← History Uncensored
Loading summary
Transcript7 lines
- [00:00]
A
Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal college deal Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30 terms@akamsCollegePC
- [00:32]
B
Cuba has always mattered to great powers for one brutally simple geography. Sitting at the mouth of the Gulf, astride Caribbean shipping lanes and just 90 miles from Florida, it's helped guard the sea routes that carried Spain's imperial wealth, tempted Britain obsessed generations of American presidents and nearly became the launchpad for nuclear annihilation in 1962. First Spain, then Britain, then the United States and the Soviet Union all understood the same thing. From their strategic perspective, Cuba is not just an island, it's a platform. And now, as Russia revives military ties and sends warships into Havana, while China expands its economic footprint and suspected intelligence presence there, that old geopolitical fact is back. And that would matter even if Cuba were stable. But it isn't. Cuba is the only one party communist state left in the Western hemisphere long after the Soviet Union that once sustained it collapsed. Today it's in profound blackouts, shortages, inflation, decaying infrastructure and a record breaking exodus. Yet Cuba still has an ideological weight far larger than its size. For some it's a symbol of anti imperial defiance and historic gains in literacy and healthcare. For others, a stark warning about bread queues, political prisoners and the cost of one party rule. So what's the best and frankly the only way to understand how we got here? You clicked the video so you already know. Cuba is the largest country in the Caribbean by land area. It's not just one island, but an archipelago, a main island surrounded by thousands of smaller islands, islets and keys. Geography gives Cuba reach a long, deeply indented coastline, many bays, excellent natural harbors and a position at the meeting point of the Gulf of Mexico or America. Let's not get into that right now. The Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic. It lies south of Florida and the Bahamas, west of Hispaniola, east of the Yucatan Peninsula and north of Jamaica. In other words, beside the sea lanes that link North America, the Caribbean and the entrance to the Gulf. And that location explains why Cuba was coveted by empires. Its harbours were not just useful because they were plentiful, which they were, but because the island sat astride the maritime routes. The tide the Spanish Empire Together, Havana, on the island's north coast, became the de facto capital in the mid-1500s. From there, Spain could better watch the approaches to the gulf and protect the fleets moving between the Caribbean, Mexico and Europe. This, naturally also made Havana a target. The city was repeatedly attacked by the English, French and Dutch sea raiders in the 16th century, which is why the Spanish fortified it so heavily. Most of Cuba is plains, basins and fertile rolling terrain, with mountains in the southeast, centre and northwest. Historically, the lowlands helped support agriculture, while mountain ranges offered refuge and defensible ground. Cuba's strategic position also exposes it to frequent hurricanes in the summer and autumn that visit death and destruction upon the island. The earliest written record I found of a hurricane was 1557. But the Taino, a people who lived across the Caribbean for centuries before any European arrived, had a word for these meteorological events long before the Spanish arrived with any traditional writing implements. And the Taino called them hurricane for storm God or God of the powerful winds. And it's believed that that's where we get the word hurricane today. The period I'm going to talk about now is usually referred to as pre Columbian, which is technically true, but implies that everything before Christopher Columb arrived in 1492 was prologue, when actually the evidence of earlier human settlement is fascinating and it's growing. So Cuba's known human history begins around 4000 BC, more than five and a half thousand years before Spain existed as a country. The first peoples arrived by boat in distinct waves. One of the oldest known sites that proves this is the Lovisa Rock Shelter, which reveals that 6,000 years ago, people were living along the coast, sheltering in caves, caves and rock faces. And across these archaic cave sites, we find stone tools, shell ornaments, pendants, burials, pictographs etched into rock. But so much of this early world was coastal, so that means that rising sea levels have swallowed part of the evidence. Some of Cuba's oldest history might not be entirely lost just underwater. The best known of the later arrivals to Cuba were the Taino and an Arakan speaking people. And that is part of a wider language family spoken by many indigenous peoples across South America and the Caribbean. They cultivated cassava, maize, beans, squash, tobacco, peanuts and peppers. They fished, hunted, built villages that could range from small compounds to settlements of thousands of people. The Taino also left a cultural legacy. One example of this, if you have ever said or heard tobacco, canoe, barbecue or hammock, you're using their language. Sharing the island with the Taino in the far west were the Guanajabete which was an older, culturally distinct people. The evidence is fragmentary and filtered through later Spanish accounts, so it's kind of tough to use. But they appear to have been hunter gatherers, and their language seems to have been unintelligible even to the Taino, suggesting that they may have been descendants of an older people once spread widely across the Caribbean. But that is somewhat still shrouded in mystery. This is where Cuba enters written history. It's 1492. Christopher Columbus, sailing under the Spanish crown and still searching for Asia, reaches Cuba and claims it for Spain. He believed the island wasn't actually an island at all, but part of the Asian mainland. And that misunderstanding is quite interesting because it tells us something about empire and how often conquest begins almost by accident. So Europeans arrived not seeing Cuba for what it actually was, but what they wanted it to be. The conquest Proper began in 1511 under Diego Velazquez Cular, who established the first Spanish settlement on the eastern tip of Cuba at Baracoa. The Spanish obviously did not walk into an empty landscape. They were met with resistance from the Taino, organized first by the Cacique Atoe. So that's like a chieftain from Hispaniola. And Hispaniola was the island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and Atuay had fled Spanish rule there and had come to warn Cuba of the atrocities that were coming for them. We have an eyewitness source from Bartolome de la