Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan revolution

Helen Delpar’s goal in this succinct, well-organized, and timely book is both a survey and analysis of the work and views of U.S. historians and social scientists about Latin America from the nineteenth-century precursors to about 1975. She modestly describes her offering as an introduction to a continually evolving scholarship and a follow-up of earlier studies by Howard Cline, Lewis Hanke, and Carl Berger. Happily, she offers much more than a survey of the major trends and setbacks affecting the training, development, and influence of Latin Americanists in the twentieth century. The result is a superb assessment of the state of the field, measured not only by its growth and status in the twentieth-century university but also by the role and views of Latin Americanists at critical times — in the heyday of U.S. empire in the first third of the century, in both world wars (especially in the decade 1935 – 45), in the tumultuous years following the triumph of Fidel Castro, and in the sometimes vitriolic debates about Latin American dependency in the 1960s and 1970s.Each chapter not only details the major changes and development of the field during a particular era but also explains how and why some practitioners in specific disciplines forged ahead while others lagged behind. Delpar reminds us that Latin Americanists in this country have always been alert to the impacts of domestic issues on those who labor in this multifaceted field, and disagreements among them in the past have often been as sharp and vitriolic as those since 1975. The earliest practitioners were also mindful of the prejudices of their readers and the interests of government officials and institutions who used their services or funded their projects.A few examples may suffice. In his detailed accounts of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, William H. Prescott was mindful of the anti-Spanish prejudices of his readers. And there is more of a hint of Anglophobia in the Central American offerings of John Lloyd Stephens and Ephraim G. Squier, who wrote at a time of increasing U.S.-British rivalry in the isthmian region. In the first third of the twentieth century, as the field struggled to gain respectability, some Latin Americanist pioneers carried out not only institutional but public roles: Bernard Moses, who was appointed to the Second Philip-pine Commission and became a delegate to the first Pan-American Scientific Congress; Leo Rowe, who advised President Woodrow Wilson on Latin American affairs; and Dana Gardner Munro, who embarked on a career in the State Department after publishing his history of Central America. Hiram Bingham, famous for his expeditions to Peru, became an outspoken critic of the Monroe Doctrine.During World War II, a generation of budding Latin Americanists — economists, cultural officers, historians, and political scientists, among others — benefited from a dramatic increase of official involvement and interest in the region. Some, such as Lewis Hanke and Frank Tannenbaum, became troubled about the impact of the shifting postwar political winds in U.S. politics on the study of Latin America. Their fears were justified, as every student of U.S. involvement in the region during the Cold War knows. What revived the field, of course, was the launching of Sputnik and the parallel concern about U.S. education, the Cuban revolution, and the growing intensity of the debate over U.S. policy in the hemisphere in the 1960s and early 1970s. Delpar tells this story, as well as the flourishing expansion and development of Latin American studies and the accompanying concerns that official and institutional support for individual research became increasingly dependent on the willingness of the scholar to look at specific topics — social revolution or dependence, among others. In the process, the racialist discourse of the nineteenth century became muted, if it did not disappear altogether, but so, too, did the old Boltonian notion of a “common history” of the Americas.Delpar has little to say about the years after 1975, save for summing up what has happened to area studies — cuts in funding, a growing sense that the “Two Americas” are divided by such different cultural heritages that no north-south unity or commonality, no “intellectual” bridge will ever unite them. Contrarily, one could make the case that Latin American and Caribbean migration into this country since 1975, the dramatic escalation of remittances of these migrants to their home countries, the laudable efforts to frame statements of human rights, hemispheric summitry, and the push for economic integration, among other modern trends, are forging new bonds.Delpar is too good a scholar to plunge into these uncertain waters. Instead, she has given us something far worthier, a biographical assessment and a guidebook to unraveling the problems and issues that confronted Latin Americanists over a century and a half. This book will have a long “shelf life.”

Theotonio Dos Santos (1936–2018): The Revolutionary Intellectual Who Pioneered Dependency Theory

The Cuban and Sandinista Revolutions stand together as Latin America's two socialist revolutions achieved through guerrilla insurgency in the latter half of the twentieth century. But beyond studies that demonstrate that Cuba militarily trained and supported the Sandinistas before, during, and after their guerrilla phase, and observations that the two countries were connected by the bonds of socialist revolution, the nature of Cuba and Nicaragua's revolutionary relationship remains little explored. This article traces exchanges of people and expertise between each revolutionary state's Ministry of Foreign Relations and Ministry of Culture. It employs diplomatic and institutional archives, personal collections, and oral interviews to demonstrate the deep involvement of Cuban experts in building the Sandinista state. Yet, Cuban advice may have exacerbated tensions within Nicaragua. This article also shows that tensions marked the day-to-day realities of Cubans and Nicaraguans tasked with carrying out collaborations, revealing their layered and often contradictory nature. Illuminating high-level policy in terms of Cuban-Nicaraguan exchanges and how they unfolded on the ground contributes to new international histories of the Sandinista and Cuban revolutions by shifting away from North-South perspectives to focus instead on how the Sandinistas navigated collaboration with their most important regional ally.

