Cold War in the context of "Fidel Castro"

A military dictatorship is a type of dictatorship where supreme power is held and exercised by the armed forces. Military dictatorships are led by either the ranking commander-in-chief (i.e. a military dictator) or by a council of military officers known as a military junta. They are most often formed by military coups or by the empowerment of the military through a popular uprising in times of domestic unrest or instability. The military nominally seeks power to restore order or fight corruption, but the personal motivations of military officers will vary.

Modern military dictatorship developed in Latin America during the 19th century, and it expanded in Europe during the early-20th century. It saw a resurgence during the Cold War, and new military dictatorships were established in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 1960s. Some scholars have asserted that the number of military dictatorships has declined since the end of the Cold War.

Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surface area. With nearly 1.4 billion people as of 2021, it accounts for about 18% of the world's human population. Africa's population is the youngest among all the continents; the median age in 2012 was 19.7, when the worldwide median age was 30.4. Based on 2024 projections, Africa's population will exceed 3.8 billion people by 2100. Africa is the least wealthy inhabited continent per capita and second-least wealthy by total wealth, ahead of Oceania. Scholars have attributed this to different factors including geography, climate, corruption, colonialism, the Cold War, and neocolonialism. Despite this low concentration of wealth, recent economic expansion and a large and young population make Africa an important economic market in the broader global context, and Africa has a large quantity of natural resources.

Africa straddles the equator and the prime meridian. The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Arabian Plate and the Gulf of Aqaba to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Yemen have parts of their territories located on African geographical soil, mostly in the form of islands.

In international relations, power is defined in several different ways. Material definitions of state power emphasize economic and military power. Other definitions of power emphasize the ability to structure and constitute the nature of social relations between actors. Power is an attribute of particular actors in their interactions, as well as a social process that constitutes the social identities and capacities of actors.

International relations scholars use the term polarity to describe the distribution of power in the international system. Unipolarity refers to an international system characterized by one hegemon (e.g. the United States in the post–Cold War era), bipolarity to an order with two great powers or blocs of states (e.g. the Cold War), and multipolarity refers to the presence of three or more great powers. Those states that have significant amounts of power within the international system are referred to as small powers, middle powers, regional powers, great powers, superpowers, or hegemons, although there is no commonly accepted standard for what defines a powerful state.

Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the largest country in the world, spanning eleven time zones and sharing land borders with fourteen countries. With a population of over 140 million, Russia is the most populous country in Europe and the ninth-most populous country in the world. It is a highly urbanised country, with sixteen of its urban areas having more than 1 million inhabitants. Moscow, the most populous metropolitan area in Europe, is the capital and largest city of Russia; and Saint Petersburg is its second-largest city and cultural centre.

Human settlement on the territory of modern Russia dates back to the Lower Paleolithic. The East Slavs emerged as a recognised group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. The first East Slavic state, Kievan Rus', arose in the 9th century, and in 988, it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated; the Grand Duchy of Moscow led the unification of Russian lands, leading to the proclamation of the Tsardom of Russia in 1547. By the early 18th century, Russia had vastly expanded through conquest, annexation, and the efforts of Russian explorers, developing into the Russian Empire, which remains the third-largest empire in history. However, with the Russian Revolution in 1917, Russia's monarchic rule was abolished and eventually replaced by the Russian SFSR—the world's first constitutionally socialist state. Following the Russian Civil War, the Russian SFSR established the Soviet Union with three other Soviet republics, within which it was the largest and principal constituent. The Soviet Union underwent rapid industrialisation in the 1930s, amidst the deaths of millions under Joseph Stalin's rule, and later played a decisive role for the Allies in World War II by leading large-scale efforts on the Eastern Front—rising as a global superpower. With the onset of the Cold War, it competed with the United States for ideological dominance and international influence. The Soviet era of the 20th century saw some of the most significant Russian technological achievements, including the first human-made satellite and the first human expedition into outer space.

Sevastopol (/ˌsɛvəˈstoʊpəl, sɪˈvæstəpoʊl/ SEV-ə-STOH-pəl, siv-AST-ə-pohl), sometimes written Sebastopol, is the largest city in Crimea and a major port on the Black Sea. Due to its strategic location and the navigability of the city's harbours, Sevastopol has been an important port and naval base throughout its history. Since the city's founding in 1783, it has been a major base for Russia's Black Sea Fleet. During the Cold War of the 20th century, it was a closed city. The total administrative area is 864 square kilometres (334 sq mi) and includes a significant amount of rural land. The urban population, largely concentrated around Sevastopol Bay, is 479,394, and the total population is 547,820.

Sevastopol, along with the rest of Crimea, is internationally recognised as part of Ukraine, and under the Ukrainian legal framework, it is administratively one of two cities with special status (the other being Kyiv). However, it has been occupied by Russia since 27 February 2014, before Russia annexed Crimea on 18 March 2014 and gave it the status of a federal city of Russia. Both Ukraine and Russia consider the city administratively separate from the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the Republic of Crimea, respectively. The city's population has an ethnic Russian majority and a substantial minority of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars.

Eurocentrism (also Eurocentricity or Western-centrism) refers to viewing the West as the center of world events or superior to other cultures. The exact scope of Eurocentrism varies from the entire Western world to just the continent of Europe or even more narrowly, to Western Europe (especially during the Cold War). When the term is applied historically, it may be used in reference to the presentation of the European perspective on history as objective or absolute, or to an apologetic stance toward European colonialism and other forms of imperialism.

