Original subtitles

[in Spanish] Cuba has always been fighting for its freedom.

[in Spanish] 100,000 died, and even though we lost the war,

the country had changed.

There is little question that Meyer Lansky had thoroughly corrupted Batista.

It's not a lie. They didn't promise anything.

They promised a revolution and they did a revolution.

[in Russian] These guys were bound to become

either martyrs, or national heroes.

Una revolución!

-Fidel Castro! -[cheering]

He told Khrushchev, "You should unleash the entire Soviet nuclear arsenals."

Apocalypse.

[in German] Cuba will never bend its knee.

The island of Cuba

has been a socialist state for over half a century.

Whether or not socialism in Cuba began with,

or well after Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959 is a point of debate.

But the icons of this revolution

are still very much present in Cuba's streets.

As crises shook the country,

ordinary Cubans often had other, more pressing worries

than where on the political spectrum their country lay.

What caused hundreds of thousands of Cubans to flee their country?

Why was the Cuban army involved in bloody wars in Africa?

How did the island become a hub for the international drug trade?

The history of Cuba is marked by 500 years of poverty and insurrection.

But also by a dream that the Cuban people have never given up on.

[man, in Spanish] Cuba was a pluralistic society,

like any other in the world.

There were liberals, communists, socialists,

there were right wing parties, left wing parties...

It was a society like any other.

When people realized that communism was being established in Cuba,

we are talking of the early or middle stages of the Cold War,

there was resistance, but this resistance was repressed very strongly.

Cuba is the biggest island in the Caribbean.

A mere 90 miles separate it from the United States.

But in the 1960s, this was one of the front lines of the Cold War,

since Cuba had allied itself firmly with the Soviet Union

and its satellite states in Europe.

To defend Cuba, and the Soviet Union itself,

nuclear missiles were secretly installed on the island in 1962.

They could have leveled most American cities within minutes.

While the Soviet Union saw these missiles as a means of self-defense -

the United States had similar weapons close to the USSR as well -

for the US President John F Kennedy, this was an unacceptable threat.

The world had never been so close to an all-out nuclear war.

[in Russian] We were all going to die, and then a miracle happened.

It really was a miracle.

Reason triumphed, for both Khrushchev and Kennedy.

The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted 13 days.

13 days during which nobody knew how things might turn out.

The United States set up a naval quarantine around Cuba,

and the Soviet Union shot down a US plane.

In the end, back-channel negotiations resolved the crisis.

The USSR proposed to withdraw their missiles from Cuba,

if the United States in turn removed theirs from Turkey.

President Kennedy agreed. Fidel Castro did not.

Khrushchev did not trust Castro.

He feared that Castro was going to bring the whole world into a nuclear conflict.

The superpowers came to an agreement,

and eventually, with promises of copious Soviet loans and arms shipments,

Fidel Castro, too, came to accept it.

His right-hand man, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, disagreed.

[in Spanish] Che Guevara's problems with Fidel

were because, for Che,

the support that he was giving the Soviet Union

and revolutionary movements was very poor.

It was very little.

And he was expecting much more out of the Soviets and the Chinese,

while Fidel had aligned himself with the Soviets.

After being sacked from Cuba's government,

"Che" Guevara went to Bolivia with a few Cuban soldiers

to help overthrow the government.

He was injured and arrested.

He approached me, we shook hands, and we embraced,

and then he stood at attention, thinking I was the one that would shoot him.

Shortly afterwards, Guevara was executed by a Bolivian soldier.

Che became a martyr and a myth.

A veritable worldwide icon for the left,

while Castro was free to rule Cuba uncriticized.

Since his revolution took power in Cuba on January 1st, 1959,

Fidel Castro had seen the United States as his principal enemy.

♪ El socialismo... ♪

He only became a socialist after the revolution.

He wanted to combat poverty and provide education for all.

[in German] This was where his literacy campaign came in.

Until then, no-one had been interested in poor, rural people.

And suddenly, Fidel sent young people from the cities

to teach the whole population how to read and write.

Schools and hospitals were built across the island.

[in Spanish] Already in the early 1970s,

social services and education became free,

for the whole country.

More than a million boys and girls

gained access to secondary education.

