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Cuban foreign policy since the Revolution of 1959 completed a full cycle by the outset of the 1980s. The strain on the international system created by public attention to Cuba's military roles in the Caribbean and Central America is indeed serious. It is not so much that Cuba's stepped-up support for clandestine arms shipments to left-wing guerrillas, first in Nicaragua and later in El Salvador, violates international law, for such transgressions are frequent in world politics. Cuba's expanded economic, political, and eventual military involvement in the Caribbean and Central America results from two basic conditions. First, Havana's capacity to become involved has increased over the years, notably in the military dimension but also in the fields of education and medicine. Secondly, the opportunities to extend its presence clearly expanded throughout the 1970s as some leftwing governments emerged in the Caribbean and Central America and as revolutionary leftist groups sought governmental power through force in other countries.

Central America — the scene of civil war upheavals, Soviet expansionism, Cuban intervention and United States anxiety — merits attention as a unique arena in which to assess superpower cooperation in conflict management. This is so for at least three reasons. First, Central America’s geographic location makes it a high priority in US security policy. Like other great powers, the US has resisted political developments in neighboring states that pose unacceptable threats to its national security.1 US concern about Central America has been exacerbated by the region’s political turbulence since World War II, dramatized by radical leftist movements and the emergence in 1979 of Sandinista Nicaragua as a major US security issue. Until the Sandinista’s stunning election loss in February 1990, the US viewed Nicaragua, like Cuba, as an opportunity for Soviet expansionism.

The October 1983 crisis in Grenada left little doubt that the Soviet and Cuban presence had been expanding in the Caribbean basin. But the October crisis did not answer questions regarding the extent of their actual influence there, nor the direction it might take in the future, nor even what the most appropriate U.S. policy responses should be to that influence elsewhere in the region. Therefore, in the wake of the U.S. occupation of Grenada and the evidence it uncovered about the degree of Soviet and Cuban activity there, it is useful to examine the kind of situations that have encouraged the Soviets to expand their presence and/or influence in Latin America. At the same time, it equally is useful to examine the limitations or constraints on such an expanded presence or influence.Clearly, Soviet policy in Latin America has been the product of two conflicting forces or tendencies.

University students in Venezuela constitute about ten percent of the corresponding age group (calculated from Universidad Central de Venezuela 1970: 19, Table 5), and leadership of the country's economic and social development is increasingly in the hands of university-trained professionals. University enrollment has quadrupled since 1958, and young professionals who have graduated over the past fifteen years already represent a majority among university graduates in Venezuela. Research on students and elites, however, in Venezuela as elsewhere in Latin America, has concentrated on their divergent political attitudes while paying scant attention to the transformation of university students into members of the elite.This paper reports on an exploratory survey of student and elite attitudes toward higher education and professional employment in Venezuela. Our findings provide some insight on the extent to which employment of high-level manpower is influenced by modern, achievement-oriented criteria, as compared with traditional, ascriptive criteria.

Havana and Moscow share a relationship of mutual benefits and costs, where each side values the other’s assets. Havana relies on Moscow’s economic and military aid — about US $4–5 billion annually — as vital support facilitating Cuba’s key policy goals: defence against US threats, economic survival, and prominence in the Third World. Moscow uses Cuba’s geostrategic proximity to the United States and backing of Third World revolutionary movements to undermine US power in Latin America and other Third World arenas. Neither Moscow nor Havana dominates the other, but each strives to maximise its benefits and minimise costs in their relations.