I only casually mentioned in the Sharansky blog below that Cuba didn’t respond to the Jackson-Vanik kind of pressure and I suggested that democracy was not a stunning success in Latin America.
I learned from my friend Susan G. who lived in Latin America for nearly a decade wrote a book about it, and has lived in Israel for a similar length of time, that there are many similarities between Latin Americans and Arabs.
The connection makes sense considering that the Moors were driven out of Spain and Portugal at the same time the conquering of Latin America was underway. Many Jews escaped by ship with the conquistidors, probably many Moors did too.