One of the important people opposed to Batista was Fidel Castro. According to Fidel Castro´s ideas, the fighters who followed him should take control of the Moncada and Bayamo barracks, give the arms to the people, and invite the soldiers to join them and adopt the first social measures. Fidel and his companions, were very confident about the peolple discontent, due to all the situations which put in gear the Cuban peolple.
After a tremendous failure at Moncada, nearly all of the revels were killed or captured. At his trial, Fidel Castro gave his famous speech, History will Absolve Me. His brave actions and his speech at his trial gave him widespread support and attention. Castro was sentenced to prison, but Batista released him, due to his overconfidence. Castro, when released, went to Mexico and the United States and gathered a force and raised funds for an invasion of Cuba. While in Mexico, he met with Che Guevara, who would prove to be a valuable ally in the revolution. By then it was 1955, and Castro started to work on raising an army. The people willing to oppose Batista were few. On December 2, 1956, Castro and 82 others aboard the Granma landed in Cuba. Their numbers were quickly reduced by Batista´s soldiers, but most of the important leaders made their way into the Sierra Maestra mountains.
The attack Castro initiated with those 82 men officially began the Cuban Revolution.
The revel forces began to rely on the peasants for support.
A movement in the cities began as well. Frank País, whom Castro had left in charge while in exile, began to attack the Batista government in various ways. Anti-Batista students, though not associated with the Castro-led group of revels, unsuccesfully led an armed assault on the Presidential Palace.
On May 24, 1958, Batista launch Operación Verano. With seventeen battalions, tanks, planes, and ships, they planned to enter the Sierra Maestra and force a showdown with Castro´s revels. Though greatly outnumbered, the revels repeatedly inflicted heavy casualties on the army and drove them back.
Batista´s army was unprepared for the fighting conditions and the guerilla style of warfare.
Eventually, Batista decided the situation was hopeless. Batista decided to give up the fight. Batista fled to Spain, by then having amassed a fortune of $300 million through bribery and embezzlement.
The Castro Regime
Batista's fall resulted as much from internal decay as from the challenges of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement (commemorating Castro's attack on the Moncada military fortress in Santiago on July 26, 1953) or from the Federation of University Students (later absorbed into the Young Communists Union) and other groups. Castro had been a candidate in the aborted elections of 1952. His defense of his part in the Moncada attack, edited and published as "History Will Absolve Me," was a political manifesto. Released from prison in 1955, Castro and some friends went to Mexico to prepare for the overthrow of the Cuban government. An enlarged group, including the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevara, landed in Cuba in December 1956 and were almost annihilated in their first attack. From the Sierra Maestra the survivors fought a guerrilla campaign. When the Fidelistas took control on Jan. 1, 1959, they numbered fewer than 1,000.The 26th of July Movement had vague political plans, relatively insignificant support, and totally untested governing skills. They quickly forged a following from among the poor peasants, the urban workers, the young, and the idealistic of all groups. The first stage of the new regime was dominated by the progressive dissolution of capitalism, between 1959 and 1963. In those confusing and difficult years, the government eliminated the remnants of Batista's army as well as the former labour unions, political parties, and associations of professional persons and farmers. New institutions emerged: the Confederation of Cuban Workers (reconstituted 1970), the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (founded 1959), the Cuban Institute of Cinematic Art and Industry (1959), the Central Planning Board (1960), the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (1960), the Federation of Cuban Women (1960), the National Association of Small Farmers (1961), the Revolutionary Armed Forces (1961), the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (1961), the Young Communists (1962), and others. The nationalization of hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. property and private businesses provoked retaliatory measures by the U.S. government, including a trade embargo, an unsuccessful invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in south central Cuba (April 1961), and unexecuted plots to assassinate Castro.Hundreds of thousands of Cubans, especially from among the skilled and the wealthy, emigrated to Spain, the United States, and other countries. Attempts to foment revolution elsewhere, especially in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Bolivia, alienated Cuba from most of the other Latin-American states.Castro visited the Soviet Union during 1963, but the next two years witnessed a period of ideological instability as the government consolidated its domestic position. Shortages became acute. Between 1965 and 1970 the revolution experienced a third, more radical phase. Cuba began to assume a significant leadership role among the so-called Third World countries. By 1968 there was a strong campaign against bureaucrats and a renewed attack on private property, as hundreds of small businesses were nationalized. The political system was reorganized. A new family code was introduced in 1975, and the following year a new constitution and a new electoral code created 14 provinces (instead of six) and 169 municipalities (including the Isla de Pinos, now Isle of Juventud). Fidel Castro became president of the Council of Ministers and the State Council (the latter office combining the offices of president of the republic and prime minister). Nationwide elections in 1976 returned municipal assemblies, which then elected members to the provincial assemblies and the National Assembly.Castro reestablished full diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1960, and that country became Cuba's major trading partner and source of funds and