Casas, who was a Spanish priest, later bishop and chronicler. And I'm going to read more of it than I usually would, and you'll see why. So I quote from the Spanish solely because Artoue fled from people so iniquitous and cruel and defended himself against those who wanted to kill and oppress to death him. I quote directly, and all the people and his lineage, they had him burned alive, bound to the stake. A Franciscan friar, a holy man who was there, was saying to him some things of God and of our faith which he'd never heard before, as much as could suffice in that little time which the executioners gave him. And that if he wished to believe what was being said to him, he would go to heaven, where there was glory and eternal rest, and if not, he would go to hell to suffer perpetual torments and pains. He, thinking a little, asked the friar whether Christians went to heaven. The friar replied that they did, but that those who were good went. Then, ah to a said without further thought that he did not wish to go to heaven, but to hell, so as not to be where The Christians were. And so as not to see such cruel people. That is the fame that God and our faith has gained from the Christians who have gone to the Indies. End quote Translation I'd rather be condemned to hell than to be where the Spaniards are. So after roughly three years of war, the Spanish subdued the island. And Bartholomew de la Casas, again I quote after all, the Indians of the land of this island were placed in the servitude and calamity of those of Hispaniola. Seeing themselves die and perish without remedy, all began. Some to flee to the mountains, others to hang themselves in despair and husbands and wives hang themselves and with them hanged their children. And because of the cruelties of a very tyrannical Spaniard, whom I Knew, more than 200 Indians hang themselves. Infinite people perished in this way. So patently the conquest was not merely military, it was demographic, economic and moral. While Ptolemy de la Casas recorded massacres where, according to his account, thousands of villagers who had approached the Spanish with food were butchered without provocation. Survivors fled to the mountains and offshore islands only to be hunted down or beat broken by the encomienda system imposed after the Spanish arrived. Now the encomienda was a labour and tribute system where the Spanish crown granted conquistadors the forced labour of conquered indigenous populations in the Americas. Then disease compounded the catastrophe. Measles and smallpox tore through populations already shattered by this forced labour and displacement. By the middle of the 16th century, indigenous Cuba had not vanished entirely. Descendants survived and adapted, but it had been violently pushed out of visibility and we'll see this again. Power in Cuba presenting itself as civilization while actually depending on coercion and extraction. Havana was first established in 1514 or 1515, but not where it is today. The original settlement was actually on the south coast in swampy mosquito ridden terrain. And by 1519 the city been relocated to the north coast to its current site on a magnificent natural harbour. Now over the course of the 16th century, Havana grew into the most important Spanish port on the island. Because Cuba sat on heavily trafficked deep sea routes linking Spain's American empire to Europe. That made the island, and especially Havana, strategically indispensable. And once something becomes indispensable, it becomes vulnerable to great power competition. Cuba's position made it a prize not only for Spain, but for anyone who wanted to weaken Spain. Wealth moving by sea attracts violence on the waves as well. The island spent centuries under near constant pressure from pirates, buccaneers, corsairs, state sanctioned pirates and rival European powers. Spain developed tobacco, cattle, and early sugar production. By the 1520s, enslaved Africans were being imported to supply the labour crisis created by conquest and demographic collapse. The massacres, the disease, the forced labour. And yet, even within empire, control was never absolute. Spain tried to monopolize Cuban trade, outlawing commerce with other powers for the empire's economic benefit. But Cuban merchants responded with extensive smuggling, especially with the Brits. The law says one thing defines an opportunity, invites another. The Brits understood Cuba's value as clearly as the Spanish did. Their first major British occupation attempt came in 1741, when they seized Guantanamo Bay and renamed it Cumberland Bay. But they couldn't hold it. Disease, Spanish resistance. Cuban guerrilla pressure drove them out in less than a year. They tried other Cuban ports as well, but unsuccessfully. Then came the real shock. During the Seven Years War, Britain finally achieved the Cuban prize that it coveted, the capture of Havana in 1762 after a difficult siege. This wasn't just a military embarrassment for Spain, it was a geopolitical revelation. Once the Brits took the city, they opened trade with their North American and Caribbean colonies, and Cuban society changed rapidly. In other words, the moment that Spain lost control, another imperial model rushed on in. But British rule was brief. In the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Britain swapped with Spain Havana for Florida to solidify British North American dominance. Many in Britain believed that this was a poor bargain, that Havana was more valuable than the larger Florida colony. In fact, William Pitt, a former prime minister, was carried into Parliament suffering intensely from gout, and delivered a three hour speech denouncing the decision to give it back. And this is why later Cuban nationalism is always shadowed by anti imperialism. The fear of foreign domination is not paranoia. It has a rather extensive archive. First Spain, then Britain, later the United States. Cuba learned very early that powerful outsiders don't merely visit the island, they try to use it. When Spain got Havana back in 1763, it recovered the island, but not the illusion of control. The British occupation had been brief, but it revealed something. The moment that Havana was open to wider trade, Cuban society changed rapidly. The island was not poor, isolated or marginal by nature. It had just been very tightly managed. And once that pressure was loosened, Cuba's economic potential surged. That's one of the key mechanisms behind Cuba's colonial rule, that Spain didn't simply govern Cuba, it obviously constrained it. What followed was a century in which empire, slavery, reform, abolition, annexation and independence all collided. In the 19th century, Cuba became the most important sugar producer in the world because of two technological modernization and human coercion. During the harvest, workers