Political or ideological obstacles have proved of paramount importance in Brazil's ability to adopt sound, consistent economic policies — the kind of policies the country needs if it is to overcome economic crisis and consolidate modern capitalism and democracy. Brazil's recent democratization was based on solid economic and social reality, representing the victory of civil society rather than a gift from the military regime. Nevertheless, it failed to tackle some of the basic ideologies and political practices which are typical of middle-income, industrialized, yet underdeveloped countries like Brazil: such as economic populism, developmentalism, anachronistic nationalist beliefs, political clientelism, unrealistic worker demands, conservatism, the orthodoxy of neoliberal monetarism, and the inability of short-sighted business elites to define the national interest.

What are the medium-term prospects for the Nicaraguan economy where, by medium term, we refer to the year 2000? The difficult task of fortune telling is made enormously more complicated by the political economy that was established in the country by the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) after the 1979 revolution in which they, with the aid of diverse social factions, overthrew the government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. After more than a decade, the FSLN then handed over power, in mid-1990, to a coalition of opposition parties (the Union Nacional Opositora or UNO) headed by Violeta Chamorro. The 1990 election brought the first peaceful transfer of power in Nicaraguan history but, perhaps, represented more an abdication by the beleaguered Sandinistas than it did a sea change in the balance of class conflict.

In 1990, the relationship between the states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Latin American states of the Caribbean Basin seemed to have entered a new phase characterized by movement toward convergence, rapprochement, and initiatives of horizontal cooperation. This situation contrasts sharply with a past marked by persistent tensions and divergent views, rooted in legacies dating from colonial times of mutually disqualifying ethno-historical perceptions and boundary disputes and marked by frequent differences within the context of international organizations (Serbín, 1989a, 1989b, 1990d; Serbín and Bryan, 1990).

Since mid-1989, remarkable political and economic changes have occurred in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Although the countries differ with regard to the scope, speed, and sequence of these changes, in the economic arena the objective is, in all cases, to abandon traditional central planning and replace it with a market economy. An integral component of these efforts to establish markets is the reform of foreign economic relations and greater involvement in the world economy.

While a tide of political and economic change has swept the East, Cuba has adamantly held on to a one-party political system and to orthodox central planning.

The death of forbes burnham in August 1985 and the passing of power to Hugh Desmond Hoyte have produced dramatic changes in Guyana, South America's only English-speaking republic. Some of these have involved: (1) privatization of the public sector, (2) abolition of overseas voting, (3) negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), (4) rapprochement with the United States, plus (5) an agreement that observers — including former President Jimmy Carter and representatives from the London-based Commonwealth Secretariat—are being invited to oversee the upcoming elections scheduled for either August or September 1991.

Precipitated by domestic and international pressures, these changes have taken place within the context of a change in regimes as well, in which one dominant leader, Forbes Burnham, has been succeeded by another equally dominant, Desmond Hoyte.