This new year marks two separate but linked anniversaries: the fiftieth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba—touching off the precipitant Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the spread of paramilitarism across Latin America—and the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe—with the election of Solidarity candidates in Poland, the dramatic dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the overthrow of the Communist regime in Romania.