cut cane with machetes through near 20 hour days and rushed it to the mill before its sugar content began to drop. Oxen initially drove the rollers that crushed the sugar cane, a process so dangerous that reportedly an axe was kept nearby to sever a hand caught in the machinery before a worker was pulled through it entirely. The extracted juice then passed through the boiling house, moving through a series of kettles, each one smaller and hotter than the last. While workers ladled the thickening syrup from one to the next. Boiling sugar that hit the skin stuck fast and could kill. The concentrated syrup was then finally poured into these clay moulds and left, draining for weeks to create the sugar loaves that were shipped to Europe. By the mid-19th century, new technologies like vacuum pans and centrifuges were transforming this process. But at every stage, the workforce was overwhelmingly enslaved. Under British pressure, Spain agreed in 1817 to abolish the slave trade from 1820. But the trade didn't slow. It simply became illegal and continued regardless. Cuba's plantation owners rushed to import more enslaved Africans before and after the deadline. And the trade continued at high volumes of people for decades. By 1841, the enslaved population of Cuba had risen to over 400,000. That's nearly 45% of the population. During the 19th century, more than 600,000 Africans were brought to Cuba, so the island grew rich from sugar. But sugar deepened dependence on slavery and increasingly on the United states, which by 1860 purchased the majority of Cuban exports. Cuba's path to nationhood was never straightforward. In the early 19th century, three political currents competed. Some Cubans wanted reform within Spanish rule, some wanted to be absorbed into the United States, and some wanted full independence. Running through all of them uneasily was the question of slavery. And the shadow of Haiti hung over everything, because in 1791, enslaved people in the neighbouring French colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, rose up and eventually created the world's first independent black republic. For Cuban slaveholders, Haiti was a warning. And it also partially explains why early challenges to slavery and colonial rule were crushed with such ferocity. In 1812, a free black militia veteran named Jose Antonio Aponte helped organise a major island wide conspiracy to end slavery and overthrow Spanish rule. He was executed and his severed head was displayed in an iron cage as a warning. The first major war in which part of Cuba's planter class openly broke with Spain, came in 1868, when Carlos Manuel de Cespedes declared Cuban independence, freed his own slaves and invited them to join the fight. But many of the western Sugar elite stayed loyal to Spain because they understood that independence and emancipation were linked and that emancipation threatened their profits. This was the beginning of the Ten Years War, a rebellion that carried its own contradiction. It needed black Cubans to fight for a free Cuba, but full freedom risked driving away the slaveholders whose wealth and men the rebellion also needed. This war was long and incomplete. The rebels held large parts of eastern Cuba but couldn't push west, and Spain built fortified military lines to contain them. By 1878, it ended in a negotiated settlement that promised reforms, but delivered neither independence nor abolition. But the war did change things. Slavery, already weakened at this point, was dismantled in stages from 1880 and fully ended in 1886. American capital was increasingly flowing into Cuban sugar, so that by 1895, Cuba was still Spanish politically, but economically it was already moving into the orbit of the United States. So as Spanish power weakened, American power filled that space. The final independence war began in 1895, shaped above all by Jose Marti, a poet, intellectual, revolutionary. Marti understood something clearly that others had missed, that Cuba needed independence, not just from Spain, but from becoming an American possession too. The United States had coveted Cuba for decades. Thomas Jefferson had expressed that Cuba would be a most interesting addition to the US. John Quincy Adams, soon to be president, argued in 1823 that Cuba would naturally gravitate towards union with the US once Spain's grip loosened. Marti knew all of this. His revolution was anti Spanish, but it was also preemptively anti American. Marty's vision was also racially inclusive. For its time, he insisted that black and white Cubans had to fight together again. This was not just a military struggle, but an argument about what kind of nation Cuba was going to be. Marti was killed in May 1895. Early on in the fighting, the war intensified under other leaders. Spain responded with a policy that shocked the world. General Valeriano Weyler, nicknamed the Butcher, and you'll see why, ordered Cuba's rural population herded into fortified three concentration camps, an early version of concentration camps to cut rebels off from the civilian support which was providing food, shelter and intelligence. Disease, appalling sanitation and starvation in these camps proved fatal for a significant portion of the population. Estimates vary a lot, but between 170,000 and 400,000 deaths by 1897, Spain was losing. And then came the event that changed everything. In January 1898, the United States sent the battleship USS Maine to Havana, officially to protect American citizens. On 15 February, it exploded in the harbor, killing around 260 crew members. The cause at the time was never established. Later investigations pointed to an accidental internal fire. But American newspapers were already full of stories about Spanish atrocities. Catchy phrases like remember the main to hell with Spain. And the explosion turned public sympathy into a stronger demand for war. Congress authorised military intervention in April. And crucially, it also passed the Teller Amendment, which was a declaration that the United States had no intention of annexing Cuba. American forces landed and, fighting alongside Cuban rebels who'd already done most of the work, defeated Spain within months. On 10th December 1898, the Treaty of Paris formalised Spain's defeat. Cuban representatives were excluded from the peace negotiations entirely. Cuban troops were barred from entering Santiago at the surrender ceremony. The island had won its liberation from Spain and then watched two empires settle its fate without it. So the superficial story is that empire ended in 1898, but it didn't. One empire collapsed, another moved in. Cubans had already learned the lesson that would define their modern history, that powerful nations often speak the language of liberation while quietly rearranging sovereignty in their own interests.
