[3] Immediately after the revolution, Cuba enjoyed some years of free-flowing creativity which was brought to an abrupt end in 1961 with the P.M. affair, when the nation's government censored a film depicting Cuban youth in Havana.

[10] After being confronted with the United States embargo and blockade that essentially cut the island nation off from the capitalist world, Cuba became heavily reliant on the Soviet Union for goods.

[2] One of Pavón's victims, Cuban poet and playwright Antón Arrufat, was forced to perform manual labor in a library basement and banned from writing or publishing for over a decade.

[22] This repression of Afro-Cuban culture and accompanying lack of representation in the public sphere throughout the grey years is generally thought to have contributed to a decline in Cuban social equality; during this time period, speaking out on issues of race was a form of diversionism.

[22] The grey years began to taper off with the foundation of the Ministry of Culture in 1976, with Armando Hart as Minister;[3] however, the situation most drastically improved when writer Abel Prieto replaced him in 1997.

[2][7] By the 1980s, the negative consequences of Cuba's "Sovietized" domestic policy became evident: economic failure, high levels of corruption, excessive bureaucratization, and the growing demoralization of the Cuban people.

In 1986, Fidel Castro made a speech acknowledging that Cuba had been veering away from the original stated purpose of the 1959 Revolution and into something "worse than capitalism"[24] for several years leading up to that point.

This is illustrated by the 1989 movie Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas ("Alice in Wondertown"), a comedy that parodied the Cuban government's bureaucracy, inefficiency, and corruption.

[17] In the context of the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc and the government's desire to crack down on "ideological diversionism" in an attempt to avoid the same fate, the movie was banned after its award winning debut at the Berlin International Film Festival.

[28] The goal of this program was to open cultural opportunities in Cuba and address deepening social inequalities in order to boost the morale of its citizens and push back against American capitalist ideology.

[30] In January of 2007, an elderly Luis Pavón Tamayo appeared beside Raúl Castro on a Cuban television program in an interview about his life, which painted his career overall in a positive light and did not acknowledge his role in the grey years.