It was hardly surprising that the December 1989 US intervention in Panama received strong public support. General Manuel Antonio Noriega had replaced Muammar al Qadaffi and the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the foreign leader the US public most loved to hate. In addition, the Bush administration was quickly able to proclaim its intervention in Panama a virtually unqualified success, confidently asserting that the stated goals of protecting US lives, capturing General Manuel Antonio Noreiga and sending him to the United States for trial, defending the Panama Canal Treaties, and “restoring democracy” to Panama had all been met (Christian Science Monitor, 1990). The US military is involved in helping form the new “Panamanian Public Force” (PPF) to replace General Noriega's Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) and US advisors are working to rebuild the economy.

Does electoral campaigning in Latin America make a difference, and does it merit the attention of scholars? This was at the core of an extensive bibliographic analysis, published nearly two decades ago, which noted the paucity of literature on the subject, extending throughout the Third World and even including Western Europe (Martz, 1971). However, the rising tide of military authoritarianism dramatically reduced the relevance of the question in the region, and students of Latin American politics turned away, understandably, from concerted attention to campaigns, elections, and parties. Only with the reemergence of democratic regimes in recent years has interest turned back toward older emphases (Martz, 1990). Once again, theoretical developments have been colored by the events of the day, reorienting scholarly attention “from the military overthrow of civilian regimes and Latin American authoritarianism toward the prospects and processes of redemocratization” (Malloy, 1987).

The most remarkable development in Latin America during the economically “lost decade” of the 1980s is the regionwide process of redemocratization. Close to 90% of the people of the region are ruled by civilian governments. The flowering of democratic, pluralistic, and participatory systems is still a noble aspiration, but it is radically different from the bleak political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, when military governments prevailed. Nor is the appurtenance of civilian government equal to democracy. There is a large variety of civilian-military coalitions possible in a democratic setting.

This article will argue that general agreement between Cuba and the Soviet Union on their foreign policy toward Latin America is likely over the long run, despite (a) Fidel Castro's condemnation of perestroika and glasnost, and (b) his obvious attempt to embarrass Soviet Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev during the latter's state visit to Cuba in April 1989. Serious obstacles — such as differences over Cuban domestic policy and Castro's personal ambitions — remain to be overcome, but foreign policy disagreements between the two countries are likely to prove less intractable than is frequently assumed.

This article will start with (1) an overview of Cuban Latin American foreign policy since the 1970s; then proceed to (2) an interpretation of Soviet “new thinking;” and finally (3) argue that this particular interpretation of “new thinking” is consistent with, and not contradictory to, Castro's foreign policy.

Within the international politics of the Caribbean Basin attention is only rarely paid to the position of Belize. This neglect is the more remarkable since Belize epitomizes — more precisely than any other territory of the region — the characteristic geopolitical problem of the Caribbean caught, as it were, uneasily between the United States, Latin America and Europe. Yet, despite being threatened by the Guatemalan claim to sovereignty over its territory, which delayed its independence until 1981, Belize has skillfully taken advantage of its British colonial past to carve out for itself a distinctive geopolitical space in Central America and the Caribbean. This has allowed it not only to remain relatively undisturbed by the conflicts which have riven the other states of the Central American isthmus, but also to display a commitment to democratic change strong enough to sustain the electoral defeat — in December 1984 — of a regime which had held power in the country for more than thirty years, as well as the defeat of its successor — in September 1989 — after just one term in office.