ABSTRACT
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted that once the proletariat gained political power, they would use it "to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State," and to "increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible". The extent of US ownership in the Cuban economy was so great and the hostility of the large capitalists so implacable that the new revolutionary regime was unable to initiate any meaningful reforms without incurring the opposition of the bourgeoisie and US capital, backed by the US government. The Grenadian revolution was somewhat similar to the Sandinista revolution in terms of its approach to the expropriation of capital. Although in theory the people's revolutionary government was committed to a noncapitalist path of development, in practice it attempted to follow a mixed-economy strategy of development that did not threaten the private sector.
