Cuban Studies Institute

Name given to Fidel Castro’s revolutionary cause, adopted from the date of his ill-fated 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba.  He began the movement in prison, and after his 1955 release he traveled in the United States and Mexico seeking funds for it. His forces sailed from Mexico to Oriente province in […]

A combined assault on the Presidential Palace, March 13, 1957, by the Directorio Revolucionario and members of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Auténtico) in an attempt to kill President Batista. Most of the attackers, including their leader Carlos Gutiérrez Menoyo, were killed after their reinforcements had failed to arrive, and their failure, in turn, doomed the associated seizure of Radio

A series of riots (looting, arson, police station bombings and c3,000 deaths) that took place in Bogotá, Colombia, following the April 9, 1948, murder of the popular Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the assassin’s lynching by an angry mob. Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón, seeking to establish an anti-imperialist Latin American Student Union

HISTORICAL – Limitations on arbitrary power were effectively removed by Spain’s 1825 law placing colonial Cuba under a permanent State of Siege. Constitutional guarantees of individual rights were introduced after independence by the Constitution of 1940, partly in reaction to the abuses that had occurred under the Machadato, but many of these returned in the 1950s

War between the United States and Spain, April 24-August 12, 1898. The Cuban independence struggle became an international issue in 1898 when the United States, angered by Spanish excesses and prodded by those who saw a possibility of its acquiring greater influence in the island, threatened war if Spain did not relinquish its authority. When

Colonial Period – Prior to the British occupation of Cuba, 1762-1763, the principles of mercantilism ensured that Cuba’s legitimate foreign trade was exclusively with Spain, but this was supplemented from as early as the mid-16th century by significant contraband trading with the French, English, and Dutch, and by licensing foreign participation in the Asiento de Negros. The

While Cuba’s 19th century development was initially financed by British investment, American investment had become the chief source well before the end of the century. As early as 1896 it had reached some $60 To $80 million. Canadian investment was important in some areas, notably banks and banking and streetcar systems. But even by the 1850s, wealthy Cubans

Portuguese slavers brought Angolans to Cuba where they were known as Bantus or Congolese. In the mid-1960s, Angola became a focus of Soviet and Cuban attention as three different guerrilla groups fought for the independence of this Portuguese colony. The Communist-supported Movimiento Popular par a Libertação de Angola (MPLA), led by Agostinho Neto, took over

A term originally applied vaguely to the entire North American mainland adjacent to Cuba, its application was gradually circumscribed by the curtailment of Spanish territorial pretensions in face of French penetration down the Mississippi (and the consequent creation of Louisiana) and of English settlements along the Atlantic coast, which by the mid-18th century had reached as