This article assumes a balanced position between two contrasting views regarding the accessibility, quality, efficiency and financial sustainability of the Cuban healthcare system. It evaluates those issues in the 2006–20 period by identifying strengths and weaknesses based on a comprehensive statistical compilation of health indicators, physical infrastructure trends, availability of physicians and other elements to assess the system's long-term financial sustainability. Finally, it examines the likely consequences of population ageing on healthcare, including potential policies.

Party development in post-transition Latin America has often proceeded unevenly, as right-wing elites opted for non-partisan forms of political action and conservative parties remained poorly institutionalised. Recent research has demonstrated that party-building was facilitated where the political Right benefited from valuable political assets – party brand, territorial organisation, sources of funding and clientelistic networks – inherited from authoritarian regimes. This article argues that authoritarian inheritance in isolation is insufficient to foster conservative party institutionalisation. It analyses the trajectories of the major right-wing parties in Brazil and Chile, where former authoritarian incumbents benefited extensively from authoritarian inheritance and yet levels of institutionalisation differed widely across parties. The comparative analysis demonstrates that right-wing parties were most likely to consolidate where, in addition to inheriting valuable resources from the dictatorship, they experienced ideologically driven, violent conflict during their early years.

The Harvard political science professor Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) made visits to Brazil in 1972 and 1974 to advise the government about ‘decompression’ or regime liberalisation. The literature on Brazil's dictatorship references these visits as having had a major causal impact. This article argues that his influence on Brazilian regime change is greatly exaggerated. It also argues that Huntington, who became a leading theorist of democratisation, had an interest in and commitment to democracy that was more recent and circumstantial than is often thought. This helps to explain the current period of democratic ‘deconsolidation’ associated with the rise of authoritarian national populism in Brazil.

International pressure to suppress cocaine trafficking sustained decades of harsh drug laws in Bolivia against cocaleros (coca producers), thus affecting coca production for traditional consumption and for manufacturing illicit cocaine. These harsh drug laws caused social unrest in cocalero communities outside traditional coca zones. President Evo Morales, leader of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, MAS) party, implemented ‘Coca Yes, Cocaine No’ (CYCN), a harm-reduction strategy that authorised ‘non-traditional’ farmers to cultivate legal coca and self-police production. This article compares CYCN outcomes in Bolivia's traditional and non-traditional coca regions and finds that strong cocalero organisations were vital to CYCN success in non-traditional areas. In contrast, organised resistance in traditional zones restricted CYCN success and added to regime instability in the lead-up to Morales’ forced resignation in 2019. Hence, while Morales harnessed state power to change drug policy, he was constrained by the rural grassroots organisations that brought him to power.

In this article I examine how, during a period of extreme social unrest, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro took up the role of a salsa radio deejay as a show of confidence in his hold on political power and of his solidarity with ordinary Venezuelans. I argue that this all but unprecedented and, for many, controversial course of action by a sitting president provides us with an unusual opportunity to analyse Venezuela's long-standing political crisis. In particular, I highlight how Maduro harnessed salsa's long association with poor Latin Americans, its connection to Venezuela and its pleasurable character to bolster his socialist credentials, and I show how this strategy unleashed a public exchange of criticisms with one legendary salsero (salsa musician), Rubén Blades. By exploring the way music intersects with politics, I show how popular culture is neither ancillary to nor derivative of the country's ever-deepening strife but, rather, constitutive of it.

Participatory budgeting (PB) has been one of the most popular local democratic reforms in Latin America in recent decades. This article examines what happened to PB when it was scaled up to the state level and integrated in a participatory system in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (2011–14). Using theories of deliberative systems, multichannel participation, ‘venue shopping’ (the practice of seeking the most favourable policy venue) and countervailing power, as well as a multimethod research design, we explain how the systems approach allowed for both deliberation and direct democracy and mobilised new sectors to participate online. However, on the negative side, the different participation channels undermined each other. Social movements migrated to other spaces, leaving the budgeting process open to control by well-established, powerful public-sector groups.