Somebody: You often hear the same sort of denigration of Cuba before 1959; that it was a typical Third World basket case, when of course it was one of the most advanced economies in Latin America and a middle income country at the time. Fun fact: Cuba had more televisions per capita at the time of the revolution than France.
The relatively bloodless transition to a command economy in Cuba was made possible by the fact that it already had the attributes of what we'd now call an emerging market.