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It is often forgotten that Cuba, before the Revolution of 1959, was one of the United States' strongest allies. What happened to the "singular ties" that united Cuban interests with the United States? The search for the origins of the Cuban Revolution has captured scholars' attention for decades and is one of the most controversial issues in Latin American history.
Though most specialists believe that U.S. economic interests in some way compromised the ultimate political stability of the island nation, historians often make a subtle distinction, or are of two minds, about the causes of the Revolution. The fact that Cuba was not suffering from economic recession in the months before the rise of Castro's July 26th Movement leads many to downplay the importance of economic causes and to emphasize, instead, the crisis in Cuban politics caused by the constitutional illegitimacy of the Batista dictatorship, a popular demand to restore democracy, and a loss of faith in a corrupt and sterile political system. As for economic causes, scholars argue that they came in the form of a "permanent economic crisis"--a structural crisis that established the root socioeconomic conditions for revolution. These features include factors that contributed to powerful U.S. hegemony on the island, the private control of Cuban industrial development by foreign capital, and other structural features considered to be derivative of these two, including oligopolistic foreign dominance of key economic sectors, unequal trade reciprocity, latifundismo (the division of land into large estates), sugar monoculture, and export dependence. These are considered as persistent economic antecedents that invited revolution. But, as for proximate causes, most leading scholars of the Cuban Revolution outwardly reject the proposition that economic conditions contributed to the downfall of Batista or the rise of Fidel Castro.
A major oversight in the literature is the neglect of the effects of increased trade protection in the United States against Cuban sugar. The import quota Cuba was given in the controlled U.S. sugar market is sometimes mentioned in digression, but no study has closely looked at its effects, and few scholars give it serious consideration. Its dismissal as a factor is surprising especially because it falls in sharp contrast with the views of contemporaries, who were gravely concerned about the shrinking market for sugar caused...