Notes1 For many of the last forty years I dedicated my career to the tourism and hospitality industry. I began as Comptroller of the famous Havana Hilton Hotel, continuing in the area of hotel development and finance in the United States, Chile, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Saint Maarten, Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, and other Latin American and […]

The resurgence of civil society was credited with playing a critical role in the transitions of the socalled Third Wave of democracy (1974-1987). Social movements, human right organizations, churches, and other forms of organized “people power” mobilized repressed populations against authoritarian governments throughout the world and helped bring about regime change from Portugal to the […]

Notes1 Corruption, the misuse of public property for private gain, is as old as government itself. Kautilya, Chief Minister to the King in ancient India, wrote in the fourth century B.C. in his Arthasastra: Just as it is impossible not to take the honey (or the poison) that finds itself at the tip of the […]

Over the years substantial areas of forest cover in Cuba have been cleared to make room for grazing land and production of sugarcane. Nearly threefourths of the country at one time was covered by trees. Today, slightly more than one-fourth of Cuba’s land area is in trees–forest cover and wooded land. Forest cover alone accounts […]