Castro's Cuban social revolution.

        Just as the USA’s foreign control structured the government to benefit itself, the same occurred in the economy.  By 1928 the USA controlled over 78% of Cuba’s sugar industry.  The USA’s abidance to the Law of Comparative Advantage molded the economy to simultaneously profit the USA and drive Cuba into a cycle of dependency.  In order to maintain trade with the US, Cuba was forced to sell their sugar cheaper then any other country.  Because Cuba’s monoculture was sugar, the country became dependent on the USA as their sole buyer since they had no other crop to export and was not self-sufficient.  This dependency became clear with the global depression.  When the USA established the Hawley-Smoot tariff, which basically doubled the price of sugar, Cuba’s economy suffered.  Futher, what money was made by the sugar industry was never returned to the people.  The vast majority of the profit made was returned to US investors that owned nearly 80% of the industry and the remaining 20% profited the minute upper class, which would rather buy foreign goods then domestic ones.  In this cycle of foreign dependency no money was returned to the Cuban domestic economy.  The Cuban people favored a revolution in order to break from their cycle of dependency on the USA from which any attempt at a profit or life improvement was futile.  

        The foreign control even hindered Cuba socially.  According to Keene, once the USA poured their foreign capital into Cuba the colonos were doomed to dissolve, because of their inability to compete with the influx of US foreign capital and machinery.  The USA’s control increased the gap between the rich and poor by basically destroying the colonos class (Cuba’s more privileged farmers).  The concentration of money in the hands of a few negatively influenced the poor.  The Cuban rich supported Cuba’s American controlled infrastructure that was inadequate to maintain an internal market.  For example, the country’s railroads, rather than benefit the whole country as a means of transportation or to spur urban growth, solely benefited the foreign dominated export economy, by running from the cane fields to the ports.  The foreign control even drove the standard of living to decrease.  The economy was created to serve the USA and when cheap labor was imported from Jamaica (during World War I) to accommodate the US with even lower sugar prices the standard of living further decreased.  Less Cubans were able to find work with immigrants settling for even lower wages.  Just as in the economy if the sugar industry boomed the vast majority of the people saw no improvements, their degrading living conditions with no improvement in sight led them to support change via a social revolution.

        The United State’s foreign control branched to all aspects of Cuba including political, economic, and social.  The foreign control was used to shape Cuba into merely a profitable resource of the USA rather than an independent nation.  Such foreign control cornered Cuba into a viscous cycle of dependency from which their only hope of improvement and freedom seemed to be a social revolution.