Reply #8: Ah, but Cuba is 600 miles long, isn't it?

[Braulio]

I guess you mean small islands, rather than small nations. The issue is interesting, and you may read about it in "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. In general, there's a limit to the population an island can support, but this limit is very high if an island is well governed and has a capable population, examples would be Singapore, Mauritius, Cyprus, and others.

Cuba isn't overpopulated, it's just mis-governed. The communist system discourages individual initiative, and centralized government control (especially one sustained via repression, media control, and human rights abuses like Castro's does) lacks the feedback needed to correct course over time.

The type of socialism advocated by Latin Americans such as Chavez is a form of the communism implemented in Cuba and North Korea, thus, even though Venezuela is very large, there's an outflow of intelligent and educated people out of the country. This brain drain in turn leads to worse performance, as the country begins to be run by what we may call incapable dogmatists - and will lead to an outflow of the lower classes as the economy worsens. It's a classic cycle driven by "socialist" policies.

Fortunately for Latin America, the real power in that continent is Brazil, and their leaders are smart enough to adopt a social-liberal approach, which is really helping Brazil's economy.