Hopes for change have been aroused by Barack Obama's history-making visit to Cuba, the first by a U.S. president since that small island-nation's revolution established the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere in 1959. The United States and Cuba reopened their embassies in 2015, four years after Cuban President Raul Castro began incrementally implementing limited economic reforms.
Some analysts are hoping that democracy will follow capitalism into Cuba. But can democracy and communism go together?
Where communists monopolize power or dominate the political scene, a transition to democracy needs more than capitalism to proceed. Nothing better illustrates this than the world's largest and oldest autocracy, China, which has risen dramatically as a world power by blending market capitalism and political monocracy. The Chinese Communist Party — which boasts 88 million members, more than Germany's total population — dominates the country's political, economic and social life.