On January 29th, 1974, Soviet camera crews were in Cuba

to capture the visit of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev to the island.

Cuba's economy was firmly "Sovietized" by the mid-1970s.

To sustain itself, Cuba relied on its Socialist brother countries,

chief among them the USSR.

Hence, trade agreements were the focus of the visit,

as Cuba's economy is modeled after that of the Soviet Union.

The State controlled and planned agriculture, industry and trade.

[in Spanish] Sovietization means that the state is omnipresent,

even in the smallest service industry, like selling sandwiches.

Every type of private initiative, even the very smallest,

was forbidden after 1968.

The Soviet Union provided an ideology, but also sustained Cuba economically.

[Schumann, in German] In the 1960s, Cuba faced serious supply problems.

It only survived thanks to the "pipeline" they established with the USSR,

and thanks to their ships which constantly delivered oil.

They delivered food as well, and many other things.

It's likely that Cuba would have gone under without the USSR.

Castro was welcomed to the Soviet Union with full honors,

and as proof of the friendship between the two states,

was allowed to take home some of the latest examples

of socialist innovation.

[in German] They charged solidarity prices, of course.

Solidarity was not limited to public events.

Solidarity also existed in their relations with each other.

Moscow also supported Cuba in competitive sports.

Success here was supposed to show the superiority of socialism.

Cuba had to come up with a way to repay its brother countries.

The island's main export was sugar, so Fidel Castro decided to majorly expand

sugar exports to the socialist bloc countries.

[in French] The 1960s don't end with exploits of war,

but instead with exploits in the economy.

It was the harvest, which they call Zafra.

They wanted to harvest ten million tons of sugarcane.

This was supposed to show

that Cuba could surpass all previous records of sugarcane production.

Almost the entire population of Cuba is called upon to help.

Workers, farmers, academics, civil servants.

Everyone was enrolled for the sugar harvest.

This truck carries a banner calling for the sugar cane plant

to be felled with one machete blow.

[in German] Furthermore, he wanted to mobilize the masses,

to unite them for a common project, and meet the challenge:

could we produce ten million tons or not?

But in exchange for a record harvest of sugarcane in 1969,

Cuba neglected all other industry.

Classrooms and factories remained empty,

as people from all walks of life worked in the cane fields.

Even Fidel Castro himself took part in the harvest.

Cuba's economy ground to a halt and would take months to recover.

[In French] It ended rather pathetically.

Not because they only attained nine million tonnes, that's forgivable,

but because even to obtain that,

he had totally destroyed the economy,

and even political life.

The ministers would meet at a hacienda

in the middle of a sugarcane plantation.

The entire state apparatus was on the point of collapse.

The only benefit of the disaster:

the Soviet government forgave Cuba's debt,

rather than see its ally go under.

[in German] Brezhnev granted his first debt relief.

And commercial relations with the USSR

and the socialist bloc in general were reinforced.

[in Spanish] The Soviet presence in Cuba wasn't like you might imagine.

You didn't see Soviets all over the place.

There were some Soviet companies.

But of course, they were always talking about the brother countries

that the Soviet Union was supporting.

But as a boy, I wasn't aware of their presence in the streets.

Even closer collaboration with the Soviet Union paid off for Cuba.

In terms of education and health,

the island was soon far ahead of other Latin American countries.

As a precaution mainly against the United States,

the island also acquired military equipment,

and Cuban military advisers were present

wherever rebels were fighting in the Third World.

[Clerc, in French] Castro adored everything military.

And he must have known that he owed them something.

So he found an excellent occasion to project Cuba internationally.

He wanted the prestige.

[in Spanish] And for the Cuban revolutionaries...

the battlefield against imperialism...

encompasses the whole world.

That is how we...

the Cuban revolutionaries...

conceive our internationalist duty.

This is how our people conceive their duties...

because they understand that the enemy is one.

The same that attacks us on our coasts and in our lands.

The same that attacks the rest.

Fidel Castro still felt indebted to the Soviet Union.

He intended to pay them back, but this time, not in sugar.

In 1974, Portugal withdrew from its former colony of Angola.

A bloody civil war erupted,

with communist and nationalist factions vying for power

and calling upon the international community for help.

[in French] It's basically a win-win situation.