Reviewed by: Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left ed. by Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez Álvaro Ramírez Harmer, Tanya, and Alberto Martín Álvarez, editors. Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left. U of Florida P, 2021. Pp. 301. ISBN 978-1-68340-169-8. Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left is an in intriguing book that sheds new light on the Revolutionary Left, a movement that emerged in the 1960s in Latin America characterized by armed struggle, revolution, national liberation, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism. In the Introduction, the editors, Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez, lament the neglect in historical writing regarding this faction and place part of the blame on conservative national tendencies of Latin American historiography and the peripheral role historians have assigned to Latin America in recent histories of the globalized world. Therefore, Harmer and Álvarez underscore the need for new, more inclusive historical accounts elucidating the transnational interconnections which the Revolutionary Left maintained with similar movements in the international arena. The present compilation is a big step in that direction. The book is comprised of two sections. Part I, “Latin America’s Revolutionary Left in the Age of the Tricontinental,” spotlights the relations Cuba cultivated with the Soviet Bloc, China and Latin America. To this end, Michal Zourek’s “Czechoslovakia and Latin America’s Guerrilla Insurgencies,” emphasizes the important logistical support this Eastern Bloc country offered the Castro regime through Operation Manuel, set up to facilitate Latin American revolutionaries trained in Cuba to travel back to their home countries, thus revealing Czechoslovakia’s key role in fomenting Cuban-style revolution in Latin America. In “Revolutionary Diplomacy and the Third World,” Blanca Mar León gives a detailed account of the Cuban efforts to hold in Havana the First Tricontinental Conference in 1966. She highlights the skillful diplomatic maneuvering that went into acquiring the support of key Third World leaders and to fend off old-guard politicians, such as Lázaro Cárdenas, who were trying to derail the Cubans. In the “The Brazilian Far Left, Cuba, and the Sino-Soviet Split, 1963,” James G. Hershberg guides us through the internecine relations of the [End Page 313] Revolutionary Left in Brazil in 1963. We follow the machinations of the rivalry that ensued between Luis Carlos Prestes and Francisco Julião due to their opposing methods of obtaining the triumph of communism in Brazil; the first promoting the peaceful coexistence policy backed by Moscow, the second calling for armed revolt in the guise of the Cuban Revolution promoted by Castro and Beijing. The disarray of the Marxist movements operating in Brazil is made obvious. They come across as wanting to be players in a political chess game but are shown to be nothing more than peon pieces moved by the hand of Cuba, Moscow, and China. Other global connections are accentuated in the book’s second part, titled “Latin America’s Revolutionary Left and Europe.” Gerardo Leibner weaves an excellent argument in “The Italian Communist Party between ‘Old Comrades in Arms’ and the Challenges of the New Armed Left.” He notes the fine line the Italian Communist Party had to walk as it maintained tenuous relations with Latin American communist factions who vied for its support, which the PCI withdrew after Che’s guerrilla tactics began to radicalize young Italian groups who had broken off from the PCI. Leibner marks an interesting reversal in the flow of political influence: to use Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s words, it was “el retorno de las carabelas,” as young, European radicals adopted tactics perfected in Latin America, much to the chagrin of the Old Left who proposed a policy of peaceful coexistence and a legal political road to power. In “The Influence of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left in Europe,” Eduardo Rey Tristán delineates the significant role of European publishers Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, François Maspero, Nils Andersson, and Klaus Wagenbach in the dissemination of New Left ideology emanating out of the Algerian War and Cuban Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing mainly on the publishers’ background, Rey Tristán establishes them...

