Revolutionary Government Research Articles

Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, 1979–1983 ed. by Nicole Phillip-Dowe and John Angus Martin

Reviewed by: Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, 1979–1983 ed. by Nicole Phillip-Dowe and John Angus Martin Robert Sierakowski (bio) Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, 1979–1983 Nicole Phillip-Dowe and John Angus Martin (ed.), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 189 pp. In the space of several days in October 1983, the Grenada Revolution, the first socialist revolution in the English-speaking Caribbean, came to its truly shocking conclusion. Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, the charismatic and internationally renowned leader of the New Jewel Movement (NJM), was treacherously assassinated along with several associates as part of an internal power struggle with other members of the revolutionary movement. Six days later, the United States administration of Ronald Reagan – which had long antagonized and threatened the People's Revolutionary Government– dispatched American military forces in a full-scale invasion of the tiny island nation (with the complicity of regional governments). The revolution's inspiring promise of a popular transformation that would provide health, education, and employment for the masses had not only been crushed by foreign intervention, but also discredited by the fratricidal violence within the NJM itself. This new edited volume by Nicole Phillip-Dowe and John Angus Martin returns to the dramatic events of the early 1980s and "captures the Grenada Revolution from a Grenada perspective" (xi). Aside from one essay, all of the papers were written by Grenadian authors from various personal perspectives and academic disciplines. The 12 chapters were selected from 16 papers presented at a 2016 University of the West Indies Open Campus conference held in Grenada. Given the more than three decades that have passed since the revolution's tragic denouement, the writers seek to foster a more nuanced and complex interpretation, transcending Manichean visions of "saints and devils, martyrs and traitors", as Shalini Puri puts it (176). Indeed, some of the early chapters prove rather polemical and controversial revisions of received wisdom. Lawrence A. Joseph, for example, looks back on the March 1979 uprising that toppled the regime of Eric Gairy, arguing that in strictly juridical [End Page 203] terms "the revolution" amounted to a mere coup d'état by "usurpers" (17), given the NJM's inability to impose a new institutional order through democratic elections. Joseph Ewart Layne, on the other hand, writes from the first-hand perspective of a revolutionary leader who spent 26 years behind bars following the American invasion for his role in the events of 1983. While he offers something of a mea culpa for NJM errors and abuses, he insists that it was the leadership's "missteps in strategy formation and implementation" that led to the disastrous outcome, rather than "ideological conflict and personal ambition for power" (29–30). Many of the chapters in volume's middle section look back on the revolution's four-and-a-half years of social transformation in areas such as women's rights, youth engagement, and church–state relations. In many of these spheres, the papers aim to document both the hope, creativity, and promise of these idealistic revolutionary projects, while acknowledging the far messier historical realities. Nicole Phillip-Dowe's chapter on the National Women's Organization (NWO) established during the revolution demonstrates the many successes of this group in educational and social projects directed at children, as well as its leading role in community development, such as improving roads and cleaning up neighbourhoods. At the same time, she shows how the NWO functioned as a subsidiary of the NJM and, despite successful reforms (such as the Maternity Leave and Equal Pay Laws), it remained very difficult for prominent women to balance party work and family obligations. In her chapter, Claudette Joseph describes her experiences as a part of the revolution's Young Pioneers movement as a child, recalling the early 1980s as a period with "a deep sense of community, national pride and patriotism" (79). Her memories of childhood in the revolutionary era are extremely positive, as she reflects on the various initiatives that she personally experienced during that heady period of social transformation. As with Phillip-Dowe's discussion of the NWO, however, Joseph also details the darker aspects of the years of New Jewel rule, such as...

“This infant Borough”: The Corporate Political Identity of Eighteenth-Century Norfolk

The rapidly growing eighteenth-century port city of Norfolk, Virginia, occupied an unusual position. It was the largest city in a colony known for its rural gentry culture and also a formally incorporated borough in an era when urban corporate independence was increasingly unusual in the British Atlantic. This essay explores Norfolk’s corporate political identity and argues that it was crucial to the city’s position in a planter-dominated society. The charter helped reconcile the city’s need for local authority over trade and urban policing with the planter elite’s suspicion of commerce by effectively quarantining the port city outside the planters’ political world. As tensions rose within the British Empire during the 1760s, however, the borough’s corporate authority became a contentious issue, as planters asserted their civic authority to regulate trade. The planter revolutionaries’ suspicion of Norfolk’s corporate status led to the showdown between the borough and the new revolutionary government and eventually to the destruction of the city in January 1776. These experiences informed the efforts of Virginia’s new state government to craft a unique subsidiary status for municipal government in the 1780s. Norfolk’s corporate status is therefore crucial to understanding the republican political economic vision of Virginia’s planter class.

