America's challenges: North America 2013.

• Position: Brief article

CUBA

Since taking over from his ailing brother Fidel in 2008, President Raul Castro has begun limited reforms that include allowing Cubans to start their own businesses and, beginning in 2013, travel without an exit visa. Will the United States lift the trade embargo it imposed on Cuba after the Communist revolution five decades ago?

HAITI

Three years after a devastating earthquake killed 250,000 people and left 1 million homeless, Haiti is still struggling to recover. An ongoing cholera epidemic, believed to have been accidentally started by United Nations relief workers, has now claimed more than 7,500 lives since it began in late 2010.

MEXICO

Drug violence has claimed the lives of more than 47,000 Mexicans in the past six years, as the government battles powerful drug cartels (above, a drug arrest in Mexico City). Mexico's new...