North American political scientists and foreign policy observers spend a good deal of time lecturing Brazil on its proper role in world affairs. Brazilian diplomats and foreign policy specialists are occupied with formulating appropriate responses to the well meaning, but basically inaccurate, attempts of the Americans to push Brazil into global leadership (Política e Estrategia, 1983).

With the coming change in government on March 15,1985, the debate will again erupt. Will Tancredo Neves reformulate Brazilian foreign policy? Can Paulo Maluf redefine his country's role in world affairs? My own sense of the evolution of Brazilian foreign policy is that the concern is irrelevant. Brazil's world view, for some decades, has manifested a high degree of coherence and even predictability, if one listens to what Brazilian foreign policy elites say as well as what they do.

Should the United States go to war with Cuba? If not, what should be the policy of the US government toward Cuba? What should be Cuban policies toward the United States and the Soviet Union? Should Cuba increase or decrease its worldwide commitments and should it emphasize formal or informal foreign policy instruments? These have been the central questions affecting US-Cuban relations during the past quarter century. This essay endeavors to address some of the aspects they raise for US-Cuban relations for the remainder of the decade.

This essay discusses the Central America policies of the Reagan administration, focusing on the evolution of what has been described as a “two-track” approach to the region. The essay disputes this characterization, describing the emergence of an unstable equilibrium between different policy objectives and their proponents, underlining important differences between official rhetoric and specific initiatives, and evaluating the outcomes of those initiatives. The discussion emphasizes the complexity of the domestic and international context of the crisis and of the policy arena, underlining the failure of the administration's attempt to impose its own unilateral solution.

The Caribbean Basin surged into political prominence shortly before the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1981. Growth throughout the region had collapsed under the weight of the second round of oil price hikes, recession in the United States and other industrialized countries, falling commodity prices, and rising interest rates. Public policy responses in most countries compounded these difficulties by failing to adjust rapidly enough to the external situation or to adopt the structural reforms needed to ensure broadly based growth on a sustainable basis. In the eyes of the administration, improving the economic situation was central to defusing the security threat it perceived in the political developments of several countries in the region.

That does the future hold for U.S.-Mexican relations? Optimistic assessments usually point to the high degree of interpenetration between the two societies, the recent history of intergovernmental cooperation, and the commonality of basic interests. Developments in one country have significant impact on the other, a process that now works both ways: the 1982 economic crisis in Mexico created serious difficulties for retailers on the U.S. side of the border, Mexico's subsequent cutbacks in imports prompted the loss of 200,000 jobs in the U.S., and Mexico's struggles with its international debt have crucial implications for banks in the U.S. Each country needs the other, and this kind of “interdependence” creates mutuality of purpose. According to this logic, the rational pursuit of national goals will build and fortify harmonious bilateral relations.

Economic relations between the United States and Central and South America are pervasive, complicated and ever changing. The nature of these relations, i.e., conflict, cooperation or neutrality in settling issues, depends on the degree and the form in which their respective markets for inputs (labor, land, capital and technology), outputs (goods and services), financial assets and unilateral transfers interact. These relations evolve around and arise from the movement of people, goods, services and financial assets between the North and the South, and within the South.

Latin American societies and economies are. in a world of change and transition. The past decade, from 1973 to the present, has been for them an era of anxiety on the one hand and of opportunity on the other, a paradoxical era in which prospects for development had to compete with the high social costs of stagnation in many instances.

Energy was the catchword, and the name of energy was oil. Its price, its availability, and its promise (a road to riches for those fortunate enough to possess it, a threat of increasing poverty for those unfortunate enough to have to buy it) brought turmoil to the economies, and the bodies politic, of Latin America.

Growing political turmoil and economic stagnation in the Western Hemisphere, especially in Central America, caused the U.S. government and a number of private groups to search in depth for more profound understanding of the problems of the region and for appropriate policy responses. Beginning in 1979, with the anti- Somoza revolution in Nicaragua, a large number of scholars, journalists and commentators began to write about Central America to the amazement and amusement of those three or four academics who had covered the region before. All who studied the Central American situation found plenty wrong with it.