- [23:28]
C
Whatever your thing, it could be anything. Canada helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing. It's a way to design, with our magic AI tool, things you can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks or presentations to show your thing. Whatever needs to be done for your thing, Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.
- [24:01]
B
In 1902, Cuba became a republic. Spain was gone, the flag was Cuban. But the most important terms of Cuban statehood had already been written elsewhere. After Defeating Spain in 1898, the United States occupied Cuba. Officially, this was temporary. In practice, Washington moved quickly to shape what kind of country Cuba would be allowed to become. So the Cuban Liberation army was demobilised and dissolved. The remaining institutions of the independence movement disintegrated and the island was reorganized under US military rule. Havana was modernised. Roads, bridges and schools were built. Elections were organised, A constitution was drafted. So on paper, the new republic looked liberal, it looked modern. The language of freedom was masking a different hierarchy of power, because attached to Cuba's independence was DRUMROLL for this, because it's very important, the Platt Amendment, passed by the US Congress in 1901, it gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs, restricted Cuba's treaty making power, limited its ability to take on debt and required it to provide for US naval stations. So basically to give land to the us, including what would become Guantanamo Bay, the Cuban constituent assembly resisted this for months, but Washington made clear that without accepting it, there would be no end to US military rule. Under pressure, the assembly eventually approved it narrowly. General Leonard Wood, a US military governor of Cuba, later admitted that little or no independence had been left to Cuba at this time. The United States didn't need to annex the island to control it because it had found a subtler instrument, a republic that was sovereign in form, subordinate in structure. This also meant that later revolutionaries, so you can remember this, could present themselves not simply as reformers, but as people trying to finish the independence that had never really been completed. The first president of the Republic, Thomas Estrada Palmer, took office on 20 May 1902 under heavy US influence when he tried to hold on to power through contested elections in 1905. Rebellion followed and the United States moved right on. Back in, Estrada Palmer resigned. American forces returned under a provisional governor. His name was Charles Magoon. From 1906 to 1909, elections were reorganised. Then, once order had been restored on Washington's terms, power was handed back. From the earliest years of the republic, American companies moved rapidly into Cuba's mining and sugar sectors, buying up land and squeezing out Cuban landowners. Many cane farmers who had once owned their own land became tenants on company estates. The economy did grow, but in a way that would make Cuban independence harder, not easier. The benefits were unequally shared and race was central to that. Afro Cubans were pushed to the margins of the Republic. In 1908, Afro Cuban veterans formed the Independent Party of Colour to demand equal rights, public employment and land. Under President Jose Miguel Gomez, the party was outlawed. In fact, Senator Martin Moroa Delgado, an Afro Cuban himself, presented and helped pass a law to ban race based political parties, effectively outlawing the pic. Now, when thousands of members launched an armed uprising in Oriente in 1912, the government crushed the uprising with extreme violence, killing thousands of Afro Cubans. US troops, guess what? Returned again officially to protect American lives and property. Gomez's administration though, became synonymous with corruption. His successor, Mario Garcia Menocal, took power in 1912, won a disputed re election in 1916 through fraud and violence. And when that triggered armed revolt, the United States sent the marines in again. Alfredo Zias took power in 1921, but when sugar prices collapsed and the finances buckled, he had to go to Washington for a loan in 1922. A leading historian of U.S. cuba relations, Louis A. Perez Jr. Has argued that at this stage Cuba had become a colony in all but name. Then came Gerardo Machado, elected in 1925 he promised modernisation and, in part delivered it. But reform slid into personal rule. His power came to depend increasingly on manipulation, troops and political violence. The state became openly authoritarian. Beneath all of this sat the same structural weaknesses. Sugar remained the island's main export, but dependence on a single crop and more or less a single market left Cuba dangerously exposed. Their system enriched some but left many poor, especially in the countryside. By 1933, Machado had fled the country under pressure from strikes, popular revolt and the United States. And out of the chaos emerged a new Fulgencio Batista. In 1933, Fulgencio Batista was not yet the cartoon villain of later memory, but a man who grasped a fact that would shape modern Cuba. If the republic was weak, whoever controlled the army could control the state. After the upheaval of 33, Batista became the island's decisive power broker, first ruling through others, then winning the presidency in 1940 under a new constitution that was widely seen as one of the most progressive in the region. At the time, it promised labour rights, equality and a more interventionist state. There was a civilian interlude after Batiste's first period in power, and Ramon Grau San Martin and then Carlos Prio Socaras governed in the 1940s, and Cuba remained formally constitutional. But corruption was deepening, public services deteriorated, and Havana's glamour acquired this darker underside of gambling, vice and organised crime. Flourishing alongside real economic growth, Cuba by the late 1940s had one of the stronger economies in Latin America a large urban population and visible, albeit uneven, modernity. Tourist wealth clustered in Havana. Rural poverty, underemployment and inequality, though, remained persistent. In 1952, Batista returned by force. He seized power in a largely bloodless