Two Caribbean island nations — Cuba and Haiti — are both in the news, albeit for rather different reasons.
Aside from the difficult questions and choices the events in those two nations respectively pose for their inhabitants and rulers, they both may offer, even demand, very different challenges for American leadership, not least because their fates have been closely tied with America’s since their respective moments of independence from their former colonial masters. It is not as if the US can just walk away from engaging with either one of them. If nothing else, both nations represent pools of would-be emigrants eager to find a new home, and judging on history, that new home often seems to look more like South Florida or New York City than anywhere else.