Assessing Howard J. Wiarda’s Contributions to Our Understanding of U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean

Howard J. Wiarda’s scholarship advanced our understanding of Latin America and the Caribbean by emphasizing culture and revealing that U.S. foreign policy often failed to understand the cultures of those regions. Through an analysis of Wiarda’s writing on Cuba, this article demonstrates that his formative experience in the Dominican Republic influenced his later analyses of U.S. foreign policy and his comparative research on Latin American and Caribbean states, and also led him to underestimate the uniqueness of the societies in the region.