7 Days

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Mask of Anarchy"

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"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws." -- Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild

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Cuba's Special Period

The Cuban economy is still recovering from a decline in gross domestic product of at least 35% between 1989 and 1993 due to the loss of 80% of its trading partners and Soviet subsidies. This era was referred to as the "Special Period in Peacetime" later shortened to "Special Period".

A Canadian Medical Association Journal paper states that "The famine in Cuba during the Special Period was caused by political and economic factors similar to the ones that caused a famine in North Korea in the mid-1990s. Both countries were run by authoritarian regimes that denied ordinary people the food to which they were entitled when the public food distribution collapsed; priority was given to the elite classes and the military."

Cubans had to resort to eating anything they could find, from Havana Zoo animals to domestic cats. Because of the overthrow of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, Cuba experienced economic difficulties, which led to a drop in calories per day from 3,052 in 1989 to 2,600 in 2006. -- The rest, as they say, is history. Read it at Wikipedia.

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Related: 24 Days