If certain observable trends in Latin America continue, Christian Democracy could well become the political dimension that Latin America at its present stage of development requires. Although a great social, economic, political, and psychological revolution has been sweeping Latin America, no political ideology has arisen with it. Most political parties have been convenient umbrellas for various, shifting small interest groups. Aside from a few strong parties in individual countries, political parties have lacked purpose and have shown ideological weaknesses. Although communism and socialism have been influential on occasion and in different countries, neither has managed to become the party of the masses. The two clashing influences of the present age in Latin America— the Cuban revolution and the Alliance for Progress—created the need for a solution of their conflict. Christian Democracy, especially as it has emerged in Chile, with the resounding success of President Eduardo Frei Montalva, offers hope of a synthesis. Its ideas appeal to youthful intellectuals and to middle-class women, and it has the support of the Roman Catholic Church and the labor unions. If Christian Democracy prevails in the other Latin-American countries, they may, like Chile, show an inclination to "third world" policies in international relations. Although political predictions are risky, we cannot ignore the significance of the new trend toward Christian Democracy in Latin America.—Ed.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Linda Robinson, “Terror Close to Home” U.S. News, September 28, 2003, http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/031006/6venezuela.htm; Dan Burton, “Opening Statement: Hearing on Venezuela,” testimony before the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, July 17, 2008, http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/43520.pdf; Fred Burton, “Venezuela: Documenting the Threat,” STRATFOR, December 13, 2006; Nima Gerami and Sharon Squassoni, “Venezuela: A Nuclear Profile,” Proliferation Analysis, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Web site, December 18, 2008, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=22568&prog=zgp&proj=znpp&zoom_highlight=Venezuela+A+Nuclear+Profile; Chris Kraul and Sebastian Rotella, “Hezbollah Presence in Venezuela Feared,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2008, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/27/world/fg-venezterror27. 2. Joseph S. Nye, “Soft Power and American Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 119, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 255–270. 3. Robert A. Pape, “Soft Balancing Against the United States,” International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 7–45; T.V. Paul, “Soft Balancing in the Age of U.S. Primacy,” International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 46–71; Andrew Hurrell, “Hegemony, Liberalism, and Global Order: What Space for Would-Be Great Powers?” International Affairs 82, no. 1 (January 2006): 1–19. 4. Stephen Walt, “Can the United States be Balanced? If So, How?” (remarks, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, September 2–5, 2004) (hereinafter Walt remarks). 5. Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Hard Times for Soft Balancing,” International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 72–108; Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “International Relations Theory and the Case Against Unilateralism,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 509–524; Keir A. Lieber and Gerard Alexander, “Waiting for Balancing: Why the World Is Not Pushing Back,” International Security 30, no. 1(Summer 2005): 109–139; Robert Kagan, “The September 12 Paradigm,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 5 (September/October 2008): 25–39. 6. Mark Eric Williams, “The New Balancing Act: International Relations Theory and Venezuela's ‘Soft Balancing’ Foreign Policy,” in The Revolution in Venezuela, eds. Jonathan Eastwood and Thomas Ponniah (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2009); Gregory Wilpert, Changing Venezuela: The History and Policies of the Chavez Government (London: Verso, 2007). 7. Wilpert, Changing Venezuela . 8. “Country Fact Sheet: Venezuela,” UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), World Investment Report 2007, http://www.unctad.org/sections/dite_dir/docs/wir07_fs_ve_en.pdf (hereinafter UNCTAD World Investment Report 2007). 9. This includes petrostates for which there is data: Algeria, Angola, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Egypt, Gabon, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Kuwait was excluded from this list because with 47 percent of outward foreign direct investment it is a prominent outlier. See UNCTAD World Investment Report 2007. 10. See UNCTAD World Investment Report 2007; Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Foreign Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean 2007 ( Santiago, Chile: ECLAC, 2008), http://www.eclac.org/publicaciones/xml/1/32931/lcg2360i.pdf. 11. Maruja Tarre Briceño, “Abandonados en grandes ligas: Chávez Quiere ahora codearse con los grandes de la política mundial,” El Universal, August 24, 2008. 12. Gustavo Coronel, “Pedigüeños de todo el mundo: absteneosi¡” Las Armas de Coronel Blog, August 4, 2007, http://lasarmasdecoronel.blogspot.com/2007/08/pedigueos-de-todo-el-mundo-absteneos-ya.html 13. See “US Accuses Venezuelan Diplomat of Working for Hizbullah,” Jerusalem Post, June 19, 2008, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1213794272800. 14. Natalie Obiko Pearson and Ian James, “Venezuela Offers Billions to Countries in Latin America,” VenezuelaAnalysis.com, August 28, 2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2571. 15. Andrés Oppenheimer, “Alan García, Chávez y las Casas del ALBA,” El Nuevo Herald, March 16, 2008. 16. Sean W. Burges, “Building a Global Southern Coalition: The Competing Approaches of Brazil's Lula and Venezuela's Chávez,” Third World Quarterly 28, no. 7 (October 2007): 1343–1358. 17. Richard Feinberg, “Chávez Conditionality,” Latin Business Chronicle, June 4, 2007, http://www.latinbusinesschronicle.com/app/article.aspx?id=1296. 18. “Food Aid Arrives in Haiti Amid Protests, Political Unrest,” FoxNews.com, April 19, 2008, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,351830,00.html. 19. Jorge I. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe For Revolution: Cuba's Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 20. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Vietnam and the World Struggle for Freedom (Message to the Tricontentinental, published in 1967),” in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: Writings and Speeches of Ernesto Che Guevara, ed. David Deutschmann (Sydney: Pathfinder Press, 1987). 21. International Monetary Fund, “Honduras: Request for Stand—By Arrangement-Staff Report,” IMF Country Report, no. 08/241 (Washington, D.C.: IMF, July 2008), http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2008/cr08241.pdf. 22. “Petrocaribe heredó deudas y compromisos; Zelaya cerró las puertas a los organismos de financiamiento internacional para Abrazar los proyectos chavistas y embarcar al país en una dependencia financiera de largo plazo,” El Heraldo, August 3, 2009. 23. Julia Buxton, “European Views of the Bolivarian Progressive Social Image: Have the Revelations of Deeper Relations with the FARC Changed Anything? Does it Matter?” (paper, Miami, Florida, 2008) (presented at the Florida International University Summit of the Americas Center conference “Ten Years of Venezuelan Foreign Policy: Impacts in the Hemisphere and the World”). 24. Jack Levy and L.Vakili. “Diversionary Action by Authoritarian Regimes: Argentina in the Falklands/Malvinas Case,” in The Internationalization of Communal Strife, ed. Manus I. Midlarsky (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 118–146; Graeme A.M. Davies, “Domestic Strife and the Initiation of International Conflicts: A Directed Dyad Analysis, 1950–1982,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 46, no. 5 (October 2002): 672–692. 25. See Demetrio Boersner, “Dimensión internacional de la crisis venezolana,” in Venezuela en retrospectiva: Los pasos Hacia el régimen chavista, ed. Günther Maihold (Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert, 2007) (in Spanish). 26. Janet Kelly and Carlos A. Romero, The United States and Venezuela (New York: Routledge, 2002). 27. Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, “Venezuela: Crowding Out the Opposition,” Journal of Democracy 18, no. 2 (April 2007): 99–113; Francisco Monaldi, Rosa Amelia González, Richard Obuchi, and Michael Penfold, “Political Institutions and Policymaking in Venezuela: The Rise and Collapse of Political Cooperation,” in Policymaking in Latin America: How Politics Shapes Policies, eds. Ernesto Stein, Mariano Tommasi, Pablo T. Spiller, and Carlos Scartascini (Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, MA: Inter-American Development Bank and Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2008), pp. 371–417; David J. Myers, “Venezuela: Delegative Democracy or Electoral Autocracy?” in Constructing Democratic Governance, 3rd edition, eds. Jorge I. Domínguez and Michael Shifter (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 285–320. 28. Vitaly Kozyrev, “China's Continental Energy Strategy: Russia and Central Asia,” in China's Energy Strategy: The Impact on Beijing's Maritime Policies, eds. Gabriel B. Collins, Lyle J. Goldstein, and Andrew S. Erickson (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 2007), pp. 202–251. 29. Because supertankers are not capable of passing through the Panama Canal, oil shipments from Venezuela to China would need to go first south to the Strait of Magellan and then northwest across the Pacific or else entirely east through Cape Horn and then the Strait of Malacca. Either route would be one of the lengthiest in the world. 30. Farideh Farhi, “Iran in Latin America: Threat or Axis of Annoyance” (paper, Washington, D.C., July 10, 2008) ( presented at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars conference “ Iran in Latin America: Threat or Axis of Annoyance”), http://www.wilsoncenter.org/events/docs/Farhi.pdf. 31. Henri J. Barkey, “Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and Energy Security” (paper, Washington, D.C., May 28–June 3, 2007) (presented at the Aspen Institute's sixth conference on political Islam “Political Islam: Challenges for U.S. Policy”). 32. Elodie Brun, La Place de l'Iran dans la politique étrangère du Venezuela (paper, Washington, D.C., July 10, 2008) (presented at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars conference “Iran in Latin America: Threat or Axis of Annoyance”), http://www.wilsoncenter.org/events/docs/Brun1.pdf. 33. Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (New York: Metropolitan Press, 2008). 34. Burton, “Venezuela: Documenting the Threat.” 35. Veneconomía Opina, “¡Ni espejo de China es!,” Veneconomía, October 18, 2008. 36. Most Latin Americans doubt the leadership of Chávez. See “Global Unease With Major World Powers; Rising Environmental Concern in 47-Nation Survey,” Pew Global Attitudes Project (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, June 27, 2007), http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=256 (hereinafter Pew Global Attitudes Project 2007). 37. Michael Shifter, “A New Path for Latin America,” Current History 107, no. 706 (February 2008): 90–92. 38. Pew Global Attitudes Project 2007. 39. Peter Hakim, “The Next President's Agenda for the Americas” (paper, Washington, D.C., November 27–December 2, 2007) (presented at the Aspen Institute conference “U.S. Policy in Latin America”), http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/docs/congressional%20program/Hakim_Paper.pdf; Abraham F. Lowenthal, “The Obama Administration and the Americas: A Promising Start,” The Washington Quarterly 32, no. 3 (July 2009): 119–136, http://twq.com/09july/docs/09jul_Lowenthal.pdf. 40. María Teresa Romero, “Expansión sin plata,” El Universal, January 7, 2009. 41. John Kiriakou, “Iran's Latin America Push,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2008, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kiriakou8-2008nov08,0,878526.story. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJavier CorralesJavier Corrales is an associate professor of political science at Amherst College

