Ok so I've only ever played this for like one day, and I cannot seem to play for more than two hours without absolutely tanking my economy.

I'm playing as Cuba, and obviously my goal is to liberate the Cuban people from the tyranny of the landowners and Catholic church and eventually establish communism.

I've watched a couple of "complete beginner" videos on the topic, but there's almost twenty "complete beginner" videos in this series and they're all like 40 minutes long lol. This game is insanely complicated.

I've played a lot of Tropico so I am not unfamiliar with "nation building" games, but this is of course way more complex. It only dawned on me recently that the reason that the plantations that I started with weren't making me any money because they're owned by the fucking ruling class and not the state.

So, any pointers? Early on in the game what should I be focusing on? What should I build, research, etc? I've established that I need to first start a construction industry (Cuba starts with none) and build some plantations in order to get some money flowing in, but after that I'm just kind of lost. Plus the Spanish empire seems to immediately gift me Puerto Rico for reasons unknown and it's a completely impoverished backwards starving hell hole, so then I have to deal with that hot mess too.

Thanks in advance Hexbears.