Differing from America’s air of love for spending, Cuba’s leaders wanted to enforce a system less classist. By 1961, the leadership of the revolution had declared for socialism. In the following year the USA instituted an economic blockade against Cuba. It was this political climate that forced the alternative paths for the Cuban experiment and the leadership worked hard to deliver social services for the people. The impressive gains in the areas of the delivery of social services such as health care and education ensured that the social content of the alternative was acknowledged by international organizations such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). These transformations of education and health services have been associated with the kind of popular leadership that can mobilize a society for defensive purposes. It was in the society’s defense against natural disasters such as hurricanes where the full importance of the committees for the defense of the revolution emerged. These committees were associated with organizations of workers, students, women, cultural artists, writers, and small-scale agricultural workers. Pitted against these social elements were the expropriated Cuban elements who had retreated to Florida and parts of Latin America and who for fifty years worked with the CIA to undermine the Cuban experiment. In the Caribbean there were many instances of this counter revolutionary activity and the downing of the Cubana airliner over Barbados in 1976, killing 73 exposed the U.S. support for terrorism in the Caribbean, Central America and South America.