While the Latin American economies have been undergoing profound economic reforms in a political context marked by multiparty democracy and free elections, the Cuban government has adamantly rejected meaningful change. During the second half of the 1980s, as the majority of countries in the Western Hemisphere liberalized their economies and rolled back government intervention, Cuba moved in the opposite direction. Since mid-1993 and while in the depths of severe economic crisis, the Cuban government has taken some tentative steps towards liberalizing the economy, but has remained firm on the single-party character of the regime.

Hundreds of thousands of Cuban troops deployed to nearly every corner of the globe—that seemed to be the nightmare of every US administration from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s. From its own perspective, President Fidel Castro’s government attempted to use its activist foreign policy first to protect itself from hostile US policies, and second to leverage support from the Soviet Union and other communist countries for Cuba’s own domestic development.

On April 11, 1997, the European Commission, represented by its vice president and UK commissioner, Leon Brittan, responsible for foreign trade and relations with North-America; and the government of the United States, represented by Under Secretary of State for Foreign Trade Stuart Eizenstat, agreed on a compromise that in effect would temporarily neutralize the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, better known as the Helms-Burton law, just a year after its approval. In the event that all the portions of the agreement are implemented, this accommodation will represent the end of one of the most serious episodes of disagreement between Washington and Brussels since the end of the Cold War, as well as between the United States and its partners in NAFTA.

The Peru-Ecuador boundary issue is the oldest continuing border dispute in the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore,

In 1942, four such friendly nations brought Peru and Ecuador together, after a short but bitter war between them, to settle their differences once and for all by signing a treaty of “Peace, Friendship, and Boundaries,” known as the Rio Protocol. These four countries were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States. Their representatives also signed that treaty, “as guarantors that the Protocol would be faithfully executed....” (McBride, 1949: 2-3).