The USSR says there's a way for communists and Soviets

to progress in Africa,

and for Castro, a way to improve Cuba's image

and to pay his debt to the Soviet Union.

[in German] It became something of a proxy war,

within the parameters of the Cold War.

But it really grew out of the local war for independence,

and the division it resulted in.

Cuba is more than 11,000 km away from Angola.

The former Portuguese colony is on the south-west coast of Africa

and has a border with Namibia,

at the time a sort of South African colony.

One of the three resistance groups in Angola was the communist MPLA.

As both a show of force,

and to pay back the Soviet Union for its help in saving Cuba,

Fidel Castro decided to intervene on a massive scale.

[in German] They basically lobbied for international support

and then Cuba became involved,

but on a much bigger scale than the Angolan government had expected.

No-one could have imagined that.

There were the world powers, the great powers,

and Cuba was, of course, just a little fish.

Cuba initially sent advisers to train the MPLA's fighters.

Their opponent factions were supported by arms shipments

from South Africa and the United States.

The MPLA leaders hoped that Cuba would support them similarly.

On November 4th 1975,

Fidel Castro sent 35,000 Cuban soldiers to Angola.

In Angola, Cuba and the Soviets cooperated, they worked together.

Cuba supplied the men and the Soviet Union supplied the weapons.

[in Russian] Our experts were adherents

of operational concept from World War II.

First, establish a bridgehead,

then advance step by step.

Like from Stalingrad to Berlin.

The Cubans had a completely different tactic,

the methods of guerrilla warfare.

To strike and to capture the enemy through counterattacks.

The war in Angola was a proxy war, fought in the context of the Cold War.

Cuba fought for the East, and South Africa for the West.

The war was broadcast to both sides of the Iron Curtain.

These images are from Soviet state television.

[in Spanish] The elite of the Cuban army went there.

Furry, Arnaldo Ochoa.

They were the elite. And they fought with pride.

General Arnaldo Ochoa was the Cuban supreme commander

during the war in Angola.

Despite the logistical difficulties

of fighting half a world away from their home country,

he led Cuban troops to victory after victory over their enemies.

[shouting]

[in Spanish] General Ochoa was one of the youngest officers

in Fidel Castro's troop in the Sierra Maestra.

He distinguished himself as a military leader at a very young age,

before the triumph over Batista.

Later, when the revolution succeeded,

he became one of the youngest comandantes.

Then he went to military academy in the USSR

and won the respect of Soviet officers.

The success of the Cuban army under his command,

as well as the fact that he had been with the revolution since the beginning,

gave his word much weight in Cuba.

When he began criticizing Fidel Castro for Cuba's treatment of his soldiers,

people paid close attention.

[in Spanish] General Ochoa was

an extremely intelligent man on the battlefield.

He was a strategist of modern warfare.

With extraordinary military capabilities.

But Ochoa's successes came at a steep price.

Thousands of Cubans died in Angola,

as did over half a million Angolan civilians.

[in Spanish] It was a bloody war. Many people died.

It was bloody and it was very long, too.

It lasted many years.

In 1976, the Cuban-supported MPLA won a provisional victory.

But the fighting did not stop until the early 1990s,

and neither did Cuba's involvement in Angola.

Castro was reluctant to order his troops to come home.

[Jaime Suchlicki] Fidel Castro was not interested in the welfare of the Cubans.

His was interested in his own position in history

when he went to Africa and became

the secretary general of the non-aligned nations.

He was dressed in African garb and sitting in a throne in Africa.

That made him feel good. And that was his mindset.

Castro let the propaganda machine exalt him as a winner,

but very few Cubans knew anything about his private life.

[in German] Until the 90s, the ordinary Cuban people

didn't even know that he was married.

He was their "comandante en jefe",

a great, free man who basically lived only for the revolution.

No-one really knew where he was. He was only there for the revolution.

The heads of the Cuban government, along with their families,

lived in a secluded and heavily fortified property not far from Havana.

[in Spanish] Fidel Castro's main home was called Punto Cero,

and Fidel Castro lived there with his family.

It has a golf course, two and a half miles square,

and he lived there with his wife Dalia Soto del Valle

and their five children.

Google Earth shows the outlines of the estate, along with a swimming pool.

