For the first time in any language the National Security Archive is publishing a translation of the first meeting between Khrushchev and Raul Castro on July 18, 1960, providing new insight into what each side wanted, expected and promised.
It’s easy to say, but it’s been six very hard decades that began with disconcerting lightness and the belief that the United States government’s blockade of Cuba would not last long – a couple of years, maybe.
Nelson Mandela visited the island nation in 1991. His interactions with Fidel Castro would inform some of his negotiations with the National Party to end apartheid.
New details have emerged of the first such plan, which was actually directed against Castro's brother Raúl Castro, in July 1960.
Over the 60 years of the Cuban revolution, the corporate media has implanted in us a negative image of Cuba through their distortions of the country’s political and economic system, their discounting the revolution’s achievements...
My knowledge of Cuba’s revolutionary offensive in Latin America is based on conversations with Cuban and Latin American protagonists, including – after two decades’ knocking at the door – a five-hour tête-à-tête with Castro in June 2015; as well as on documents from the US, the USSR, the GDR, Canada and Britain.
Che’s youngest sibling, Juan Martin Guevara, remembers his revolutionary brother and the family's travails after his murder by the Bolivian military with the aid of the CIA.
Most fascinatingly, the film's coda features footage of the now 23-year-old Elian who still lives in Cuba and reveres the late Castro. Articulate and self-assured, he seems none the worse for his childhood trauma. Talking about the current state of relations between the two countries, he comments that Barack Obama’s history-making trip to the island country was important, but that it also “left much to be desired.”
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Castro's biggest test was in the 1990s, when the sudden end of subsidized trade with the Eastern Bloc, combined with sanctions from the United States, led to a severe economic crisis. His response - which history may judge as his greatest legacy - was to launch an ambitious program in organic agriculture, environmental planning, renewable energy and other sustainable development practices.
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