It has been described as a crisis that is “threatening the stability” of Cuba, which “already has one of the hemisphere’s oldest populations”. According to Carmelo Mesa-Lago, there is widespread consensus that the policies of the revolutionary government decreased poverty until the end of the Cold War. Any firm that hires a Cuban must pay the Cuban government, which in turn pays the employee in Cuban pesos (CUP). Most of the means of production are owned and run by the government, and most of the labor force is employed by the state. Cuba was ranked 19th by the number of imprisoned journalists of any nation in 2021update according to various sources, including the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch. In July 2010, the unofficial Cuban Human Rights Commission said there were 167 political prisoners in Cuba, a fall from 201 at the start of the year.
In November 2023, OpenAI released GPT Builder a tool for users to customize ChatGPT’s behavior for a specific use case. However, no machine translation services match human expert performance. In December 2023, the Albanian government decided to use ChatGPT for the rapid translation of European Union documents and the analysis of required changes needed for Albania’s accession to the EU. According to the company, Plus provided access during peak periods, no downtime, priority access to new features, and faster response speeds. In December 2024, OpenAI launched a new feature allowing users to call ChatGPT with a telephone for up to 15 minutes per month for free. GPT-based moderation classifiers are used to reduce the risk of harmful outputs being presented to users.
Military
The Cauto lowland adjoins a series of coastal plains that continue across the island from east to west, including the Southern Plain, Júcaro-Morón Plain, Zapata Peninsula (Zapata Swamp), https://www.betybets.nl/ Southern Karst and Colón Plain, and Southern Alluvial Plain. The island of Cuba itself is by far the largest in the chain and constitutes one of the four islands of the Greater Antilles. The country comprises an archipelago of about 1,600 islands, islets, and cays with a combined area three-fourths as large as the U.S. state of Florida. In 2015, Cuba became the first country to eradicate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis, a milestone hailed by the World Health Organization as “one of the greatest public health achievements possible”.
Government and politics
Cuba has historically—before and during communist rule—performed better than other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean on several socioeconomic indicators, such as literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy. Raúl retired as president of the Council of State in 2018, and Miguel Díaz-Canel was elected president by the National Assembly following parliamentary elections. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced a severe economic downturn in the 1990s, known as the Special Period. During the 1970s through the late 1980s, Cuba intervened in numerous conflicts in support of anti-colonial and Marxist governments or movements across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. The country under Castro was a point of contention during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into nuclear war.
This includes text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion and large language models such as ChatGPT. In the 2020s, the rapid advancement of deep learning-based generative artificial intelligence models raised questions about the copyright status of AI-generated works, and about whether copyright infringement occurs when such are trained or used. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “fathers of AI”, voiced concerns that future AI systems may surpass human intelligence.
- In the 2020s Cuba is undergoing its most severe socioeconomic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, leading to a record number of Cubans fleeing the island.
- A blog post casually introduced the AI chatbot to the world, with OpenAI stating that “we’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way”.
- By 4 February, the death toll had increased to six, with 11 people still in critical condition.
- All these models can understand and generate human-like answers to text prompts, because they’ve been trained on huge amounts of data so they can create responses that make it seem like a friendly and intelligent robot.
- He then aligned with landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans.
- On balance, during the period 1933–1940, Cuba suffered from fragile political structures, with three presidents in two years (1935–1936) and in the militaristic and repressive policies of Batista as head of the army.
Migration
In the 2002 Census, Cuba recorded a population of over 10,000,000 inhabitants. (due to economic crisis the 1990s census had to be postponed to 2002). In the 1981 Census, the population increased to 8,553,395. In the 1970 Census, Cuba registered a population of 7,077,190. In 1960, Cuba reached a population of 5,876,052.
Sand and clay plains cover parts of the north, a gravel bed takes up most of the southern part of the island, and bogs dominate the coasts and sparsely inhabited interior. Hills, dotted with groves of pine and palm, characterize much of the island’s northwest and southeast. Among the extensive cays and archipelagoes ringing the main island are Los Colorados, to the northwest; Sabana and Camagüey, both off the north-central coast; the Jardines de la Reina (“Queen’s Gardens”), near the south-central coast; and Canarreos, near the southwest coast. The main island is surrounded by a submerged platform covering an additional 30,000 square miles (78,000 square km). The plains covering about two-thirds of the main island have been used extensively for sugarcane and tobacco cultivation and livestock raising.
