The 1946 election for Venezuela's National Constituent Assembly marked the beginning of democratic electoral processes and the modern party system in that country. Although interrupted by ten years of dictatorship (1948-1958), nine national elections for president and parliament have been held since 1946. In conjunction with these elections, the Venezuelan party system has passed through four stages: a predominant party system (1945-1948), a limited multiparty system (1958-1973), an attenuated two-party system (1973-1993), and recently, the return to a limited multiparty system (1993-) (Sartori 1976).

Venezuelan politics presents a puzzle to students of Latin America, and to anyone concerned with the comparative analysis of democratization and democracy. As the major countries of Latin America (and the majority of scholars) worked their way from authoritarianism through “transitions”to democracy and hopefully toward democracy’s consolidation, Venezuela moved in the opposite direction. After decades of political stability and social peace, beginning in 1987 Venezuela’s democratic order was shaken by widespread unrest and citizen disaffection, the decay of key parties and state institutions, attempted coups, and the impeachment and removal of the president in 1993.

During the approximately 30 years in which the exercise of entrepreneurship in a market-oriented setting was effectively prohibited, Cuba actually created a nation of entrepreneurs. Although the intention was to convert Cuba into a “school for socialism,” the reality is that Cuba has also been, in part, a school for market-oriented entrepreneurship. This, indeed, is one of the more surprising and significant paradoxes of the Cuban Revolution. The nature of Cuba’s planned economy itself has inadvertently promoted widespread entrepreneurial values, attitudes, behavior, and savoir-faire, as citizens of necessity have had to buy and sell, truck and barter, hustle and “network” to improvise solutions to their personal economic problems. While entrepreneurial talents have developed broadly among the population, their exercise, until 1993, was restricted to the important but low-level everyday tasks of sustenance and survival, often carried out in the shadow or underground economy or on the black market. But when the space available for entrepreneurial activity was increased with the liberalization of microenterprise beginning in September 1993, the expansion and diversification of microentrepreneurial activity was impressive.