Cuba - Lonely Planet [20]
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On January 2, 1959 the Cuban government announced that 50% to 60% of all casino profits would be directed to welfare programs.
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Among more than 1000 laws and acts passed by revolutionary government in its first year were rent and electricity cost reductions, the abolition of racial discrimination and the much-lauded (among Cubans) First Agrarian Reform Act. This landmark piece of legislation nationalized all rural estates over 400 hectares (without compensation) and infuriated Cuba’s largest landholders, the bulk of whom were American. Establishing the embryonic Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA; Agrarian Reform Institute) as an umbrella organization, the government slowly began to piece together the rural apparatus that would later prove decisive in promoting its ambitious literacy and community-doctor programs.
Meanwhile, back on the political scene, entities with vested interests in Cuba (ie the US-owned businesses) were growing increasingly bellicose. Perturbed by Castro’s intransigent individual style and increasingly alarmed by his gradual and none-too-subtle shift to the left, dissidents started voting with their feet. Between 1959 and 1962 approximately 250,000 judges, lawyers, managers and technicians left Cuba, primarily for the US, and throughout the top professions Cuba began to experience an economically debilitating brain drain. At the same time Fidel hit back at the counterrevolutionaries with stringent press restrictions and the threat of arrest and incarceration for anyone caught being outwardly critical of the new regime.
Crisis begot crisis, and in June 1960 Texaco, Standard Oil and Shell refineries in Cuba buckled under US pressure and refused to refine Soviet petroleum. Sensing an opportunity to score diplomatic points over his embittered American rivals, Castro dutifully nationalized the oil companies. President Eisenhower was left with little choice: he cut 700,000 tons from the Cuban sugar quota in an attempt to get even. Rather worryingly for Cold War relations, the measure played right into the hands of the Soviet Union. Already buttered up by a 1959 visit from Che Guevara, the USSR stepped out of the shadows the following day and promised to buy the Cuban sugar at the same preferential rates. The tit-for-tat war that would come to characterize Cuban-Soviet-US relations for the next 30 years had well and truly begun.
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Che Guevara – whose father’s family name was Guevara Lynch – can trace his Celtic roots back to a Patrick Lynch (born in Galway in Ireland in 1715), who emigrated to Buenos Aires via Bilbao in 1749.
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The diplomatic crisis heated up again in August when Cuba nationalized US-owned telephone and electricity companies and 36 sugar mills, including US$800 million in US assets. Outraged, the American government forced through an Organization of American States (OAS) resolution condemning ‘extra-continental’ (ie Soviet) intervention in the Western hemisphere, while Cuba responded by establishing diplomatic relations with communist China and edging ever closer to its new Soviet ally, via a hastily signed arms deal.
By October 1960, 382 major Cuban-owned firms, the majority of its banks and the whole rental housing market had been nationalized, and both the US and Castro were starting to prepare for the military showdown that by this point seemed inevitable. Turning the screw ever tighter, the US imposed a partial trade embargo on the island as Che Guevara (now Minister of Industry) nationalized all remaining US businesses. In the space of just three short years Fidel had gone from the darling of the American liberals to US public enemy number one. The stage was set.
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COLD WAR DEEP FREEZE
The brick finally hit the window in early 1961