The entire area is heavily guarded.

A chance snapshot shows Fidel Castro and his wife in 2007.

They have been married since 1980.

[in Spanish] She was a teacher at the school their children attended,

and the children of other leaders and high-placed officials.

She was a strong-willed woman and she gave the orders at Punto Cero.

Cuba's leaders enjoyed certain privileges on the island.

But in typical socialist manner, they still lived rather modestly.

[in Spanish] As for the privileges, there's little difference

between a man with power and a humble Cuban citizen.

The difference is two wheels. The Cuban citizen goes by bicycle

and the Cuban in power gets around in a car,

although a pretty humble car.

Cuba is known for its curious mix

of "ancient" American and Eastern Bloc built cars.

But for himself, Fidel Castro chose something more extravagant,

a Mercedes.

[in Spanish] For years, Fidel had a Mercedes Benz, a 280SE,

a car that can be very luxurious,

but from another point of view, I rode in his car several times.

It wasn't a very luxurious car.

It was a normal car.

A little beat up and scratched from the guards' rifles.

It was not a luxurious car.

[Montaner, in Spanish] His biggest pleasure was not his fortune,

but being at the center of the universe.

It's interesting how he relates to people.

Fidel is always looking for a way...

to subjugate the people around him,

to convince them of his greatness,

and to impress them with his memory and an absurd amount of information.

While their head of state lived a modest, but well-protected life,

the situation for many other Cubans was more dire.

The number of people wanting to leave grew constantly.

Many contacted the US diplomatic mission on the island,

which had provisionally re-opened in 1971.

It was called the American Interest section of the Swiss Embassy.

So we are in the same building in the malecón for decades

and then we had an office down the street where we processed refugees.

We had one of the three refugee processing centers in the world

outside of the United States.

Some Cubans fled with the help of the US diplomatic mission.

Others chose more dangerous ways, such as crossing the ocean.

Year by year, thousands of Cubans left their homeland for the United States.

[Montaner, in Spanish] The old expression is that in dictatorships,

people vote with their feet. They walk away.

This is very interesting, because at the end of '79,

Fidel thought he was at the height of his glory,

and in April 1980, to his great misfortune...

...there was a massive wave of rejection of his system.

Supply problems, the lack of consumer goods and sometimes even food,

as well as travel restrictions, encouraged young people to leave.

They wanted to go to the USA or to Europe.

In April of 1980, the pressure boils over,

when the regime restricts legal ways for Cubans to leave the island.

[in German] There were other periods of restrictions later,

when it was but a trickle for years.

And then there was this mass exodus, especially in 1980,

with over 100,000 people leaving from the port of Mariel.

On April 1st 1980,

a group of Cubans crashed their bus through a fence at the Peruvian Embassy,

and asked for asylum.

Peruvian embassy staff refused to hand them over to the Cuban authorities.

Castro's reaction was surprising, essentially for its lack of diplomacy.

He removed the guards from around the embassy

and encouraged all those who wanted to leave Cuba

to try their luck with the Peruvians.

[Menier, in Spanish] Mariel began because the embassy granted asylum

to anyone who came.

Fidel removed the security, the embassy guards.

Suddenly, in one day, there were 10,000 people on the embassy grounds.

It was a global scandal.

So how did he solve this?

"You want to leave, so go, have people in Miami come pick you up."

Everyone wanting to leave had to go to the beach of Mariel, west of Havana,

and be transferred to Key West,

the southernmost point of the United States.

Exiled Cubans in Florida organized the first ferries for the refugees.

Between April and October 1980,

boats worked non-stop to deal with the human tide.

[in Spanish] To those who would seek exile,

we wish them well with their consumer society

and their American citizenship, after abandoning their homeland.

And to those who want to leave but can't,

it is not our fault,

but the fault of the US government, which refuses admission.

We don't forbid them from leaving the country.

On the contrary, the door is open.

27 refugees died, most of them drowning after falling overboard.

More than 100,000 arrived safe and sound in the USA, and obtained work permits.

But the Cuban government had its own plans as well.

[in Spanish] The idea was to flood Miami,

to empty the Cuban prisons and the madhouses

and send them to Miami and let them take care of it.

