Another consideration here is that Cuba already was a very poor country in 1959 and hardly any capitalist poor countries (which constitute the majority in the world) have managed to escape poverty in the 20th century, so political orientation doesn't seem to be the determining factor.
Government efforts to lower subsidies to unprofitable enterprises and to shrink the money supply caused the semi-official exchange rate for the Cuban peso to move from a peak of 120 to the dollar in the summer of 1994 to 21 to the dollar by yearend 1999. Living conditions in 1999 remained well below the 1989 level. New taxes introduced in 1996 have helped drive down the number of self-employed workers from 208,000 in January 1996.
To alleviate the economic crisis, the government introduced a few market-oriented reforms including opening to tourism, allowing foreign investment, legalizing the US dollar, and authorizing self-employment for some 150 occupations. These measures resulted in modest economic growth; the official statistics, however, are deficient and as a result provide an incomplete measure of Cuba's real economic situation.
The Native Cuban Indian population, including the Ciboney and the Taíno, were forced in to reservations during the Spanish subdual of the Island of Cuba. Many Natives were put in reservations. One famous reservation was known as Guanabacoa, today a suburb of Havana.
In the Castro government's first agrarian reform law on May 17, 1959 it sought to limit the size of land holdings, and to distribute that land to agricultural workers in "Vital Minimum" tracts. In compensation, the Cuban government offered to pay the landholders based on the tax assessment values for the land.
In 1878, the Spanish Captain General Arsenio Martínez-Campos Antón offered Cubans the Pact of Zanjón to end the war. It was signed on February 10, 1878 and it promised some reforms of the Spanish government in Cuba, including some elective institutions, and theoretically promised Cuban representation in the Spanish Cortes (courts).
In 2001, a group backed by the powerful Catholic church collected thousands of signatures for the Varela Project, a petition requesting a referendum on the island's political system. The process was openly supported by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter during his historic 2002 visit to Cuba. A plebiscite then was made in which it was formally proclaimed that Castro's brand of socialism would be perpetual.
The economy of Cuba is based on state ownership with some small scale private enterprise existing at the fringes. Tourism has become one of the largest sources of income for Cuba, and in 1993 the U.S. dollar was made legal tender (the country operated under a dual-currency system); this arrangement was, however, revoked on 25 October 2004.
When Spain opened the Cuban trade ports, it quickly became a popular place. New technology allowed a much more effective and efficient means of producing sugar. They began to use water mills, enclosed furnaces, and steam engines to produce a higher quality of sugar at a much more efficient pace than elsewhere in the Caribbean.
Santeria was historically practiced primarily by descendants of west African slaves in Cuba, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Panama, and in Hispanic population centers in the United States such as Florida, New York, and California, but its popularity is spreading to all corners of the globe, to all different kinds of people.
However, as Castro's control of the island's assets tightened and more nationalization campaigns took place, promises such as these were not honored.
He was succeeded by Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín, a populist physician who had briefly held the presidency in the 1933 revolutionary process. President Grau passed a number of populist measures favoring workers and also was instrumental in passing the 1940 Constitution, which has been widely regarded as one of the most progressive ever written in terms of worker protection and human rights.
However, leading up to the abolition of slavery, Cuba gained great prosperity from their sugar trade. The Spanish had ordered regulations on trade with Cuba, which kept the island from becoming a dominant sugar producer.
The island consists mostly of flat to rolling plains, with more rugged hills and mountains primarily in the southeast and the highest point is the Pico Real del Turquino at 2,005 m. The local climate is tropical, though moderated by trade winds. There is a drier season from November to April, and a rainier season from May to October.
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