Bounded rationality offers the best approach for explaining Latin America's autocratic wave. Due to cognitive heuristics, the Cuban Revolution inspired among leftists excessively high hopes for replicating Castro's success. Drawing similar inferences from the Cuban precedent and therefore regarding the established order as fragile, rightists and elites feared the spread of Communism and forcefully combated revolutionary stirrings. Due to asymmetrical loss aversion, defenders of the status quo outnumbered challengers and acted with special fierceness. Counter-revolutionary efforts therefore led to harsh repression and the imposition of dictatorships. While shaped by cognitive mechanisms (heuristics and loss aversion), the reactionary backlash to the Cuban Revolution was mediated by the organization of the contending forces. Broad-based, pluralistic parties that engaged in internal discussion and deliberation loosened the bounds of rationality and deviated less starkly from conventional cost-benefit calculations. By contrast, unorganized groupings fell prey to the problematic inferences suggested by cognitive heuristics, and tight-knit, uniformity-seeking organizations reinforced the deleterious impact of these distortions.