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{{Useful Notes}}
[[File:cuba-map_724.gif|frame]]
'''Cuba'''. A land where the music is good, the drink flows freely and the tourists come for both. Oh, and it's famous for its cigars.
A brief history of Cuba: Cuba was a island in the Caribbean inhabited by the native Tainos before the Spaniards arrived in the 1500s and colonized the place. The Tainos who weren't killed off through disease were assimilated into the colonist population. The Spanish colonists brought in African (mostly Yoruban, though they were from many different parts of Africa) slaves to operate plantations and such.
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The resulting [[Bay of Pigs Invasion|"Bay of Pigs"]] amphibious assault by a troop of Cuban exiles was an embarrassing failure. Seeing it as a way of fending off the US, Castro began cultivating a relationship with the Soviet Union. Things got hairy during the [[World War III|Cuban Missile Crisis]], wherein the US learned that the Soviet Union had transferred some missiles to Cuba. After several days of nuclear brinkmanship and frantic diplomacy, the two superpowers avoided all-out war, leading to a relative thaw in US-USSR relationships. Castro was not present at the talks concerning the crisis.
From 1966 to 1989 Cuba would aid [[Angola]] in its military conflict against [[South Africa]] under apartheid (same apartheid as in ''[[Lethal Weapon]]'') in the
The status quo in Cuba tottered along until [[The Great Politics Mess-Up|the Soviet Union's collapse]] in the late 1980's. This had an immediate and devastating effect on the Cuban economy since USSR was the main commercial partner of Cuba for decades, while the
Until his official retirement in 2008, Castro was one of the longest-serving leaders in world history who wasn't a monarch. His brother Raul
If you like crumbling Spanish architecture, 1950s cars and lovely beaches uncluttered with [[Hawaiian-Shirted Tourist|stupid tourists]], ballet and the best music Latin America has to offer, modern Cuba is the place to go. Also notable is the country's human development (average healthcare, education, nutrition, life expectancy, et al.) which throughout the last decades has been higher than those of the countries that surround it and Latin America in general. All this despite the crumbling infrastructure, the secret police, the embargo, and the continued repression of free speech and human right abuses against those elements deemed "counter-revolutionary" (sure sounds like China doesn't it? except for the embargo part that is).
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Some characteristics of Cuban Spanish include:
* velarization of 'n' (so that pan [pan] becomes [paŋ])
* debuccalization of s in syllable coda (so that perros ['peros] becomes ['peroh])
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== Film ==
* The movie ''[[Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights]]'' is set in Cuba on the eve of the revolution.
* ''[[The Godfather]] Part II'' has a number of scenes set in pre-Castro Havana.
* ''[[Red Zone Cuba]]''
== Literature ==
* The [[Clive Cussler]] novel ''Cyclops''
== Live-Action TV ==
* The ''[[Airwolf]]'' episode "Mad Over Miami".
* ''[[Whose Line Is It Anyway?
{{reflist}}
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