n 1961, Kennedy unveiled a program known as the Alliance for Progress, conceived as a direct response to Castro's Cuba. It was intended to prove that genuine social change could take place in latin America without the need for revolution or socialism. It would also become part of the ongoing CIA effort to discredit the Cuban government, an effort that would continue long past the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Blum 214-215).
Over the next three decades, some pressed for a change in the way the U.S. viewed Cuba, while others demanded that Cuba continue to be treated as an outlaw state. The economy of Cuba has continued to deteriorate and to encounter problems in the 1990s. Cuba has been less able to get international assistance now that the Soviet Union has changed and has been pressured by the United States to remove troops and other personnel from Cuba. The crisis caused the Cuban government to relax certain restrictions and to consider a return to some enterprises that had earlier been banned. In 1993, Castro lifted a thirty-year-old ban on Cuban citizens' possessing foreign currency. This was considered a significant departure from the nation's centrally-planned socialist economy and was intended to attract large sums of foreign currency then in circulation on the black market into the regular economy. Another move away from traditional economic policy came as the government authorized limited individual private enterprise in 117 occupations. Plans were also made for the introduction of agricultural reforms to allow for the decentralization and reorganization of state farms into "Units of Basic co-operative Production" that would be managed and financed by the workers themselves. The government was reorganized again in 1994, with the creation of four new ministries and the dissolution of several state committees and institutes. The new ministries were for economy and planning, finance and prices, foreign inv...