"Didn't you want to leave? Well, here you are!"

The American administration arrested all suspicious refugees

and checked criminal records.

[Montaner, in Spanish] Of the 130,000 people that went to the United States,

probably between 10 and 20,000 were murderers

that they took out of prison.

Crazy people and other misfits

made up maybe 10% of the entire Mariel exodus.

Some 2,500 Cubans spent up to 15 years in American jails

before Cuba agreed to repatriate them.

In 1980, the massive arrival of Cubans

raised the unemployment rate in Florida by one percent.

But most Cubans managed to find jobs,

and news of their success only served to spread dissatisfaction on the island.

Relations between Cuba and the US were seriously impaired.

Then, at the end of the 1980s, a new conflict made things even worse.

American narcotics agents claimed that large quantities of cocaine

were entering the United States through Cuba.

Cuba has been involved in narco-trafficking for a long time.

There's more than plenty records of their participation in it.

The cocaine came from Colombia.

Since the 1960s, Cuba had supported a communist rebel group here.

The highlands of Colombia

formed the main growing area for the coca plants.

Cocaine was extracted and distributed around the world.

In order to finance their clandestine combat,

the communist rebels, the FARC, collaborated with drug barons.

[Menier, in Spanish] The story of Cuban drug dealing begins

when Cuba starts having difficulties supplying the guerrillas in Colombia.

Cuba has been supporting Colombian guerrilla groups since the 1960s,

and some of these groups have, since the 1970s,

cooperated with drug barons to finance their activities.

[in Spanish] One of the officers in Cuba had an idea.

"Why don't I talk to these drug people, the drug dealers,

so that they help me get logistical help to the guerrilla,

and take some guerrilleros and have them train in Cuba?"

Fidel approved that.

[gunshot]

Weapons, especially machine guns, were smuggled into Colombia.

Colombian drug dealers transported weapons for the guerillas,

while they took care of coca plantations and labs.

[in Spanish] It began to work

and Fidel, in exchange,

told the drug dealers that they could use Cuban territorial waters.

That's when the planes started dropping things that floated.

The boats came, picked them up, and left.

But then Fidel demanded

that he be paid a share of 10%.

As US agents interrogated captured drug mules,

it became clear that Cuba and the Cuban government

were involved in the cocaine trade.

We definitely have information and intelligence

that there was some high-government officials

facilitating the move of cocaine through Cuba.

That information existed.

I personally participated with a group of a task force from the United States.

I was already retired.

They had information there was a brother of a Cuban general here in Miami.

They caught him with 100 tons of cocaine or something like that.

The guy was trying to get a reduced sentence,

and he claimed his brother was a general

had dealings out of Pinar del Rio with Raúl Castro personally.

The Americans only managed to catch small-time dealers,

and were unable to identify and stop the ring-leaders.

[Simmons] I think there were those within the regime

that sold drugs as a legitimate weapon

in trying to destabilize the United States...

and had the secondary effect of it raised a lot of money.

Furthermore, drug money was laundered in Cuba,

apparently with government approval.

The international banks that were established in Cuba,

they were used to facilitate the money laundering.

The United States, however, could find no direct evidence

linking Fidel Castro to the cocaine trade.

[in Spanish] Fidel never spoke to a drug dealer.

That was Tony de la Guardia.

Tony de la Guardia was a colonel in Cuba's ministry of the interior,

and here, he was responsible for special missions.

[in Spanish] They began carrying out special missions for Fidel Castro.

In the '80s, in 1982,

they asked my father not to violate the embargo

but to go to the United States,

and collect high tech material

that you couldn't get in Cuba under normal circumstances

because of the embargo.

The US administration claimed to have evidence

of Cuban involvement in the drug trade.

Some Cuban officials were charged in absentia,

but the real targets were their superiors in the government.

Meanwhile, Cuba received disturbing news from Moscow.

The new Soviet General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev,

had decided to introduce historic reforms,

which would, in the end, prove to be fatal for the Soviet Union.

[in Russian] His attitude was the same as ours.

At first, I thought he was doing a good job,

that there would be democracy,

that we would improve the situation in the country.

He was saying good things, but in fact, he did what the Americans wanted.

But it was impossible to say what Gorbachev would become.