- More specifically, Cuba is considered a military dictatorship in the Democracy-Dictatorship Index and has been described as “a militarized society” with the armed forces having long been the most powerful institution in the country.
- These will severely impact industries key to the economy, including agriculture, forestry and tourism.
- OpenAI says that its responses “may be inaccurate, untruthful, and otherwise misleading at times”.
- Preventative medicine is very important within the Cuban medical system, which provides citizens with easy to obtain regular health checks.
- The Arawakan-speaking ancestors of the Taíno people arrived in the Caribbean in a separate migration from South America around 1,700 years ago.
- In 1961 Castro officially announced that his government was communist.
- Cuba ranks 29th on the 2024 Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index, the highest ranking of a developing country.
Cuba has universal health care, and despite persistent shortages of medical supplies, there is no shortage of medical personnel. Historically, Cuba has ranked high in numbers of medical personnel and has made significant contributions to world health since the 19th century. Education has a strong political and ideological emphasis, and students progressing to higher education are expected to have a commitment to the goals of Cuba.
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In response, between 1960 and 1964 the U.S. imposed a range of sanctions, eventually including a total ban on trade between the countries and a freeze on all Cuban-owned assets in the U.S. The promulgation of the Agrarian Reform Law, expropriating thousands of acres of farmland (including from large U.S. landholders), further worsened relations. The US government initially reacted favorably to the Cuban Revolution, seeing it as part of a movement to bring democracy to Latin America. One of the goals of Castro’s revolution was to achieve economic independence, but Cuba instead became heavily dependent on Soviet subsidies, with additional economic aid provided by Eastern European countries through COMECON.
Images
Since 1960, the U.S. embargo on Cuba stands as one of the longest-running trade and economic measures in bilateral relations history, having endured for over six decades. Cuba has conducted a foreign policy that is uncharacteristic of such a minor, developing country. The country is subdivided into 15 provinces and one special municipality (Isla de la Juventud). Miguel Díaz-Canel was elected president on 18 April 2018 after the resignation of Raúl Castro. More specifically, Cuba is considered a military dictatorship in the Democracy-Dictatorship Index and has been described as “a militarized society” with the armed forces having long been the most powerful institution in the country.
Emigration has continued into the 2020s, with the national population dipping below 10 million for the first time since 1980 in 2025. Internal migration has led to overpopulation in Havana, resulting in people living in makeshift shelters or overcrowded buildings, some of which are on the brink of collapse. In the 2020s Cuba is undergoing its most severe socioeconomic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, leading to a record number of Cubans fleeing the island. Also, in February, the government dictated new measures to the private sector, with prohibitions for only 124 activities, in areas like national security, health and educational services. However, this devalued the Cuban peso and caused economic problems for people who had been previously paid in CUCs, particularly workers in the tourism industry.
At one time the whole island was covered with forests, and there are still many cedar (Cedrela odorata), chechem (Metopium brownei), mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni), and other valuable trees. Cuba makes maritime claims that include a territorial sea of 12 nautical miles (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) and an exclusive economic zone of 350,751 km2 (135,426 mi2) with 200 nautical miles (370.4 km; 230.2 mi). The largest natural water mirror is Laguna de Leche at 67.2 km2 (25.9 sq mi), while the man-made Zaza Reservoir, at 113.5 km2 (43.8 sq mi), is the largest inland water surface by area in the country. Its main island is the 17th-largest island in the world by land area. The largest island outside the main island is the Isla de la Juventud is (Isle of Youth) in the southwest, with an area of 2,204 km2 (851 sq mi). The main island (Cuba), at 104,338 km2 (40,285 sq mi), makes up most of the land area and is the 17th-largest island in the world by land area.
Cuba spent this money on health, education and the army. Cuba became a communist-led country like the Soviet Union after this. At the time, Cuba was a monoculture economy. Even though Cuba was independent, the Americans still controlled the island by a law called the Platt Amendment. Three years later, he claimed the islands for the Spanish. The Taínos were the largest and most common of the three tribes.