ABSTRACT
The 1990s had been the bleakest decade of the Cuban Revolution. Yet by the beginning of the new millennium the ageing leader and his regime received a new boost of economic and political oxygen through the changing configuration of international geopolitics. With the collapse of Communism in Europe, the bipolar world of the Cold War had given way briefly to the unipolar world of US hegemony, only to make way for a new multipolar world of competing states in which old powers such as Russia and newly emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil increasingly challenged the economic supremacy of the US. In Latin America, a new cycle of social democratic and populist governments emerged, largely in response to the failure of the neo-liberal measures essayed under pressure from the US and the IMF by the governments of the 1990s. This was marked by a new phenomenon that promised more than the cyclical left–right patterns of previous decades in that non-traditional groups such as women and people from poor and ethnic backgrounds were penetrating the preserve of the hitherto white, male and middle-class political elites and acceding to positions of power, often with the backing of new, popular movements.