Castro did not think much of Gorbachev's reforms.

But as Cuba depended on the Soviet Union for its economic survival,

whether he liked it or not, he had to work with Gorbachev.

[in German] There was a new generation of leaders

in power in the Soviet Union.

But more important was the fact

that there had been basically a new revolution

in the motherland of the great socialist revolution.

It was a cultural revolution

with Perestroika and Glasnost,

an opening which encouraged new ideas.

In the Soviet Union, "Perestroika", restructuring,

and "Glasnost", transparency, became official state policy.

The old system is on the brink of collapse.

Gorbachev believes his reforms to be the only way

to save his immense empire from going bankrupt.

[in Spanish] Gorbachev wanted clarity, transparency, honesty.

Can you imagine?

Fidel has been an enemy to transparency, and honesty.

For Fidel it was clear.

He said it would be the end of the Soviet Union, and it was.

The end of the Soviet Union would be a catastrophe for Castro's regime.

In order to be seen as also embarking upon reforms,

he introduced a policy called "Rectificación",

straightening of the path.

But the government's total power was not an issue to be questioned.

[in Spanish] Fidel refused to implement any necessary reforms.

His exact words:

"The island will sink into the sea before it abandons Marxism-Leninism."

During this time, an assistant director of Cuba's secret services,

Juan Antonio Rodriguez Menier, was stationed in Hungary.

He took advantage of his position to flee,

taking his wife and children with him.

[Menier, in Spanish] What could I hope for? I was 52.

The question was to ensure that my family could prosper,

the way they wanted to be.

They were young, but I didn't have any ambitions,

nor do I have any now.

Cuba's Angolan War hero, General Arnaldo Ochoa,

remained in close contact with the Soviet Union

both during and after the conflict.

He was a few years younger than Fidel Castro,

and his military prowess had made him a hero in Cuba.

He met with Gorbachev and seemed to be open to discussing the need for reforms.

His criticism of Fidel Castro had not gone unnoticed in the USSR.

[in Spanish] Gorbachev met with Arnaldo Ochoa

to talk about these issues.

Ochoa spoke Russian and had many contacts in Russia

because he had gone to military academy there.

He witnessed the changes happening in Russia,

so Fidel said: "No, no, no, I'm not going to lose power."

On June 12th 1989, Arnaldo Ochoa was arrested and put on trial.

The hero of the republic was accused of being involved in drug trafficking.

The prosecution claimed that, together with 14 co-conspirators,

he turned Cuba into a hub of the cocaine trade

without the government's knowledge.

[Masetti, in Spanish] If this operation really existed,

it could only have existed if Fidel and Raúl Castro knew about it.

They made these accusations,

which were supposed to make the case against Ochoa.

Arnaldo Ochoa was never proven to have smuggled drugs.

The direct evidence does not exist, but they accused Ochoa, and why?

Because Fidel wanted to send a message to all the officials with high authority.

"If I'm capable of killing one of my most important and glorious generals,

no-one is safe."

Before the trial, the United States had provided evidence

that the Cuban government itself was involved in drug trafficking.

Castro had to act.

[Montaner, in Spanish] The United States government

found proof of Cuba's ties to drug trafficking.

Proof that they couldn't deny.

Tony de la Guardia, a close friend of Fidel's brother, Raúl Castro,

was accused of treason, and put on trial alongside General Ochoa.

In a public show trial, he said what the regime wanted to hear.

[in Spanish] We were waiting...

for a plane load of cocaine,

due to land at Varadero,

and we loaded the drugs onto a boat to be taken to the United States.

[in Spanish] The trial was televised,

but the process began before the trial.

They made press statements saying

this offence to the fatherland would be washed away with blood.

Even before the death sentence was announced,

they were saying that they were going to execute them.

General Arnaldo Ochoa and Tony de la Guardia

were among four defendants executed by firing squads.

All others received harsh prison sentences.

[in Spanish] My father was arrested on the 13th of June

and executed on the 13th of July.

That shows they wanted to eliminate these people very quickly.

Fidel and Raúl Castro claimed

they had never been involved in the drug-trafficking.

The verdict underlined their authority over the country.

There was no room for either reform, nor for pretenders to their succession.

