ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at three social revolutions that occurred in the Third World in the second half of the last century: the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, and the Iranian Revolution of the same year. It discusses a major revolutionary situation that ended in political rather than social revolution: the overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986. Cuba was one of the major slave plantation societies of the Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cuban society was characterized by massive discontent affecting not just the subordinate classes but the middle classes and elites as well. University students from elite and other well-educated backgrounds often joined revolutionary groups that sprung up in the universities. In 1936 Anastazio Somoza Garcfa gained control of the government, and his family controlled Nicaragua until the revolution of 1979.
