On 5 August 1994, residents of Havana poured on to the fabled Malecon, the wide, salt-sprayed boulevard that separates the city from the sea, and mounted the largest public defiance of Cuba’s government since the revolution. The ‘Maleconazo Uprising’ as it came to be known, was ignited by a host of factors. The day before there had been harrowing reports that some 40 people were left to drown by security forces when a leaking tugboat carrying refugees bound for the US had sunk seven miles off the Cuban coast. The reports, vigorously denied by the government, gave focus and immediacy to a simmering discontent that finally spilled into the open. Rarely, if ever, had anyone heard such calls for an end to Fidel Castro’s rule.
Cuba is utterly determined not to fall prey to the free-market fictions that led to such wreckage in Russia
