Country of the week.

Another of our neighbors who we don’t pay enough attention to, or sometimes the wrong kind of attention, is the lonely island nation of Cuba. This isn’t just a country full of communists and baseball players. Cuba is a beautiful country with a vibrant people, who have gotten the short end of the stick because of certain people who have decided to put it upon them selves to run the country into the ground.

Cuban modern history begins with Christopher Columbus (before that there were native cultures existing for thousands of years), and the colonization of Cuba by the Spanish occurred here as early as anywhere else in the new world. The Spanish were fascinated by tobacco, which has been grown and smoked here since long before the European discovery of the new world.
The Spanish treated the island as a colony until the 1800s bringing slaves from Africa, when the people began to fight for independence. It didn’t always work out well. There was a 10 year war from 1868 to 1878. Landowners declared independence and freed slaves. The nation didn’t achieve independence until the turn of the century, when the Cuban Revolutionary Party, led by Jose Marti, strung a series of military victories together. The US was brought in, almost by accident, when a US ship was blown up off the coast. At that point the Spanish surrendered and left.
Jose Marti is the spiritual father of Cuba, originating the ideals that ended up driving the country, and even inspired Castro and Che Guevara. He is kind of like our George Washington and Thomas Jefferson all wrapped up into one.

After independence the country of Cuba spent a few decades trying to overcome electoral fraud, corruption and the heavy dependence on American trade. In 1933 some army officers joined up with a student uprising and staged a coup. Fulgencio Batista took over the country, initiated some reforms and then was elected president. Things were smoother for a while, in the perspective of the US, but Batista was little more than an elected dictator, and when Batista realized he was going to be defeated in the 1952 election he staged another coup.
Enter a little know lawyer named Fidel Castro and an Argentinean Doctor named Ernesto Guevara. He led men in battles against the Batista government, was jailed, banished from Cuba, but came back with Guevara and led a campaign that eventually took the country over. Fidel has been dictator for the last 45 years, but Cubans revere Che just as much. First of all, whatever political or government problems exist, Che doesn’t get tagged with because he eventually left the country to stir up trouble elsewhere and died soon after. He is a symbol of courage and national pride.
Che and Fidel were idealists and when Castro led the revolution into Havana, he centralized all government functions and most industry in the name of communism. This upset the Americans, who started the trade embargo that still exists.
The USSR kept Cuba going for decades and used Cuba as a staging point to export communism all over latin america.

Cuba’s most important exports are sugar, rum (which is a byproduct of sugar cane) and tobacco. The country is just bigger than the state of Kentucky, but has plains, mountains, tropical forests, dry and dusty areas and lovely beaches. It's probably a very nice place to live if it weren’t so poor. There are just over 11 million people living there.
Castro is President of the country. He is elected by the National Assembly, and usually runs unopposed. The National Assembly is elected popularly, but the slates are approved by special “candidacy commissions.” Elections, as you can guess, are not very open there. The Presidential and Assembly terms are 5 years. The last elections were in 2003, and the next set will be in 2008.

It’s the 102nd anniversary of Cuban independence from Spain.
Some lawmakers (authored and introduced by Max Baucus (D-Montana)) propose to finally eliminate the sanctions on Cuba after 40 years.
This is in response to the Bush administration actually tightening restrictions on visiting and sending money to Cuba.
Focus on the detainees being held at Guantanamo, the US military base on the Southeastern end of the island.
Here is a good article about how things are for people trying to help the Cuban people in the face of a restrictive regime.