military supplies. From 1960 until 1991 the Soviet Union bought the major portion of the Cuban sugar crop, generally at a price above that of the free world market. Soviet aid to Cuba in loans, petroleum, war matériel, and technical advice amounted to several billions of dollars annually. The dominant Soviet role forced the Cubans to support the Soviet Union in its dispute with China, although pro-Chinese sentiment was strong in Cuba in the mid-1960s. In 1968 Cuba endorsed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, but Cuba lost considerable influence among the nonaligned nations when it supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In 1979 the United States objected to the presence of Soviet combat troops in Cuba.The wide-ranging Cuban foreign policy relied on Soviet support. In the late 1960s the Cubans began to redefine themselves as an "Afro-Latin-American people." By the 1980s this new definition was accompanied by assistance to several nations in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Emigration from Cuba to the United States became an issue beginning in the 1980s; and in 1987 the two countries signed an agreement allowing for the emigration of 20,000 Cubans annually to the United States.Although some overall improvement in Cuba-U.S. relations could be noted since the revolution, the U.S. trade embargo imposed in the early 1960s remained essentially in force, and there were few apparent signs of thaw into the mid-1990s. In the meantime Cuba-U.S. relations worsened when the United States invaded the island of Grenada, in 1983, killing a number of Cubans and expelling the remainder of the Cuban aid force from the island. Cuba began a phased withdrawal of its troops from Angola in 1989 and completed the withdrawal in May 1991.Although Cuba had for decades leaned heavily on the Soviet Union for the support of its economy, Cuban-Soviet relations deteriorated as a result of the liberalization in the late 1980s of Soviet political, economic, and social policies. The Soviet Union initiated the withdrawal of its troops from Cuba in September 1991 over the latters' objections that the withdrawal would compromise the nation's security and open the way to U.S. aggression. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, the already troubled Cuban economy suffered further from the loss of vital military, economic, and commercial support that had in effect constituted subsidies. Amid severe internal shortages, and with unrest and dissatisfaction growing, Castro declared a "special period in peacetime" of food rationing, energy conservation, and reduction of public services.
Analysis of the question:
Which was the impact of the Cuban Revolution?
By most social and economic indicators, Cuba by mid-century was among Latin America's most highly developed countries. However, in the postwar period it was suffering from a corrupt political dictatorship set up in 1952 by the same Batista who earlier had helped put his country on a seemingly democratic path. It was also a country whose long history of economic and other dependence on the United States had fed nationalist resentment, although control of the sugar industry and other economic sectors by U.S. interests was gradually declining. While conditions for revolutionary change were thus present, the particular direction that Cuba took owed much to the idiosyncratic genius of Fidel Castro, who, after displaceing Batista at the beginning of 1959, proceeded by stages to turn the island into the hemisphere's first communist state, in close alliance with the Soviet Union. The Cuban Revolution achieved major advances in health and education, though sacrificing economic efficiency to social objectives. Expropriation of most private enterprises together with Castro's highly personalistic dictatorship drove many members of the middle and upper classes into exile, but a serious decline in productivity was offset for a time by Soviet subsidies. At the same time, thanks to its successful defiance of the United States--which tried and failed to overthrow it by backing a Cuban exiles' invasion in April 1961--and its evident social advances, Castro's Cuba was looked to as a model throughout Latin America, not only by established leftist parties but also by disaffected students and intellectuals of mainly middle-class origin. Over the following years much of Latin America saw an upsurge of rural guerrilla conflict and urban terrorism, in response to the persistence of harsh social inequality and political repression. But this upsurge drew additional inspiration from the Cuban example, and in many cases Cuba provided training and material support to guerrillas. On one hand, governments strengthened their armed forces, with U.S. military aid preferentially geared to counterguerrilla operations. On the other hand, emphasis was placed on land reform and other measures designed to eliminate the root causes of insurgency, all generously aided by the United States through the Alliance for Progress launched by President John F. Kennedy. Moreover, the Cuban Revolution ultimately lost much of its lustre even in the eyes of the Latin-American left, once the collapse of the Soviet Union caused Cuba to lose its chief foreign ally. Although the U.S. trade embargo imposed on Cuba had been a handicap all along, shortages of all kinds became acute only as Russian aid was cut back, clearly revealing the dysfunctional nature of Castro's economic management.
Conclusion
I think that many of the things achieved after the Revolution, worth it. And also many of them, or most of them, should be emphazised and preserved:
- The educational system which produced the most literate and educated people of Latin America should be continued, not as an instrument of political control but only as a system of education in which the Truth is respected.
- The health system, given proper funding, was also a model to many nations in the Continent. The statistics prove that the system was universally available and efficient. Why destroy that which was a positive result of the revolution.
- Another example of the good done was the Biotechnology research which is underway. Properly promoted, this aspect of Cuban technological maturity could well become it's most important contribution to the World's economy.
Bibliography
- Encyclopedia Britannica 2000
