ABSTRACT
The 1990s had been the bleakest decade of the CubanRevolution. Yet by the beginning of the new millennium the ageing leader and his regime received a new boost of economic and
political oxygen through the changing configuration of international
geopolitics. With the collapse of Communism in Europe, the bipolar world
of the Cold War had given way briefly to the unipolar world of US hege-
mony, only to make way for a new multipolar world of competing states in
which old powers such as Russia and newly emerging economies such as
China, India and Brazil increasingly challenged the economic supremacy
of the US. In Latin America, a new cycle of social democratic and populist
governments emerged, largely in response to the failure of the neo-liberal
measures essayed under pressure from the US and the IMF by the govern-
ments of the 1990s. This was marked by a new phenomenon that promised
more than the cyclical left-right patterns of previous decades in that
non-traditional groups such as women and people from poor and ethnic
backgrounds were penetrating the preserve of the hitherto white, male and
middle-class political elites and acceding to positions of power, often with
the backing of new, popular movements.