American Middle East Policy: Pragmatism or Fata Morgana?

American Middle East Policy:Pragmatism or Fata Morgana? Juan Romero (bio) Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon. The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. xviii + 396 pp. Notes and index. $28.95. Osamah F. Khalil. America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. x + 426 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. Students of Middle East history know that instability in the Middle East did not originate with the Cold War, but this worldwide conflict contributed to the perpetuation of earlier tensions in the region, at the same time as it fueled new rivalries and conflicts. The early Cold War was characterized by tension between Arabs and Israelis, revolutionary governments and conservative monarchies, nationalists and extra-regional powers, and efforts by the two superpowers to increase their influence in the region. The later period of the Cold War brought the superpowers closer to a direct confrontation, as a result of intensifying Arab-Israeli tension, Israel's acquisition of nuclear capability, and superpower machinations. Two new works aim at shedding light on the role of the United States in the Middle East during the superpower conflict. The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East by Roy Takeyh and Steven Simon examines U.S. policies toward the Middle East from the perspective of high politics, with the title containing the book's main argument in a nutshell. The second book is America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State by Osama. F. Khalil. In this work the author focuses on a little studied subject—the interrelationship between American knowledge production about the Middle East, academia, and U.S. policies toward the region. As in the case of the first work, the title provides a clear indication of the book's main argument—the close relationship between formulation of U.S. foreign policy and academic scholarship and other expertise on the Middle East. Both studies complement one another since they examine two different aspects of the Cold War and draw different conclusions regarding U.S. policies toward the region. [End Page 672] The authors of The Pragmatic Superpower are well qualified to take on the complex and difficult task of assessing American foreign policy as it relates to the Middle East during the Cold War. Both authors have an academic background and have served in the Department of State. Takeyh and Simon examine ten crises which had the potential to grow into serious regional conflicts or even confrontations between superpowers. The chapters are evenly split between the early- and late-Cold War, with the Six-Day War of 1967 serving as the chronological dividing line. Unlike early scholarship on the Cold War, which was frequently preoccupied with assigning blame for the conflict to the Soviet Union, later succeeded by a trend to reexamine superpower tension and advance the argument that the United States played a much more prominent role in causing friction between the two superpowers, Takeyh and Simon have adopted an innovative approach to the Cold War. They treat it as a learning process illustrated by the ability of American administrations to change or rectify policies which did not produce the desired result. This ability to adapt and adjust—styled "pragmatism" by the authors—has led them to conclude that American administrations achieved their stated objective of denying Soviet leaders control of Middle Eastern natural resources and minds. Furthermore, this conclusion yields the concomitant argument that U.S. policy in the region during the Cold War was successful and amounted to making the right decisions, which, according to Takeyh and Simon, includes the recognition of the state of Israel in 1948 (p. 49). Both conclusions without doubt deserve further examination. Many scholars in the field are more critical of U.S. Cold War policies than Takeyh and Simon. One example is Ervand Abrahamian, who notes in his The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian relations (2013), that it was the efforts of American and British oil companies to secure oil concessions in northern...

Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, decolonization, and the Third World Order by Jeffrey James Byrne