coup, interrupted the electoral process, suspended the constitutional order and gradually began to rule as a dictator. Batista 2.0 was harsher than the first. Censorship, repression, manipulated elections and growing violence became the grammar of the regime. At the same time, Cuba's old dependence sharpened. Foreign investors controlled large parts of the economy. By the 1950s, the US and other foreign interests owned huge shares of land, services and sugar production. So that central contradiction of Cuban history rose again. The island was formerly independent, yet much of its political and economic life still seemed bent around the interests of others. And that is where Fidel Castro enters the story. In 1953, after Batista's coup had shut down the legal route to power, Castro led a failed attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. A tactical defeat, but politically just the beginning. Castro's courtroom defence, later published, famously as history will absolve me, turned this defeat into a manifesto released in an amnesty in 1955. He went to Mexico, regrouped and returned in December 1956 aboard the Grandma yacht with a small band of rebels, including Raul Castro and Che Guevara. So let's pause here for a second on these towering historical figures. Fidel Castro was magnetic, theatrical, politically brilliant, a lawyer who'd turned failed revolt, prison and the courtroom into a platform, presenting himself more as a radical nationalist and anti imperialist in Marty's tradition, who I mentioned earlier, rather than a Marxist, Raul Castro was Fidel's quieter, harder younger brother, less charismatic, more disciplined and pragmatic and already openly communist. Raoul handled much of the practical organisation that the revolution depended on. And it was through Raul that Fidel first met Che Guevara in Mexico. And Che Guevara was an Argentine doctor turned committed Marxist, radicalized by witnessing the CIA Baku in Guatemala in 1954, which convinced him that Washington would always intervene to destroy reform before it could take root. So he brought the ideological rigor, internationalism and revolutionary ruthlessness to compliment Fidel's Cuban nationalism. I actually had a Che Guevara T shirt that I used to wear when I was 16 to try and be cool. I also was president of the chemistry club and had braces, so I'd say that was a botched attempt. They landed on December 2, 1956, and after an initial, near fatal ambush by Batista's troops, the three men, plus a few survivors, 82, set out on the grandma yacht and around 12 made it, and they escaped to the Sierra Maestra mountains to begin their guerrilla campaign. By 1958, the rebel forces began to overwhelm government troops, aided by declining support for Batista within his own government and from the United States, which placed an arms embargo on Cuba. On 1 January 1959, Batista fled. Castro's forces entered Havana days later and the old order collapsed with surprising speed. Castro's movement presented itself as the force that would end corruption, break oligarchic rule, humble foreign influence and finally make the republic a real thing. And at first, the revolution was not yet fully communist. It was radical, nationalist and transformative. Before it was Marxist, Leninist. The new government moved quickly. It purged Batista's state apparatus, carried out executions, redistributed land, postponed elections and began nationalising major property. These measures were popular with many Cubans, especially the rural poor and the politically excluded. But they also rapidly collided with U.S. interests as Cuba expropriated U.S. owned assets and signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union. Washington turned from suspicion to active hostility. By March 1960, before Castro had declared himself a communist, the Eisenhower administration had already already adopted a COVID policy aimed at his removal. Then came the event that locked the revolution into the Cold War, the Bay of pigs in April 1961. So about 1,400 Cuban exiles financed and directed by the US government, all patterns repeating themselves. They landed in Cuba expecting to spark an uprising. Instead, the invasion collapsed within days. On the eve of that invasion, Castro made a declaration that changed everything. He announced that the Cuban revolution was socialist. By December 1961, he went further, declaring himself a Marxist Leninist. So America had moved to remove him before either of those declarations. The failed invasion did not weaken Castro politically. It actually strengthened him because it validated his warnings about US interventionism, rallying support at home. And it also made alignment with the Soviet Union look like a strategic necessity. That in turn set up the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Fearing another US invasion, Castro agreed to host Soviet nuclear missiles on the island. When the US discovered them, the world came to the brink of nuclear war. The crisis is often told as a duel between Kennedy and Khrushchev. And in the end it was. Castro wasn't consulted on the resolution. He learned of the Soviet retreat on the radio and was furious. For Cuba, it also had another meaning. The island had finally escaped US Tutelage, only to become one of the most dangerous strategic squares on the Cold War chessboard. Cuba was no longer a client of Washington, but the missile crisis had just shown that it was a client of Moscow. The old pattern hadn't vanished. It had changed patrons and scale. Castro's revolution genuinely transformed power in Cuba. It broke the old oligarchic system, defy the United States. But every revolution also manufactures legitimising myths. And in Cuba's case, one of the most powerful was the idea that the revolutionary state alone embodied national dignity. And that claim drew strength from a real wound, the long history of intervention, dependence and humiliation that came before it. But it was dangerous too, because once the state is treated as the sole vessel of national honor, dissent becomes very easy to cast as betrayal. And that's why this period still matters now. It explains why Cuba's legitimacy has so often rested less on prosperity, elections or individual rights than on something very emotionally