1968 : Crépuscule du printemps cubain ?

On the night of December 31st, 1967, all the elements favoring the introduction of a Soviet-style society in Cuba seemed on the verge of succeeding. The death of Ernesto Guevara who was the main opponent to the Sovietization of the Cuban economy, the aid sent by the USSR to Havana, the progressive integration of all the guerrilla’s groups into the Cuban Communist Party (CCP), the end of the anti-Castro guerrilla movements in the Escambray region, and the reorganization of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) into neighborhood bodies, were among the trends that showed a disposition of the Cuban government to imitate the Russian-style economy. However, when former members of the PSP were excluded from the Cuban Communist Party in January 1968, the PCC leadership seemed to choose an endogenous model of development instead, in the wake of the non-alignment movement of the era. The debate was finally resolved in August 1968, when the government decided to unconditionally support the USSR during the Prague Spring events and to implement its first economic development plan, based on the theories of Soviet economists. The year 1968 marked the transition between these two periods and the end of the original nature of the Cuban Revolution, as the Soviet-like political structures that would come to characterize the Seventies and Eighties in Cuba came into being