The term "Eurocentrism" dates back to the late 1970s but it did not become prevalent until the 1990s, when it was frequently applied in the context of decolonization and development and humanitarian aid that industrialised countries offered to developing countries. The term has since been used to critique Western narratives of progress, Western scholars who have downplayed and ignored non-Western contributions, and to contrast Western epistemologies with indigenous epistemologies.

Eastern Europe is a subregion of the European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic connotations. Its eastern boundary is marked by the Ural Mountains, and its western boundary is defined in various ways. Narrow definitions, in which Central and Southeast Europe are counted as separate regions, include Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. In contrast, broader definitions include Moldova and Romania, but also some or all of the Balkans, the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and the Visegrád group. In Eastern Europe, Russia is the largest and most populous country.

The region represents a significant part of European culture; the main socio-cultural characteristics of Eastern Europe have historically largely been defined by the traditions of the Slavs, as well as by the influence of Eastern Christianity as it developed through the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Another definition was created by the Cold War, as Europe was ideologically divided by the Iron Curtain, with "Eastern Europe" being synonymous with communist states constituting the Eastern Bloc under the influence of the Soviet Union.

The revolutions of 1989, also known as the fall of communism, were a wave of liberal democratic movements that resulted in the collapse of most Marxist–Leninist governments in the Eastern Bloc and other parts of the world. This wave is sometimes referred to as the "autumn of nations", in reference to the revolutions of 1848 as the "spring of nations". The revolutions of 1989 were a key factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union—one of the two superpowers—and abandonment of communist regimes in many parts of the world, some of which were violently overthrown. These events drastically altered the world's balance of power, marking the end of the Cold War and beginning of the post-Cold War era.

The earliest recorded protests, which led to the revolutions, began in Poland on 14 August 1980, the massive general strike which led to the August Agreements and establishment of Solidarity, the first and only independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc, whose peak membership reached 10 million. The main region of the 1989 revolutions was Central Europe, starting in Poland with the 1988 Polish strikes, and continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. On 4 June 1989, Poland conducted the first elections that led to the dissolution of the communist government, with Solidarity winning an overwhelming victory, leading to the peaceful fall of communism in Poland. Influenced by Poland, Hungary organised round table-format talks and began dismantling its section of the Iron Curtain. In August 1989, over a quarter of the Baltic states population physically chained for 675 kilometres (419 mi) in the Baltic Way protesting the occupation by the Soviet Union, while the opening of a border gate between Austria and Hungary set in motion a peaceful chain reaction, in which the Eastern Bloc disintegrated. This led to mass demonstrations in cities of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which served as the symbolic gateway to German reunification in 1990. A feature common to these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance, demonstrating popular opposition to the continuation of one-party rule and contributing to pressure for change. Romania was the only country in which citizens and opposition forces used violence to overthrow its communist regime, although Romania was politically isolated from the rest of the Eastern Bloc.

The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the semi-exclave of Alaska in the northwest and the archipelago of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The United States also asserts sovereignty over five major island territories and various uninhabited islands in Oceania and the Caribbean. It is a megadiverse country, with the world's third-largest land area and third-largest population, exceeding 340 million.

Paleo-Indians first migrated from North Asia to North America over 12,000 years ago, and formed various civilizations. Spanish colonization established Spanish Florida in 1513, the first European colony in what is now the continental United States. British colonization followed with the 1607 settlement of Virginia, the first of the Thirteen Colonies. Enslavement of Africans was practiced in all colonies by 1770 and supplied most of the labor for the Southern Colonies' plantation economy. Clashes with the British Crown over taxation and lack of parliamentary representation sparked the American Revolution, leading to the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Victory in the 1775–1783 Revolutionary War brought international recognition of U.S. sovereignty and fueled westward expansion, dispossessing native inhabitants. As more states were admitted, a North–South division over slavery led the Confederate States of America to attempt secession and fight the Union in the 1861–1865 American Civil War. With the United States' victory and reunification, slavery was abolished nationally. By 1900, the country had established itself as a great power, a status solidified after its involvement in World War I. Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. entered World War II. Its aftermath left the U.S. and the Soviet Union as rival superpowers, competing for ideological dominance and international influence during the Cold War. The Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 ended the Cold War, leaving the U.S. as the world's sole superpower.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one of the six principal organs of the UN system and is the primary organ charged with ensuring international peace and security. Its powers as outlined in the UN Charter include authorizing military action, establishing peacekeeping operations, recommending the admission of new members to the UN General Assembly, approving any changes to the Charter, and enacting international sanctions. Chapter VII of the UN Charter gives the Security Council the power to identify threats to international peace and security and to authorize responses, including the use of force. Security Council resolutions adopted under Chapter VII are binding on UN members and are therefore a source of international law. The Security Council is the only UN body with the authority to issue resolutions that are binding on its member states.

Like the United Nations as a whole, the Security Council was created after World War II in 1945 in the hope of preventing future wars and maintaining world peace, as the League of Nations had been formed following World War I. It held its first session on 17 January 1946 but was largely paralyzed in the following decades by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union (and their allies). Nevertheless, it authorized military interventions in the Korean War, the Congo Crisis, and peacekeeping missions in Cyprus, West New Guinea, and the Sinai Peninsula. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, UN peacekeeping efforts increased dramatically in scale, with the Security Council authorizing major military and peacekeeping missions in Kuwait, Namibia, Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.