powerful. In this context, the claim to have stood up at last to the United States. By the mid-1960s, the revolution had hardened into a one party state. Private economic space narrowed further political pluralism disappeared and Cuba's three main revolutionary organisations were fused into a single ruling structure, officially designated the Communist Party of Cuba. In 1965, the revolution stopped being an insurgency that had seized the state and became a state that claimed to embody the revolution. The usual Cold War story can make Cuba sound like a pawn, but that's way too simple and doesn't capture it because Soviet support was obviously essential. But Cuba was not only passively used by the superpowers, it also tried to use them. It took the rivalry of the Cold War and turned it into reach prestige and influence that exceeded its size. First, it locked itself more firmly into the Soviet world. In 1972, Cuba joined comic con, the Soviet Union led trade bloc. By then, Cuban institutions were increasingly being modelled along Soviet lines and thousands of Soviet advisors and technicians had been working on the island. Aid from the USSR helped steady Cuba's economy after upheavals and shortages during the 60s, while the Cuban state poured resources into healthcare and education, foundations of the social model it would later showcase to the world. In 1976, Cuba adopted a new socialist constitution, codifying the socialist state and institutionalizing Castro's dominance at the top of government. It was now an institutionalised regime with a clear ideological identity that gave Cuba more confidence abroad and it projected power. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cuba offered military, technical and political assistance across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. It supported leftist governments and liberation movements. And nowhere was that more dramatic than in Angola and Ethiopia. In 1975, as Angola moved toward independence, Cuban combat troops were sent in, followed by much larger deployments. With Cuban military backing. The MPLA held Luanda, defeated its rivals and proclaimed Angolan independence. At its peak, there were approximately 40,000 Soviet Armed Cubans fighting in Angola. In Ethiopia, Cuban combat troops began arriving in 1977, eventually totalling more than 15,000. Fighting Somali forces with Soviet weapons, coordinating with Soviet advisors. Cold War Cuba used superpower rivalry to magnify itself. Of course it was still dependent on Moscow. But it wasn't just dependent, it was also ambitious for itself. Cuba wasn't exporting just troops, but revolutionary legitimacy or trying to presenting itself as the militant conscience of a post colonial world. And for a while that kind of worked. Cuba gained a leadership role among developing and non aligned nations. Those countries that chose not to align formally with either the US or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In 1979, Castro was elected chair of the Non Aligned Movement. This was a high point of Cuba's international prestige. The island that had once been a US Protectorate now spoke as if it were the voice for the global south, a phrase that I don't actually like. But there was a contradiction in all of this which exposed the limits of Cuban independence. So Cuba claimed to be non aligned while relying heavily on the Soviet Union. Castro argued in 1973 that a natural alliance existed between the Soviet Union and the Third World. Then in 1979, Cuba supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which was a serious blow to its standing among these non aligned countries. The revolutionary state that spoke the language of anti imperialism defended a superpower invasion. Cuba could project power abroad and have its own agenda, but it couldn't fully escape the gravitational pull of its patron. It was a balancing act. There were also domestic shocks. In 1980, after a crisis in which thousands of Cubans stormed the Peruvian Embassy in Havana seeking asylum, leaving Castro with an embarrassment that he couldn't ignore or suppress. He opened the port of Marielle, turning the crisis into a managed departure that he could reframe as the revolution purging its malcontent. About 125,000 Cubans left for the United States in the Marriott boat lift. This was not a marginal episode, it was a warning sign. Cuba was internationally ambitious, but internally very strained. Rationing restrictions and political control had become facts of daily life for two decades. Immigration had shadowed the revolution from the start. But that event, that boat lift, made it especially visible. Relations with the United States remained bitter and unstable. There were moments of limited negotiations like anti hijacking talks and migration agreements and low level diplomatic missions in Havana and Washington in the late 1970s. But the pattern remained antagonistic. The US objected to Cuban troops in Africa, reimposed travel bans, restored pressure under Reagan and invaded Granada in 1983, killing more than two dozen Cubans and expelling the rest. But then the Cuban system began to crack. By the late 80s, Cuba was facing mounting international pressure over human rights. It was also moving towards withdrawal from its African campaigns. From 1989, Cuban troops were gradually withdrawn from Angola. And that mattered symbolically as much as it did strategically, because it marked the beginning of the end of Cuba's age of global revolutionary projection. Then came the real shock. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. For Cuba, this was catastrophic. When the USSR dissolved, Cuba lost not just a trading partner, but the external structure that had sustained its economy, armed its military, bought its sugar and underwritten its international role. Estimates that I found from the IMF and the CIA estimate that Soviet aid to Cuba during the 1980s was between 4 to 6 billion dollars per year. So this chapter ends with a sharp reversal. For more than two decades, Cuba had tried to become a world actor, exporting revolution, sending troops across oceans, claiming moral authority exceeding its size. And for a time, that succeeded. But that same alliance that amplified Cuba and its significance also exposed its vulnerability.
