The collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the subsequent dissolving of its Council for Mutual Economic Assistance led to Cubas Special Period, in which investment in the domestic economy and access to foreign exchange disappeared. This forced the Castro regime to reevaluate its development policy and, for the first time, actively seek and promote foreign direct investment (FDI). Nevertheless, Cuba has refrained from providing a laissez-faire marketplace for foreign firms and investors; on the contrary, the Castro regime has been determined to regulate and control this investment to a high degree. As per the existing literature, this strategy is imprudent, as FDI has been shown to have a generally positive influence on several economic and political factors, such as growth, wages, civil liberties, and political empowerment. Given these self-imposed constraints, I predicted that FDI would engender economic growth and gender equality as well as enhance civil liberties and political freedoms in Cuba, though at a slower pace than is typical. In a cross-sectional analysis of provincial data that used bivariate and multivariate regressions, I ultimately determined that FDI in Cuba is positively related to average monthly salary, investment output per capita, and number of business entities per capita, three metrics of general economic robustness. FDI also has some explanatory power in the variance of gender equality in the federal legislature, but was not linked at all to either the number of political prisoners nor provincial income and expense balances, when controlling for population.