ABSTRACT
Fidel Castro, too, had reasons to celebrate. He had survived the end of the Cold War unscathed, at least in what mattered most, his hold on power. With smug satisfaction, he welcomed Iberoamerican dignitaries to Havana for the 1999 summit. Years earlier, when Cuba had been selected as the host country for the last summit of the decade, no one had expected Castro to be around for the actual meeting. In Havana, he reminded his guests that Cuba had rejected entreaties to change its Communist ways: “The advice rained down from everywhere, but we thought of another way and decided to struggle.”1 The Comandante had, moreover, held on to power on his own terms, ignoring calls from within the elite and the citizenry for broader market reforms and dismissing all talk of political concessions. In Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, a young Italian aristocrat-turned-revolutionary says to his uncle, a Sicilian prince: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” And so it had been for Castro and his regime. By the end of the 1990s, moreover, the tide had begun to turn against market reforms in Latin America. While still holding the democratic ideal in high regard, the region’s citizens were becoming increasingly impatient with the practice of democracy. Continued inequalities and stagnant living standards were stirring popular anger. In December 1998, Venezuelans fired the first salvo by electing Hugo Chávez president. Chávez took office two months later and quickly launched an institutional transformation aimed at limiting the checks on power at the heart of liberal democracy. As the new century neared, Havana faced a more auspicious regional environment than it had earlier in the decade.