Reviewed by: Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America ed. by Jessica Stites Mor Stephen F. Diamond (bio) Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America ( University of Wisconsin Press , Jessica Stites Mor ed., 2013 ), 305 pages, ISBN 978-0-299-29114-3 . The end of the Cold War raised hopes among many democratic and human rights activists that a new era of openness and accountability in global affairs was possible. Just as the end of both World Wars led to the emergence of new social movements for radical political change and national liberation, there was hope that as the bipolar politics that had dominated world affairs for several decades receded, new movements could emerge to confront challenging economic and social problems. Perhaps the high point of this period, from a North American perspective at least, was the 1999 Seattle uprising against the World Trade Organization. But the moment proved to be short-lived, as the events of 9/11 reminded the world of both the continuing appeal of authoritarian politics to many in the developing world, as well as the inherent tendency of Western powers to surrender civil liberties in the face of dangers that are frequently overblown. Thus, if the Cold War is indeed now only a memory, it is very much the case that authoritarianism remains a potent force in world politics. A reconsideration of the roots of today’s political circumstances in the Cold War, then, would be very welcome. This collection, edited by historian Jessica Stites Mor, promises such a reconsideration yet quickly finds itself justifying a new version of the authoritarianism that undermined many opponents of Western imperial power during the Cold War. As perhaps the most obvious example, the book contains not one but two chapters (out of nine) dedicated to the argument that there is, or at least was, something fundamentally progressive about Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Russell Cobb, writing about cultural issues, appears to believe that “initially” the Cuban Revolution was a breath-taking inspiration to Latin American artists, only to “turn [at some unspecified date after January 1959] dogmatic and authoritarian.”1 In other words, for Cobb, the Revolution began as a progressive experiment that turned bad. He even suggests, without foundation, that the “revolution in the region’s politics . . . stemm[ed] from Cuba.”2 This is an odd conclusion in light of the book’s stated aim of exploring a new alternative “transnational solidarity from below.”3 It is true, of course, that the Cuban Revolution was influential across Latin America, but different actors drew different lessons from the experience. In Nicaragua, for example, the events were mostly influential in encouraging dangerous new forms of guerilla warfare by liberals and radicals alike that endangered broader forms of democratic movements opposed to the Somoza dictatorship. It [End Page 663] was the authoritarian Sandinista movement, in fact, that would be trained and armed by the Cubans. Similarly, the second piece on Cuba, by Christine Hatzky, argues without irony that the Cuban regime was engaged in something called “international solidarity” when it sent thousands of young Cubans to die in a proxy war in southern Africa beginning in the 1970s.4 She even invokes the names of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Leon Trotsky in order to justify this effort. At least Cobb acknowledged the eventual deterioration of whatever elements of democracy he thinks might have existed when Castro took power. For Hatzky, there is no discussion at all of dogma or authoritarianism. Again, the reader is left to wonder how the use of the armed might of a state to overthrow another state’s government has anything to do with the new forms of solidarity “from below” the editor claims to have discovered.5 Perhaps one is supposed to assume that since Cuba was a revolutionary regime it is therefore an honorary member of this new movement “from below.”6 Of course, at the very same time as Cuban regulars were engaged in war in Africa, there were mass movements from below emerging in Central and Latin America, quite often in direct conflict with the authoritarian model created by Cuba. Thus, it was in this period...

In a January 1980 essay in Black Collegian, historian Vincent Harding remembered political activism of early 1970s with regret and disappointment compared to inspiriting sense of collective action, transformative power, great victories, and tragic wounds of 1960s. And in a revised periodization, for this scholar-activist the seventies began with Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968. Harding noted that at time of his death, King was questioning political, social, economic, and moral foundations of American society. Dr. King's murder spurred tremendous activism, but inability of social and political activists to make profound societal changes they so desperately sought revealed strengths of entrenched corporate establishment. Harding acknowledged that these substantial obstacles smashed our vague dreams up against hard limitations of American structures. (1) Harding's frustrations stemmed from partial victories of protest movements in early 1970s and eventual splintering of these movements by decade's end. During 1970s Black Power transformed civil rights activism, dispersing protests in various directions and seeking different solutions to problem of achieving racial equality. The decade witnessed growth and creation of numerous organizations such as Congress of African People, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and Malcolm X Liberation University that sought to expand and deepen meaning of civil rights and Black Power for 1970s. These groups provided depth and breadth to ongoing social activism through involvement in political arena, cultural affairs, unions and labor organizing, education, feminism, and other areas. Ideologically diverse, these organizations cooperated publicly in early 1970s in name of a hypothetical black Behind scenes, however, scholars and social activists were often wedded to particular ideological formations and resulting divisions strained well-publicized attempts at unity. (2) Despite these strained efforts, a unified front in attacking American structures and their inherent discrimination continued to be an aspiration for freedom struggle in early 1970s. The Atlanta-based Institute of Black World (IBW) was one of many new Institutions founded in late 1960s in various attempts to achieve to promote black liberation. IBW was a collective of scholar-activists and intellectuals, primarily under leadership of Vincent Harding, that forged operational unity among various ideological formations and camps within freedom struggle by emphasizing social, political, economic, and cultural analyses of American and African American society. IBW's associates, those affiliated artists and intellectuals, fostered unity within group by adhering to a form of pragmatic nationalism, believing that flexible and carefully constructed social, political, and economic goals and strategies designed to improve communities were more important than ideological pronouncements, conformity, and rigidity. (3) IBW's pragmatic nationalism differed from cultural nationalism promoted by Maulana Karenga and Amiri Baraka, and shared by many artists and college students, and focused on Africa and African peoples in Diaspora. African-descended peoples have a distinct aesthetic, sense of values, and communal ethos emerging from either, or both their contemporary folkways and continental African heritage. (4) Cultural nationalists differed ideologically from revolutionary nationalists of era who, according to literary historian James Smethurst, called for an open engagement with Marxism regarding U.S. and global political economy, and pursued alternatives to capitalist approach to economic development. (5) IBW's pragmatic nationalism was rooted in specific activities and issues such as creation of Black Studies programs and development of a black political agenda for 1970s. …