- [45:34]
D
Expedia and visit Scotland invite you to come. Step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today, and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today@expedia.com VisitScotland
- [46:05]
B
Cuba's 20th century drama had been about revolution, superpower rivalry and ideological ambition. When the Soviet union collapsed in 1991, I suppose the real test became how does a revolutionary state survive when the world that sustained it disappears? For an island whose economy had long depended on a narrow range of exports and a narrow range of buyers, this was a historic shock. Fidel Castro called it the special period in peacetime, a government euphemism for food, fuel, medical shortages, blackouts, unemployment, rationing and reduced public services. While formal government to government aid was prohibited by the US embargo, in place of since the 1960s, the Cuban government allowed some humanitarian aid from America, particularly through religious organisations, to address these acute shortages. People were desperate and they ate whatever they could find. Cats were reportedly eaten. There was unrest. Crime rose in 1994 after years of deprivation. Thousands protested in Havana in the Maleconazo uprising earlier that year. Around 41 Cubans, exact numbers disputed, including 10 children drowned trying to flee aboard a tugboat that government vessels were later accused of deliberately ramming and sinking. After the Maleconazo, Castro announced that Cubans who wanted to leave could do so. Tens of thousands took him up on it. Around 33,000 rafters left after the announcement, and the United States intercepted many at sea and detained them at the Guantanamo naval base. From the early 90s, under pressure, the government began market reforms in Cuba. Small businesses such as Paladares, independent restaurants, they were legalised. Self employment was allowed. The use of US dollars was legalised, foreign capital welcomed. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, tourism had become one of the engines of recovery. The state that had built its legitimacy on resisting capitalism now had to survive by selectively opening itself to it as a necessary evil. And all of this happened under the continuing weight of the US embargo. And the main framework of that was the Cuban Assets Control regulations initiated in 1963, reinforced by the Cuban Democracy act. Of 1992 and the Helms Bursten act of 1996, which restricted trade and codified conditions for lifting the embargo that reach far beyond economics, including the removal of the Castros from power. Democracy, release of political prisoners so by the 1990s and 2000s, Cuba was living inside this double bind. The collapse of the Soviet system on the one side and US sanctions on the other. This crisis deepened because Havana was reluctant to reform central planning and the regime had a preference for political control over economic adaptation. There were moments when the regime showed this brittleness quite clearly. In 1997, a group led by Vladimiro Roca petitioned for democratic and human rights reform. Roca and fellow campaigners were arrested. In 2002, activists launched the Varela Project, gathering thousands of signatures to request a referendum on Cuba's political future. Instead of opening the system, the government moved to close it more. And in March 2003, as the world's attention was fixed on the invasion of Iraq, the government imprisoned 75 dissidents, including journalists, activists, democracy advocates, accusing them of acting as agents of the United States. Amnesty International declared all of the prisoners prisoners of conscience. And this has become known as the Black Spring. The state still cast itself as the guardian of Cuban dignity against foreign subversion and treated internal dissent not as disagreement, but collaboration with the enemy. And that logic has deep roots in Cuba's experience of US power, namely the Monroe Doctrine. Proclaimed by President James Monroe in 1823. It warned European powers against interfering in the Americas and over time became Washington's justification for dominance across the Western Hemisphere. That helped justify the dominant US role imposed on Cuba after 1898 and shaped the US's resistance to Soviet influence in the region. And it never really went away. Trump's 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly called for reasserting and enforcing the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere. The Donroe Doctrine was coined to capture this re emphasis for the Cuban government. This is not history. It's a strategic anxiety with a 200 year pedigree. At the same time as all this, the island was changing. In 1999, a Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez was found floating off Florida after his mother drowned trying to reach the United States. His Miami relatives fought to keep him in the US rather than return him to his father in Cuba. What followed was this 7 month international custody battle inside Cuba. Castro seized on it. Rallies, demonstrations, a vast campaign of youth mobilization and ideological renewal that became known as the Battle of Ideas. What looked from the outside like a Custody dispute became inside Cuba a referendum on sovereignty, exile and who had the right to speak for the Cuban nation. Eliane was returned to his father in June 2000 and he was elected to Cuba's National assembly in 2023. Then came the beginning of the end of the Fidel Castro era. So in 2006, Fidel fell ill and withdrew from public life. In 2008, he formally resigned and Raul Castro took over. Age Age 76. Raoul's answer was not democratisation, but managed adjustment. Cubans were allowed to buy cell phones and personal computers, stay in hotels once reserved for foreigners. In 2010 and 2011, the government started tolerating more private enterprise, cutting state jobs, opening more space for non state activity in sectors like agriculture, construction, transport, retail. Private property transactions were legalised, travel restrictions were liberalised. And the regime was trying to preserve political monopoly by loosening a bit of economic