After 66 years, Cuba's regime faces reckoning

Fidel Castro and his communist band of brothers have had a good long run in power (66 years), but they have run out of road.

- Gwynne Dyer

Most of the relatively small Cuban middle class fled to the United States after the 1959 revolution, but the new regime certainly had mass popular support for at least the next quarter-century. Then it began to erode, but only quite slowly at first.

The Castro brothers and their allies always faced huge economic problems because of the US trade embargo, but things got much harder after the old Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, eliminating about 85% of Cuba's foreign trade.

The ensuing "Special Period in Time of Peace" spanned the 1990s and brought great hardship to ordinary people — rationing, blackouts, even severe food shortages — but the economy stabilised (at a permanently lower level of prosperity) by 2000.

At that point, 40% of the population would probably still have fought to defend the regime, at least if the enemy was the United States. The enthusiasm was gone, but Cuban nationalism has always been a powerful force.