I'm well aware that liberalization protests against communism were additionally stimulated by American and Western intelligence agencies to break the Communist governments... but the Communists never did themselves any favors, and constantly contributed to the collapse of their states by genuinely outraging swathes of the population. In some cases, like in Estonia, you had nationalists and liberals working together to unseat what they saw as a Russian Communist occupation.
We know that the CIA was absolutely desperate to kill Castro for decades, and they never did, and Cuba is still Communist. The reason that the rest of the Communist world collapsed is because the Soviet System collapsed, and routinely de-legitimized itself with it's own people and subjects.
I'm not, I'm watching the crowd.
I'm well aware that liberalization protests against communism were additionally stimulated by American and Western intelligence agencies to break the Communist governments... but the Communists never did themselves any favors, and constantly contributed to the collapse of their states by genuinely outraging swathes of the population. In some cases, like in Estonia, you had nationalists and liberals working together to unseat what they saw as a Russian Communist occupation.
We know that the CIA was absolutely desperate to kill Castro for decades, and they never did, and Cuba is still Communist. The reason that the rest of the Communist world collapsed is because the Soviet System collapsed, and routinely de-legitimized itself with it's own people and subjects.