Impact of Fidel Castro

With the Cuban revolution in play, it brought a lot of pain and suffering to the Cuban people. Many causes led to the Cuban revolution before the rule of Castro. Cuba was under the leadership of Batista. Under him, the Cuban people were unhappy with Cuba. The government had profited from everything that went on in Cuba. But most importantly the Cuban government was unfair and discriminative against its own people. All sources of media were controlled, many Cubans were unemployed and if were employed got paid so little that they couldn't feed their own families. Medical care, education and housing was inadequate and insufficient, people were taken and beaten by the military for insurrection or any sort of suspicion and numerous forms of bribery and corruption with government officials. The Cuban people needed a new leader and that leader became Fidel Castro. But was Fidel Castro any better for Cuba than Batista?

Castro by the end of his rule did many things for revolutionary Cuba both good and bad. Good things he did were made changes in housing, education and medical care. Despite an initial expansion, in 1955 only 51% of Cuban children were enrolled in primary school, more than half of Cuba's rural children lacked schools, but Castro made an expansion on public education and took a nation that had a literacy rate of 2% and within 20 years had raised it to 98%. Cuban ranked third in Latin America in enrollments in higher education. With housing, soon after coming to power during the 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro sought to release the grip landlords held on Cuban properties with a 1960 urban-reform law that eliminated multiple ownership, gave renters a chance to buy their homes at low cost and made the state responsible for providing housing and the government now proudly claims that 85% of Cubans own their homes. Castro made housing a right and made housing adequate by also building public housing and with medical care he provided free health care to Cuba. He prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, or class. Peasants finally had enough money to put food on the table, he thought that land reform was the right thing to do for the country so Castro set up large government run farms and wanted to industrialize Cuba. These were all positive results for Cuba since fairness, equality and improvement were starting to take place after years of a corrupt government.

Although Castro did good things for Cuba he also did bad things aswell. Castro took away many freedoms of the people. He made bogus criminal offences such as reporting any sort of political or economic developments, speaking to international reporters or even writing letters to the government. With this he imprisoned many people for these political reasons. He didn't want the people talking about issues concerning faults in the government. He committed many crimes against the property, rights and liberty of the cuban people, he killed directly