The historic instability of pre-Castro politics in Cuba is
developed into three hypotheses dealing with a national
personality dominated by old order values which tend to be
anti-democratic, group-divisive, symbolic as opposed to realistic,
and dominated largely by the allure of personalismo,
a hypothesized Latin political phenomenon in which personalities
obscure the issues. The hypotheses were tested in the
analysis of a survey of samples of Cuban- and native-born
high school students in Dade County, Florida.