The Republic of Cuba Society

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) July 26, 2006 --

Throughout 2004-5 a series of tit for tat measures between the Cuban and US governments put the prospect of an end to the embargo on the back burner once again. In May 2004 the Bush administration set up a special commission designed to bring about the swift demise to the Castro regime. New laws heightened restrictions on Cuban Americans visiting family members in Cuba and placed similar restrictions on the sending of money between the US and the Caribbean country. Castro responded in November 2004 by taking the US dollar out of circulation. He also sought sanctuary in ever-closer relations with enigmatic Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. The 2005 hurricane season hit Cuba hard. In July Hurricane Dennis destroyed housing and crops in the Cienfuegos and Sancti Spiritus provinces and knocked out a trio of Trinidad � s hotels (all but one have now re-opened). A few months later Hurricane Wilma swung by and flooded much of Habana Centro.
Modern History

The USA, hobbled by a law requiring its own government to respect Cuban self-determination, could not annex Cuba outright, as it did Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Instead, they installed a governor, General John Brooke, and began a series of public works projects, building schools and improving public health, that further tied Cuba to the USA. US leaders did retain the legal right to intervene militarily in Cuba's domestic affairs: in 1903, the USA built a naval base at Guant � namo Bay that is still in operation - notoriously so - today. By the 1920s US companies owned two-thirds of Cuba's farmland, imposing tariffs that crippled Cuba's own manufacturing industries. Discrimination against blacks was institutionalised. Tourism based on drinking, gambling and prostitution flourished. The hardships of the Great Depression led to civil unrest, which was violently quelled by President Gerado Machado y Morales. In 1933 Morales was overthrown in a coup, and army sergeant Fulgencio Batista seized power. Over the next 20 years Cuba crumbled, and its assets were increasingly placed into foreign hands. On January 1, 1959, Batista's dictatorship was overthrown after a three-year guerilla campaign led by young lawyer Fidel Castro, flanked by military leaders 'Che' Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos. Batista fled Cuba for the Dominican Republic, taking with him 40 million of government funds. Castro was named prime minister and began reforming the nation's economy, cutting rents and nationalising landholdings larger than 400 hectares. Relations with the USA, already shaky, deteriorated when he nationalised US-owned petroleum refineries that had refused to process Russian oil. The Americans retaliated by cutting Cuban sugar imports, thus crippling the Cuban economy, and the CIA began plotting devious ways to overthrow the revolutionary government. Desperate for cash, Castro turned to the Soviet Union, which promptly paid top dollar for Cuba's sugar surplus. In 1961, 1400 CIA-trained Cuban expats, mainly upper-middle-class Batista supporters who had fled to Miami after the revolution, attacked the island at the Bay of Pigs.


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