control just enough to prevent collapse. And it was also helped by Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, which became a major source of subsidised oil and financial support. When Venezuela Weakened in the mid 2010s, Cuba's room for manoeuvre narrowed again. One reason that the next great diplomatic shift became possible. And that shift was the Obama thaw. In December 2014, after secret negotiations supported by Canada and Pope Francis, Barack Obama and Raul Castro announced the restoration of diplomatic relations. Prisoners were exchanged. In 2015, embassies reopened in Washington and Havana. In 2016, Obama visited Cuba, the first sitting US president to do so in nearly 90 years. But the embargo itself, codified in law, couldn't be ended by executive decision. And within Cuba, the leadership warned that foreign contact could undermine the system from within. Then, in November 2016, Fidel Castro died and his death marked the end of the founding presence of the revolution. Cuba now entered a new psychological phase. The revolutionary state now had to justify itself increasingly without the man who had embodied it. Under Donald Trump, many of Obama's initiatives were rolled back. The embassy in Havana was reduced to skeletal staffing after a series of unexplained health incidents which you probably remember. Diplomats, intelligence officers reported these unusual experiences and strange sounds, followed by headaches, hearing problems, cognitive symptoms and other neurological complaints. The incidents, which became known as Havana Syndrome, were never definitively explained and Cuba denied any involvement. The broader pattern of hostility returned, sustained in part by the political weight of Cuban Americans. In Florida, a state where I spent a lot of time growing up and whose electoral votes have decided presidential elections, many Cuban Americans, especially older exiled generations, have long leaned Republican and supported a tougher line of Havana. That influence runs deep in Washington. Figures like Marco Rubio himself, the son of Cuban immigrants, have been among the most consistent advocates for maintaining pressure on the Cuban government. As one of the most influential republican voices on Cuba, he's helped shape a Cuba policy that prioritized sanctions and regime change over engagement, which is a position with deep roots in the exile community that his family has come from. In 2018, Miguel Diaz canel became president, the first non Castro to hold the office in more than 40 years. Raul Castro stepped down from the presidency, but retained the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party until 2021. This was not a democratic transition, it was a controlled succession. But for the first time since 1959, Cuba was being led, at least formally, by someone who had not made the revolution. And post 1991, Cuba survived by just opening enough, repressing when necessary, turning scarcity itself into part of the revolutionary story. Today, Cuba's most important external relationships have shifted again. Russia is reasserting military ties with its parliament, ratifying a force formal military cooperation agreement with Cuba in October 2025, and Russian warships entering Havana in 2024. In what's widely seen as a show of force, Cuba's ties with China have become both a growing economic lifeline and a growing security concern for guess who? The United States. U.S. officials have acknowledged Chinese intelligence activity from Cuba, likely supporting surveillance of the us Beijing is also helping fund a major build out of Cuba's energy infrastructure, extending its geopolitical influence on the island. And it's emerging as one of Havana's most significant economic partners. Spain and the EU are priority trading partners as well, but they're chiefly commercial relationships, not the kind of strategic military ties during suspicion from the us. Meanwhile, the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, obtained under a treaty framework in 1903 and never returned, remains a permanent open wound in Cuba's claim to full sovereignty. And after 2001, the base acquired that darker identity. The US opened a detention facility there to house suspected enemies of the war on terror, mostly without formal charges. For Cuba, the base is a grievance of two layers, a colonial imposition that predates the revolution and a symbol of the impunity with which the US has treated both international law and Cuban sovereignty. Cuba is too strategically placed to be ignored and often too small to dictate the terms on which it's noticed. Again and again, outside powers have treated it not simply as a nation of people, but a platform for empire, deterrence, intelligence and ideological projection. This was true for Spain, the US and the Soviet Union. And it's true again. Now, as Russia signals with warships and military ties and China deepens its footprint through infrastructure and suspected intelligence facilities, the patrons change. One structural fact doesn't an island at the hinge of the Gulf, the Caribbean, and the approaches to the American mainland were always to powers larger than itself. That fact has shaped its history as relentlessly as any ideology. Thanks for watching History Uncensored with me, Bianca. Let me know what you think of the episode in the comments or any facts about Cuban history or politics that you want to share. And if you like the channel or this episode, please be sure to subscribe or leave us a rating or review on Spotify or a comment on YouTube because it makes a massive difference and I will see you soon. Thanks again for watching.
- [59:14]
E
This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Selling your car should feel like one less thing on your list. Not one more. With Carvana it is just go to Carvana.com Enter your license plate or VIN and get a real offer. Down to the penny. No back and forth, no surprises. Just an experience you can trust. Like your offer. Accept it, schedule pickup and we'll come to you with a check in hand. Your car, your timeline, your terms. Visit Carvana.com to sell your car today. Delivery fees and terms may apply.