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CASTRO'S TREATMENT OF OPPOSITION - Coggle Diagram
CASTRO'S TREATMENT OF OPPOSITION
DISAFFECTED GROUPS
Landowners who had been forced off their land.
Industrialists who had their factories taken over by the state.
Peasants wo felt aggrieved at having been forced into collectivization.
Pro-Americans who had been forced to break their commercial and financial links with the US.
Those badly affected by the failure of Castro's economic diversity programme.
Those who considered that the political constraints and repression imposed by the regime were unjustified.
Writers and artists whose works were subjected to government censorship.
Editors and journalists who objected
The trade unions, which had lost their independence.
Those who had fled Cuba because they knew their days of privileged living were over or because they simply felt they could not live in the repressive society.
EMIGRES
By 1968, over 3% of the population had left Cuba.
Most migrated to the US and formed cells planning to return to reclaim Cuba by force.
The emigres contacts with disaffected groups remaining in Cuba justified Fidel's action of imposing surveillance and controls of people.
The US-backed emigres represented real resistance but they were defeated when they openly challenged Castro.
OPPOSITION WEAKNESSES
They were never a united, organized body.
The disaffected groups were unable to concert their efforts.
Opposition towards Castro seemed unpatriotic and so rarely gathered popular support.
It was a hazardous venture to try to oppose Castro.
Cuba's close-knit society made it easy to monitor opposition movements through eavesdropping and surveillance.
The DGI (General Directorate of Intelligence) was a highly effective means of detecting Castro's enemies in Cuba and outside.
ASSASSANATION ATTEMPTS
Castro was a leader who excited either intense affection or profound dislike for the way he was prepared to destroy rights and liberties.
Castro's bodyguard (Fabian Escalante), claimed to have counted 638 assassination attempts on Castro.
The number of assassination suggests the danger Castro was constantly in and the degree of hatred towards him.
The CIA was thought to have been behind most of the attempts.
CASTRO'S TREATMENT OF OPPOSITION
Castro deliberately encouraged criminals, the insane and anti-social types to leave Cuba.
Castro dumped his unwanted population in the US.
Regulations were introduced forbidding Cubans to leave without acceptable reason.
In 1980, 10,000 people reacting to food rationing, besieged Cuba's Peruvian embassy appealing for asylum.
Castro always accompanied such occasions with vast propaganda displays of support of himself and the regime.
The use of show trials (Padilla affair), and the restrictions placed on people's freedom to express their views.
The CDR (Committees for the Defence of the Revolution) set up in 1960 was responsible for social projects and to report counter-revolutionary activity.
Members of the CDR were instructed to identify 'enemies of the revolution' and report on their activities.
The CDR had more than 800,000 members and by 1963, one third of the Cuban population worked for the CDR.
The level of peer surveillance was very high, which intimidated people.
UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production) - between 1965 and 1968, about 25,000 young men were sent to UMAP labour camps, with 'offenders'.
Children of political prisoners, youngsters imitating US dress codes and tastes, homosexuals and political dissenters were sent to the UMAP.
They were 're-educated through the liberating effects of collective work'.
TOTALITARIANISM
Arbitrary arrest, imprisonment without trial, summary executions, suppression of all forms of political dissent, denial of the right of 'free expression, association, assembly, privacy, movement, and due process of law'
Cubans had limited access to the interne, the right to use it being restricted to selected government-monitored locations.
By the end of the 1990s, Cuba's prison system was the most extensive in Latin America.
40 maximum-security prisons, 30 other prisons, and 200 labour camps.
Cubans did not have the right to free movement, being unable to leave or return to Cuba without official government permission.
The one party-state, strict censorship, control of the legal system, intolerance of dissent, persecution of minorities, an extensive prison-camp system, centralized control of the main institutions of society and the state.