Beginning with an overview of the Castro regime's program to transform Cuban culture as guided by the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology, Julie Bunck first outlines in a broad way the four phases through which the regime's strategy evolved, from 1959 to the present, with a variety of methods tried—noncoercive, indirectly coercive, and directly coercive. The four main chapters then each focus on one of the principal targets at which the regime aimed in trying to change popular attitudes: youth, women, labor, and sports. The last chapter offers an overall assessment and explanation of the regime's few successes and many failures, suggesting lessons from Cuba's experience that help account for the collapse of communist regimes elsewhere in the world that foundered on the resistance of traditional culture to revolutionary change.
This text describes the methods of the Castro regime's programme to change Cuban cultural attitudes to women, youth, sports and labour through coercive and non-coercive means, and how they were, generally, unsuccessful.