HAT happens in Cuba is important not only to Latin America W/ V but to the rest of the world, but there is a great danger in Britain, and even in the United States, of assessing the importance of the revolution in Cuba purely in terms of the cold war between East and West. It is true that events in Cuba have been used for the purposes of the cold war and have had repercussions on the differences between East and West. But in order to understand the reasons for what has happened in Cuba, it is necessary to realize that as far as the Cubans themselves are concerned this revolution is a product of their own history and their own part in Latin American and Iberian history, while for the rest of Latin America, too, the Cuban revolution represents something which is particularly their own, whether they approve of it or dislike it. At the present moment we are very conscious of winds of change in Africa and in Asia. What is perhaps not realized is that this process, with its anti-colonial connotations, started a hundred and fifty years ago in Latin America. What is now happening at an accelerated twentiethcentury pace in Africa and Asia began to happen at a slower nineteenthcentury tempo in the Americas south of the United States in i8io, when what is now Argentina rose up against the Spaniards in the south, and wvhat is now Venezuela rose up against them in the north. This was a political revolution such as we have seen in many countries which have cast off their original allegiance to the metropolitan Power, but it was not accompanied by a social revolution. Although the founders of the Latin American Republics and the great fighters for Latin American independence based their ideas and their public speeches on the ideals of the French Revolution, these ideals, with their connotations of liberty, equality, and fraternity, were not the reasons for which many of the revolutionaries were fighting, and, in fact, were in large measure not achieved. Just as the Boston Tea-Party which triggered off the American War of Independence was largely caused by commercial feelings, so the revolutions against Spain received most of their support in the seaport towns which in most cases were the capitals, or at any rate the most important cities, in Latin America. The merchant classes in these cities resented the Spanish monopoly of trade by which all their exports of primary materials had to go to Spain or Portugal and everything which they imported had s Address at Chatham House, 3I January I96I. 285

The article tracks Hamas's political evolution by analyzing its governance record, as well as its political, economic, and social policies as the effective in the Gaza Strip between 2007 and 2013. By providing a specific snapshot in time, the study focuses on understanding Hamas's approach to governance, as well as how the group has been able to function as a rebel government since taking over the Gaza Strip. The article also highlights the complex interactions between Hamas the political party, Hamas the effective government, and Hamas the non-state armed group.The organizational development of Hamas - the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya) - illustrates the complex role non-state armed groups can play as political, social, and military actors. Over the past two decades, Hamas evolved from a marginal political and military organization to a sophisticated, deeply embedded, and influential player in Palestinian politics. The group also transitioned from managing an extra-institutional network of social services to the of the Gaza Strip. Hamas's unique position as an insider political party and an outsider armed group, as well as its capacity to govern simultaneously through top-down institutional politics and bottom-up social welfare networks make the group an interesting case study when analyzing the link between state and non-state provision of governance, and between effective sovereignty and legitimacy.Since Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections and gained sole control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, most of the scholarship on the group has focused on understanding its evolution through the lenses of its foreign policy and strategy with respect to Israel. Considerably less emphasis has been placed on analyzing what the group's domestic policies and strategies as a could reveal about its organizational growth and adaptation. In turn, this outward focus reflects the assumption - well in line with a conventional understanding of rebel rulers and their motives - that governance is only of secondary importance to Hamas, and that its political strategy is primarily geared at achieving its extra-institutional objectives, while boosting its economic and military resources and imposing its ideological values.1This article tracks Hamas's political evolution and its governance record between 2007 and 2013, providing a perspective that goes beyond the notion of domestic governance as guided solely by the prism of ideology or self-enrichment. This analysis reveals an organization struggling between ideology and maximizing and preserving power, and consistently choosing to place the latter practical considerations above the former. Accordingly, Hamas's political leaders in Gaza have focused on centralization and political control, displaying more interest in establishing an authoritarian regime than in creating a Taliban state2 or in promoting a society of resistance. In achieving high levels of internal control over Gaza, the ongoing Israeli and international policy of nonengagement and isolation have unintentionally provided Hamas with an opportunity to maximize its power. In this sense, Hamas's decision to pursue reconciliation with its political foe, Fatah, by entering into a unity with them in April 2014 with the ultimate vision of relinquishing its control of Gaza in exchange for national integration - while outside the scope of this review - further confirms Hamas's pragmatic approach to governance. Indeed, this shift was more the product of a dramatic alteration in the group's regional status and alliances - resulting in growing political isolation and a steep financial crisis and producing deep internal frictions - than an ideological shift in the group's vision and priorities.A performance-based review of Hamas's governance record similarly strengthens the image of the group as guided by practical calculations when devising its own organizational strategies. …

