Caribbean Archive

On Monday, the 60th anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Raul Castro stepped down as leader of the Cuban Communist Party. Between them, Raul and his late brother, Fidel, led Cuba since the triumph of the revolution in January 1959. But Raul Castro’s resignation more than six decades later, at the party’s Eighth Congress, represents more than just the retirement of an aging revolutionary with a storied last name. His departure marks the final stage of a leadership transition from the “historic” generation that founded the revolutionary regime to a successor generation born after 1959. All five of […]

Pro-democracy activists once held up Latin America as a crowning achievement, a region notorious for 19th-century caudillos and Cold War military strongmen that was almost universally electing its leaders by the early 1990s. In 2001, the Western Hemisphere’s premier political institution, the Organization of American States, adopted the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which commits members to uphold and defend democracy. Nowadays, it is more common to hear about Latin America as a cautionary tale, a flashing red light reminding us of the fragility of new democratic institutions and the allure of old habits. The overachiever of what Samuel Huntington called the […]