Honduras and the Cuba exception

The images were decidedly retro and jarring in their distant familiarity, as if a grainy old family film long left in the attic had been brought out for a screening. In defense of la patria, army troops overpowered el palacio at dawn and placed el presidente on an airplane to be flown into exile, still wearing his pajamas. Sunday's coup in Honduras followed a script once so familiar it acquired cliche status, material even for a Woody Allen sendup.

Military coups are supposed to be a thing of the past in Latin America, where the consolidation of political stability and electoral democracy has been a landmark achievement over the last two decades. But events in Tegucigalpa over the weekend reminded us that this achievement remains somewhat tenuous. There is nothing inevitable about democracy in Latin America, it turns out.

In this case, outside reaction to the political drama in Honduras (which has its nuances, to be sure, including an ousted president who had been acting in defiance of his nation's Supreme Court) has been swift and energetic. The Organization of American States, the Obama administration, leftist allies of ousted President Manuel Zelaya (a close friend of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez) and other world leaders have rightly condemned the army's intervention and called for the return of Zelaya, invoking among other things the Inter-American Democratic Charter signed in Lima, Peru, on Sept. 11, 2001.

That's the proper reaction. But the attempted coup also serves to unmask the hypocrisy surrounding Cuba's possible return to the Organization of American States and to full participation in the Inter-American community. Indeed, some of the very same regional players now urging a united front on behalf of democracy in Honduras are the same leaders who in recent months have been eager to embrace Cuba and give the tropical gulag nation a pass on its lack of democracy and basic civil liberties, citing explicit principles of nonintervention and implicit nostalgia for anti-gringo revolutionary lore. This despite the fact that the Inter-American Charter makes democracy a precondition to full-fledged membership in the OAS.