The prerevolutionary Cuban agro-industrial economy was financed and controlled largely by U.S. capitalist entrepreneurs and almost totally integrated into the American industrial-productive complex. Hence the Cuban Revolution was highly vulnerable to external economic pressures – a state of affairs the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations exploited with considerable success. Most discussions of developments in Cuba since 1959 have minimized the role of U.S. bilateral, regional, and global economic warfare in exacerbating the problems that confronted the Castro leadership in the struggle to attain its economic goals.

During the revolution's early years, the threat of external military intervention also posed a towering barrier to domestic economic planning, with concern for mere survival and security forcing the nationalist regime to divert scarce financial and physical resources for these purposes. In December 1958, the regular armed forces and reserves together totalled less than 50,000. After 1959, this figure skyrocketed to approximately 600,000 (half regulars and half reserves), annual military expenditures reached $500 million, and one estimate placed allocations for defense and internal order during 1963 in excess of 10 percent of the new state's budget. Between 1959 and 1963, there was at least one general nationwide military mobilization annually, while U.S. paramilitary sabotage operations in the summer of 1961 forced the regime not only to transfer extra funds and workers to defense purposes, but also to establish “a large administrative bureaucracy and a whole industry [to] work on civil-defense installations.” Against this background, the bilateral and global blockade loomed far larger than it could have by itself.