Their propaganda painted Cuba as a socialist utopia,

a country which sent doctors to every humanitarian hotspot around the world.

Meanwhile, in Europe, socialism was failing.

The Berlin Wall collapsed in November 1989.

One people's government after the next was swept aside.

[Krenz, in German] I was in Cuba. I had a long talk with Raúl Castro,

and I told him about what happened in the fall of 1989.

They had to understand why East Germany had failed,

and the Soviet Union had failed.

It was vital for them, because they wanted to learn

how to keep going and to go even further than we had.

Mikhail Gorbachev was General Secretary of the Communist Party until 1989,

when he became president of the Soviet Union for a mere two years.

While Europe's formerly socialist countries

looked forward to a bright, new future,

Cuba was caught in a vicious cycle of fear and isolationism.

The fall of the Soviet Union was catastrophic for Cuba.

Selling all these things that nobody was going to consume.

In 1991, the Soviet Union broke apart,

and Boris Yeltsin succeeded Mikhail Gorbachev as president of Russia.

Faced with a bankrupt economy, Yeltsin cut financial and material aid

to Russia's former, and remaining, socialist allies.

Cuba's economy, and its army, were in serious difficulties.

[Latell] If there was a crisis in the Soviet Union it was going to impact Cuba,

because Cuba was dependent at that time on the Soviet Union

for its economic lifeline,

about $5 billion dollars a year of economic support,

and another $1 billion a year of military support.

[Krenz, in German] In 1990, a major West German newspaper

asked me to write an article on Cuba and its future.

I did so, and the conclusion was, "Cuba will never bend the knee."

The island underwent one of the most serious crises in its history.

Electricity, coal, gas and oil,

as well as the most basic necessities, were rationed.

People hoarded food, fearing shortages and famine.

In the larger towns, they took to raising animals and growing vegetables,

just to have something to eat.

[Schumann, in German] And so began, from the late '80s to the late '90s,

a period of independence.

But Cuba's situation, in terms of supplies, was so catastrophic,

that the people really suffered from hunger.

The island, or the island's government,

was incapable of meeting people's needs without outside help.

Like before the days of revolution,

Cuba once more tried to finance itself through tourism.

Hotel complexes were built or modernized,

and the island's tropical beaches restored.

Europeans and Canadians arrived and brought hard currency to the island.

[Clerc, in French] It was a partial solution but still significant.

I say partial, because the problem with tourists is that you have to feed them.

To attract tourists and their money,

in 1993 Fidel Castro authorized a mini-revolution.

The US dollar was introduced as a second legal tender, primarily for tourists.

An additional advantage of this measure

was that Cubans in exile in the United States

could now send money to Cuba

to better the lives of their families on the island.

[Hoffmann, in German] Making the US dollar legal tender

was an emergency measure in 1993, at the height of the crisis.

It was done to get money from Cuban exiles,

as a new source of hard currency that would ensure Cuba's survival.

It was a lot of money, around $2 billion a year.

That's more than Cuba's income from tobacco and sugar sales combined.

Dollars were welcome,

but US citizens could still only go to Cuba via other countries.

[Cason] The regime needs an enemy, it always has,

and Fidel said from his early days,

"A revolution like mine needs an enemy, and the US will always be the enemy."

So they do not want, really, normalization with us.

They need to keep us as an enemy to explain the failure of the system.

As he grew older, and his health began to deteriorate,

Fidel Castro increasingly had to delegate.

His brother Raúl took over some of his responsibilities.

[in German] Raúl had two projects in mind, which he managed to push through.

On one hand were military companies,

meaning civil companies under military command.

The second were farmers' markets.

Small-scale producers could now sell home-grown groceries and turn a profit.

40% of the economy, however, mostly generated by tourism,

was directly controlled by the army.

[in Spanish] We have to note that the Cuban Armed Forces,

unlike anywhere else in the world,

have transformed themselves into a kind of ministry of the national economy.

Fidel Castro's promise of freedom and socialism for Cuba ultimately failed

when the rest of the socialist world collapsed.

In order to save his island, and his rule,

he established total military control of the economy and society.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union,

he had to find new partners to ensure his survival.

The revived tourist trade had one principal objective.

Financing Cuba's army, and thus keeping the Castros in power.