To understand the social revolution in Cuba today one must be at once anthropologist, historian, sociologist, political scientist, scientist, economist, writer, philosopher, and something of a rebel oneself. In other words, one must be a Universal Man. Who of us today, however, would pretend to such all-encompassing knowledge? The Cuban Revolution in the nineteenth century, however, did produce such a man, José Martí. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that such a man produced the Revolution, at least in the sense that Marti was the main publicist for the revolutionary Cuban exiles, co-ordinator of the emigrant groups, money collector, and author of its major political documents.Although Marti ranks with Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín as a liberator, he is relatively unknown in the United States. Yet his collected works fill seventy-four volumes. One bibliography lists over 10,000 items, including more than a hundred books and more than 200 monographs written about him. Marti was first and last a revolutionist, but he was also a poet, one of the best, and highly praised by such authorities as Gabriela Mistral, Rubén Darío, Miguel de Unamuno, Fernando de los Ríos, Rufino Blanco Fombona, and Amado Nervo.

EXAMINING THE NEW. LATIN AMERICA Riordan Roett T,he field of Latin American Studies has undergone a dramatic shift in the last three decades. The study of Latin America and the Caribbean, with the exception of traditional diplomatic and historical studies in the immediate postwar period, changed dramatically with the advent of the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959. Great amounts of money from private foundations andthe publicsectorwere suddenly availablefor training a new generation ofarea specialists. Fluency in language received high priority, as was travel andresidence inthe region. Social scienceparadigms were added to the more traditional historical approaches to analyzing change in the Western Hemisphere. For a briefperiod in the 1960s, a new generation of "Latin Americanists " graduated from leading institutions in the United States. The new generation immediately confronteda series ofcritical policy andtheoretical issues that have marked the evolution of Latin American and Caribbean Studies for the last three decades. The first was the emergence in the mid1960s of a new kind of military dictatorship: the infamous BureaucraticAuthoritarian Regimes of South America. Fifteen years later, as a transition back to civilian government began, a second policy issue appeared: the decision by Latin American governments to abandon the post-1945 economic model of Import Substitution Development (ISD and embrace a market-driven model of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. Riordan Roett is Sarita and Don Johnston Professor and Director of The Latin American Studies Program at SAIS. 41 42 SAIS REVIEW For many observers the efficacy of the new economic model fell into jeopardy with the "lost decade" ofdebt in the region—the third important development. Followingthe oil price shock in 1973, LatinAmericangovernmentsborrowed heavily to avoid adjustment and to maintain theirpolitical legitimacy. Many borrowers were military regimes with little else to claim but economic performance. But by the early 1990s, the debt issue, while still significant, became far less prominent. Finally, in the early 1990s, as analysts reviewed the last three decades of development in the hemisphere, a fourth policy area has risen on the research agenda. It emphasizes social equity, participation, competitiveness , and investment strategies stressing people and skill. It offers the compelling argument that the region will repeat, in some variety, the same dreary saga ofbreakdown and non-democratic governance unless it gives individual citizens a greater stake in society. Like the three issues mentioned above, the human argument is incomplete in that the danger of breakdown is not necessarily irreversible. But the four themes are important to note, because they delineate the progression of professional and academic interest in Latin America and the Caribbean since the early 1960s and the heyday of the Revolution in Cuba. Regime Changes The 1950s in Latin America were years ofpolitical and economic populism . Relatively weak civilian governments ran up large budget deficits to satisfy the rapid growth of a new urban proletariat's consumption expédions . The proletariat evolved from a rapid movement from countryside to city in most countries after 1945. The emergence of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISD models ofdevelopment in the region created factory jobs. Urban workers were more readily available for mobilization by competing political parties, labor unions, professional associations and similar organizations. Governments were hard-pressed to implement programs of fiscal austerity with mounting pressure for morejobs, better education and housing, and social security. For most regimes, it was easiest to print money, to run an overvalued exchange rate, and to borrow. As a result ofa decline in investment, infrastructure , and technology, exports began to fall, further increasing the current account deficit. Widespread social unrest, often combined with the putative threat ofleftist agitation or subversion, led to a series ofmilitary takeovers which began in Brazil in 1964. Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile followed. On the continent, only Colombia and Venezuela escaped (Paraguay had a military government since the early 1950s). The new regimes were not a repetition of the in-and-out military dictatorships of the 1950s, because many officers in the regimes were EXAMINING THE NEW LATIN AMERICA 43 trained in economics and planning. In some countries, war colleges had offered a common program of study to both military officers and civilian technocrats, who shared a vision of an authoritarian political shield to...

