of fresh money and with accumulated problems is a real exercise of tenacity and thought. Liberal economics would easily solve the dilemma leaving many out of the saving equation. Socialism should and must think of everyone. Hence, we should meditate more on our steps and we have less room for mistakes.
Source: Cuba en Resumen
https://www.resumen-english.org/2022/07 ... 4f0d67d419
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Cuba’s solidarity with Africa and the Soviet Union
July 11, 2022 Stephen Millies
Fidel Castro with Angolan President Eduardo dos Santos. Dos Santos, who died July 8, 2022, was a leader of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). He studied engineering in the Soviet Union and fought for the MPLA during the Angolan War of Independence.
“When Africa called, Cuba answered” is a well-known and true description of how Cuba aided the African liberation struggle. The slogan was popularized by Elombe Brath, the late Pan African educator and organizer who was a founder of the December 12th Movement.
Over 2,000 Cuban soldiers died fighting alongside their African comrades in defeating the fascist army of apartheid South Africa.
At the decisive battle of Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola, soldiers from the People’s Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola threw back the apartheid invaders in 1988. Joining Angolans were soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), the armed wing of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO); uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed section of the African National Congress (ANC), and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba.
Also present were military advisers from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the Soviet Union. It was Soviet-built MiG-25 jet fighters that gave the African forces air superiority.
Less than two years later Nelson Mandela walked out of prison on Feb. 11, 1990. Mandela declared that “the Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the peoples of Africa.
“The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom and justice, unparalleled for its principled and selfless character,” said Mandela. “Cubans came to our region as doctors, teachers, soldiers, agricultural experts, but never as colonizers. They have shared the same trenches with us in the struggle against colonialism, underdevelopment, and apartheid.”
Che and Fidel in Africa
One million Algerians died winning independence from France in 1962. Forty thousand Algerians were tortured to death by war criminals like Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French fascist movement now called the National Rally.
In 1963, Cubans helped Algeria fight off an attack by the U.S.- backed Moroccan monarchy. Che Guevara and other Cuban internationalists fought alongside the followers of the murdered Patrice Lumumba in Congo in 1965.
Fidel Castro helped freedom fighters in Zimbabwe unite and form the Patriotic Front that overthrew the white minority regime. Just as the U.S. economically blockades Cuba, Wall Street sanctions the people of Zimbabwe for taking back their land from white settlers.
Amílcar Cabral, the leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), met with Fidel Castro in Cuba. Cabral was assassinated in a plot masterminded by the Portuguese secret police, which was a close ally of the CIA.
Cuban military instructors assisted PAIGC liberation fighters while Cuban doctors treated their wounds.
Meanwhile the Pentagon was sending napalm bombs to its fellow NATO member, the fascist regime then in power in Portugal. Today the U.S. and NATO are supplying fascists in Ukraine with billions of dollars of bombs.
Portuguese communists aided their African comrades and helped overthrow the fascist regime in Lisbon on April 25, 1974. The hundreds of thousands of Africans who died fighting for independence also brought some freedom to poor and working people in Portugal.
Saving the world twice
When the Cuban revolution triumphed on Jan. 1, 1959, the Bolshevik Revolution was 41 years old. Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders hoped their revolution would inspire people around the world to break their chains.
The Bolshevik Revolution itself was an international event since more than 150 nationalities and peoples took part. Oppressed peoples who had been humiliated by the Russian czar and Russian capitalists now stood up.
After Lenin died on Jan. 21, 1924, the Honorable Marcus Garvey said, “We as Negroes mourn for Lenin because Russia promised great hope not only for Negroes but to the weaker people of the world.”
A year after the Bolshevik victory, the German Kaiser was overthrown in November 1918. German workers and sailors formed soviets, councils of poor and working people.
But this revolution was drowned in blood. Revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed on Jan. 15, 1919.
A dozen armies invaded the new Soviet Republic. U.S. soldiers occupied Vladivostok on the Pacific and Arkhangelsk near the Artic.
Millions of people died in a civil war supported by the imperialist capitalist powers. It was followed by a terrible famine with more victims.
In 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted 133 days before it was overthrown by foreign troops. The Soviet people were all alone.
Instead of a fellow socialist republic in Germany ― the homeland of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels ― the Nazis came to power over the bones of the working class.
Twenty-seven million Soviet people died defeating Hitler. Close to 80% of the Nazi regime’s military casualties were on the eastern front.
President John F. Kennedy described the destruction wrought by Nazis as comprable to everything east of the Mississippi River in the United States being destroyed.
