ABSTRACT
For several decades, the Cuban Revolution has influenced the political thought of an entire generation of intellectuals across the Black Diaspora. Black activists in the mid- and late 1960s saw in Cuba both a bastion of political support for their own domestic struggles as well as a theoretical paradigm for advancing their movements. The Cuban Revolution as a social process sought not only to oust Batista from power, but to create genuine democracy for the workers, peasantry, and oppressed Afro-Cubans. After a quarter century of social transformation, Cuba has become a "revolutionary democracy". By the late nineteenth century, Cuban race relations reflected an uneven mixture of classical Hispanic standards of culture with the organic culture of the African slaves. The basic economic system of Cuba is, of course, socialism, although elements of capitalism are permitted to exist and even to thrive.