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

Mexico’s 2012 presidential election was fought between two affluent career politicians and a millionaire businesswoman. The 2013 race in Chile pitted an economist against a physician. And the top candidates in last year’s presidential election in Brazil were both millionaire economists. The pattern is clear: Latin American democracies – like democracies all over the world – are disproportionately run by the rich. Although working-class jobs (informal workers, manual labor, and service industry jobs) make up the vast majority of the labor force in every Latin American country, only a tiny percentage of Latin American lawmakers come from those kinds of jobs. Like most places, Latin America is run by white-collar governments. Many journalists, pundits, and political observers take this aspect of the governing environment for granted in Latin America and elsewhere. (In 2013, commentators in Chile buzzed about having two female frontrunners in the presidential race. But they failed to note that both came from affluent backgrounds.) Perhaps they are so accustomed to welloff politicians that they simply see them as a natural feature of the political landscape. Or perhaps they believe that it does not matter whether politicians are drawn from one class or another. In the 1970s, scholars of comparative politics reached exactly that conclusion. After a handful of studies (which, in hindsight, probably had serious methodological problems) found that policymakers from different classes behave about the same in office, the eminent political scientist Robert Putnam concluded that “the assumption of a correlation between attitude and social origin lies behind most studies of the social backgrounds of elites, . . . most of the available evidence tends to disconfirm this assumption” (R. Putnam, unpublished manuscript: 93). A decade later, a sweeping review of the evidence available in the mid-1980s concluded that the existing data were “scattered and inconclusive” and “certainly [did] not add up to a finding that the social . . . [or] economic . . . biases of legislative recruitment result in a . . . policy bias of legislative institutions” (Matthews 1985: 25). In the mid-1990s, another review of the research reached the same conclusion: scholars had “not clearly established that the social background of politicians has a significant influence on their attitudes, values and behavior” (Norris and Lovenduski 1995: 12). Ever since, the idea that a legislator’s class does not matter has been the de facto conventional wisdom in the scholarly community. This conventional wisdom has helped fuel indifference about the overwhelmingly unequal social class makeup of the world’s political institutions. But new evidence suggests that the scholarly consensus may be wrong (Carnes 2013, and his contribution to this Swiss Political Science Review 21(2): 229–236 doi:10.1111/spsr.12162

Revolutions are the locomotives of history. Karl Marx Controversy over different views of “methodology” and “theory” is properly carried on in dose and continuous relation with substantive problems …. The character of these problems limits and suggests the methods and conceptions that are used and how they are used. C. Wright Mills Social Revolutions have been rare but momentous occurrences in modern world history. From France in the 1790s to Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century, these revolutions have transformed state organizations, class structures, and dominant ideologies. They have given birth to nations whose power and autonomy markedly surpassed their own prerevolutionary pasts and outstripped other countries in similar circumstances. Revolutionary France became suddenly a conquering power in Continental Europe, and the Russian Revolution generated an industrial and military superpower. The Mexican Revolution gave its homeland the political strength to become one of the most industrialized of postcolonial nations and the country in Latin America least prone to military coups. Since World War II, the culmination of a revolutionary process long underway has reunited and transformed a shattered China. And new social revolutions have enabled decolonizing and neocolonial countries such as Vietnam and Cuba to break the chains of extreme dependency. Nor have social revolutions had only national significance. In some cases social revolutions have given rise to models and ideals of enormous international impact and appeal—especially where the transformed societies have been large and geopolitically important, actual or potential Great Powers. The patriotic armies of revolutionary France mastered much of Europe. Even before the conquests and long after military defeat, the French revolutionary ideals of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” fired imaginations in quest of social and national liberation: The effects reached from Geneva to Santo Domingo, from Ireland to Latin America and India, and influenced subsequent revolutionary theorists from Babeuf to Marx and Lenin, to anticolonialists of the twentieth century. The Russian Revo lution astounded the capitalist West and whetted the ambitions of the emerging nations by demonstrating that revolutionary state power could, within the space of two generations, transform a backward agrarian country into the second-ranked industrial and military power in the world. What the Russian Revolution was for the first half of the twentieth century, the Chinese has been for the second half.