Created by Joel on November 7, 2000
- Cut off from the Western capitalist world until the end of the Cold War, and only just emerging from a chronic economic crisis, the face of modern-day Cuba is in many respects frozen in the past - the classic American cars, moustachioed cigar-smoking farmers, horse-drawn carriages and colonial Spanish architecture all apparently unaffected by the breakneck tempo of modernization, brought on by the country's desperate need for dollars following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The last ten years, Cuba has opened the floodgates to global tourism and it shifts from a socialist stronghold to one of the Caribbean's major tourist destinations, running on "Green Gold".