After World War II, Soviet workers and peasants not only had to rebuild their country. They also had to devote a large part of their economy to match the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed the Pentagon Papers, wrote that the military-industrial complex had plans to launch a nuclear first strike on the socialist countries. An estimated 600 million people would be killed.
It was only because the Soviet Union was able to match the Pentagon’s arsenal that this genocide was averted. The Bolshevik Revolution saved the world twice: first from the Nazis and then from Wall Street.
Dangerous illusions
Lenin described a strike as a small revolution. In a long strike of a few months, some strikers weaken. Capitalists do everything to demoralize workers.
All of the socialist countries have been on strike against world capitalism for decades.
Last year the official U.S. spy budget was $84 billion. The U.S. State Department ― which is just another spy shop ― is getting another $83 billion.
All this money is spent to fight socialist countries, workers’ movements and any country that wants to be independent of world capitalism. At the same time, the capitalist media lies 24/7, like their current denials about the fascist gangs in Ukraine.
After being isolated for over 25 years, the peoples of the Soviet Union welcomed the Chinese Revolution. The world’s most populous country had chosen communism!
Yet the post-war world capitalist economic boom nurtured political illusions, which were spread by U.S. propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
At least 60 million people died in World War II. For capitalism, however, the destruction of much of Western Europe and Japan got rid of a vast inventory of unsold goods that had caused the Great Depression. Capitalist “prosperity” sprung from the ruins.
Capitalist illusions were particularly dangerous in the new socialist countries of Eastern Europe. For example, around a quarter of Hungarians had relatives in the United States.
In the 1920s the Communist Party published a Hungarian language daily newspaper in Cleveland. The great CIO union organizing drives improved the living conditions of millions of U.S. workers, including those from Eastern European backgrounds.
So some Hungarians compared their living standards in a region rebuilding from war with their cousins in the United States. Many people thought that everybody in the U.S. had a car. In fact, in the 1950s less than 50% of households in the U.S. had a car, with only about 10% of households having two cars.
Radio Free Europe wasn’t telling Hungarians about the living conditions of Black people or the millions of poor white people. The propaganda outlet was saying socialism was inferior.
There were also unnecessary concessions towards political reaction in the Soviet Union. It didn’t help world peace to allow Vice President Richard Nixon to come to Moscow with a “typical” U.S. kitchen.
The truth was that millions of working-class families in the United States couldn’t afford those “typical” appliances Nixon was advertising. What Soviet people needed to be told was that millions of people in the U.S. were hungry.
It was the Black liberation movement that won food stamps, now called SNAP benefits. The Black Panther Party pioneered school breakfast programs.
More than 20 years before Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was allowed to be published in 1962.
Solzhenitsyn was so right-wing that he later praised Soviet Gen. Andrey Vlasov―who defected to the Nazis ― in his book “The Gulag Archipelago.”
Welcome Fidel!
While Nixon was in Moscow, the Cuban Revolution was already six months old. Cuban workers and peasants were taking back their country.
This included $2 billion of U.S.-owned plantations, railroads, mines and other properties. That was one-sixth of Wall Street’s loot in Latin America.
As Fidel Castro said after the attempted U.S.-mercenary invasion at Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs), “This is what they cannot forgive: the fact that we are here right under their very noses. And that we have carried out a socialist revolution right under the nose of the United States!”
In October 1962, the U.S. threatened nuclear war over the defensive missiles placed in Cuba by the Soviet Union. A few months later, Fidel Castro was invited to visit the USSR.
The historical leader of the Cuban Revolution spent 40 days in the Soviet Union, from April 26 to June 3, 1963. Everywhere the Soviet people of every national background welcomed him, particularly the youth.
That the Cuban people made a socialist revolution right under Wall Street’s nose lifted the spirits of Soviet communists ― while it set back the cynics and the pro-capitalist elements.
The Soviet Union and the other socialist countries gave much aid to Cuba. After 80% of Cuban doctors were enticed to leave their country, Czechoslovakia helped train a new generation of medical workers.
This aid wasn’t all one way. Cuban exports also helped the socialist bloc. Even more important was Cuba’s revolutionary policies, like its aid to Africa.
The overthrow of Soviet power and the socialist countries in Eastern Europe was an immense tragedy. But what if these counter revolutions had occurred not in 1989-1991 but ten years earlier?
It would have been even worse. Besides all the other accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution, it helped set back capitalist restorationist elements in the Soviet Union during the early 1960s.
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