Group items tagged

“He should have taken responsibility,” said Alexi, who asked that his full name not be used because he was discussing the Cuban leadership. Cubans’ morals had been broken, he said, by the “special period” of severe economic hardship that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, when many people resorted to stealing, scams and, in some cases, prostitution to get by

Standing shirtless outside his small house, Alexi pointed to his 24-year-old son, fixing a hubcap on the sidewalk. “How could I raise him with the same morals, when just to put rice, beans and pork on the table requires all kinds of illegalities?” he said. “I had to teach him the values of survival.”

Still, Havana has avoided the rampant crime and drug violence that plague many Latin American — and American — cities. And in spite of complaints about deteriorating manners, many Cubans maintain a sense of community and remain close to family, sharing food or helping out friends and neighbors.

growing up in an environment where cheating and duplicity were a way of living had bred cynicism. “This cynicism feeds into people’s lack of engagement,” she said. “Individual responsibility toward the collective is very low.”

Cubans complain that sliding professional standards, inexperienced teachers who are barely older than their students and a lack of public facilities have helped corrode people’s civic-mindedness.

Mr. Castro proposed a combination of education, promotion of culture and enforcement to restore the country’s civility. He called on workers’ unions, the authorities, teachers, intellectuals and artists, among others, to hold other Cubans to standards of behavior.

Buoyed by China trade, nationalist-minded politicians launched a foreign policy meant to reduce the role of the U.S. in Latin America. Brazil blocked a U.S. free-trade initiative for the Americas. They teamed with Venezuela to create a regional security council to supplant one that included the U.S. The foreign minister worked from an office with a huge map of the world upside down, offering the message that the era of emerging markets was at hand. But the world wasn’t upside down. While Brazil tied itself more closely to anti-American governments like Venezuela, Argentina and Iran, some regional neighbors—Chile, Colombia and Peru—went around Brazil and cut individual free-trade deals with the U.S.

Anticipating commodity sales, the government spent increasingly heavily. Government banks supplied Brazilians with easy credit. Brazil subsidized energy bills, issued cheap loans to big companies with government ties and built stadiums to host global events such as the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

Meantime, Brazil produced far less oil than predicted. Production actually shrank in some years, as Petróleo Brasileiro SA, PBR 12.80 % known as Petrobras, struggled with the enormous task of developing oil fields in extremely deep water.

Commodities’ support of the economy allowed Brazilian leaders to put off addressing certain problems that had long bedeviled the nation, such as a political system that tended to breed corruption and a bureaucracy that stymied business innovation. “Brazil became complacent because of the intoxicating effects of China trade,”

On the surface, it seems like the Nicaraguan government is doing quite a bit to fight the drug war and that Bluefields is a place of perdition. But reality is more complicated. Cocaine Trafficking Routes Through Nicaragua Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: "Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean" (September 2012) Credit: Alyson Hurt / NPR 'Cocaine Republics' Cocaine's Influence on Nicaragua's Miskito Coast Nicaragua — the largest country in Central America — has a lengthy coastline on the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. With its remote location, Bluefields is well placed to serve as a pit stop along the corridor where drugs travel from the South American producers to U.S. consumers. What's more, the cocaine moving through Nicaragua's territory represents a higher share of GDP than any other Central American country, which in the words of the U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime, should give traffickers greater leverage to both sow more corruption and foment violence.

In 2011, The Global Commission on Drugs, a high-profile panel of world leaders – including former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker — declared that the "global war on drugs has failed." And this September, the commission followed up with a report recommending policies that work, including some legalization and encouraging countries to try regulating instead of prohibiting some aspects of the drug trade.