Reviewed by: Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, decolonization, and the Third World Order by Jeffrey James Byrne Carolyn Barnett Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, decolonization, and the Third World Order By Jeffrey James Byrne. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. When it gained independence from France in 1962, Algeria immediately faced a mass exodus of the pieds noirs, the European inhabitants of French Algeria. Soon afterward, it encountered an influx of outsiders referred to as pieds rouges ("red feet"), a hodge-podge of leftists, revolutionaries and other idealists from around the globe attracted to the "Mecca of Revolution," Algiers, a city full of radical possibilities. In Mecca of Revolution, Jeffrey James Byrne traces the emergence and evolution of Algerian nationalists' connection to broader Third World and revolutionary currents and how Algeria shaped the evolution of the international system from the early twentieth century to the mid-1960s. The book is organized into five chapters which proceed in roughly chronological order. "Method Men," encompassing the emergence of the nationalist movement to the mid-point of the war, emphasizes the Algerians' greater focus on the praxis of revolution than on ideology and their early links with the international community. "Our Friends Today" discusses how, largely due to the collapse of the insurgency inside Algeria, the FLN embraced aggressive diplomacy in the West and East and began building deeper links with Cuba and with African independence movements, reflecting an embrace of the transformative power of Third Worldism as a concept. "Real Existing Third Worldism" explores the ambiguities and tensions that arose domestically as Ben Bella sought to implement a "specifically Algerian" brand of socialism and to play various foreign benefactors against one another so that Algeria would not become beholden to any particular outside patron. This course of action began to stir domestic opposition from those who resented the increasingly global and cosmopolitan orientation of the leadership in Algiers. "The Allure of Globalism" argues that independent Algeria's early foreign policy demonstrated that "Third Worldist ideals could indeed provide the basis for a practical and consistent foreign policy" (223). The final chapter, "Mecca of Impatience and Anxiety," argues that former Algerian President Houari Boumedienne—who overthrew Ben Bella—and his "political clan" took advantage of growing tensions between the project of building a nation-state and Ben Bella's aggressive pursuit of an activist version of nonalignment to bring down the leader they saw as a threat to collective decision-making. Several themes run through Byrne's work. First, he argues that Algeria's actions and those of other Third World powers demonstrate that the increasing globalization of politics reinforced the primacy of the nation-state as the organizing unit of the international system. In order to act effectively within the international system, Byrne argues, Algerian and other postcolonial (or aspiring postcolonial) leaders had to strengthen their claims to national sovereignty. Second, Byrne shows how the composition of the "Third World" ideology and community were the subject of significant contestation. In particular, by 1965, actors were divided as to whether the Third World was to be defined "programmatically," as "a movement with an agenda that was open to any who shared its political and economic goals," or as "the expression of an innate identity… limited to non-Western regions or races" (282). Algeria's leaders were partial to programmatic definitions, which suited their interests and reflected their convictions. Third, Byrne underscores that a balance of pragmatic and principled motives drove Algerian foreign policy decision-making. Algeria sought to protect its territory from the ambitions of Moroccan and Tunisian leaders, and it saw little hope of steering the course of events in the Arab east, where revolutionary regimes under Nasser in Egypt and the Ba'ath Party in Syria and Iraq were already pursuing competing visions of Arab nationalism. In Africa, by contrast, Algeria proved itself a leader of anticolonial activism and postcolonial political organization, although its selective provision of arms and training to insurgent movements across the continent contributed, in time, to increasing polarization. Relations with Cuba and Yugoslavia were strong largely because of ideological affinities, but the former had also to be contained so as not to threaten Algeria's precarious relationship with the...

Real and Imaginary Friends in Revolutionary France: Quakers, Political Culture, and the Atlantic World

In 1791 a group of French and American Quakers petitioned the French revolutionary government to grant the Protestant sect exemptions from taking up arms and swearing an oath to the nation. Their petition ultimately failed, but an analysis of this event reveals a simultaneous attraction to Quaker cosmopolitanism, egalitarianism, and friendship and rejection of religious privilege in pursuit of a limited citizenry. This article focuses on the political connotations and multivalent symbolism of Quakerism for a set of revolutionaries attempting to reorient the political realm’s relationship with the religious.

Santos reyes. Virtuosos Incas. Antiguos tiranos: imagen de la monarquía en la homilética sagrada rioplatense (SS. XVIII-XIX)

La homilética fue un instrumento de defensa del orden político establecido o de crítica al régimen en decadencia que puede caracterizarse como un discurso religioso con fuerte contenido doctrinal e ideológico que alcanzaba a un amplio auditorio. Se pronunciaba en fiestas marianas, exequias del monarca o celebraciones cívico-religiosas. Buscaba construir modelos ideales de comportamiento transmitiendo valores y representaciones desde la cosmovisión católica; pero también fueron creadores y difusores de opinión, como piezas de teología política en las que se buscaba legitimar a la Corona o al gobierno revolucionario. Se tomaban así como figuras ideales a los santos, la Virgen o a los reyes canonizados. Se analiza aquí qué imagen de la monarquía se predicaba en general y el conjunto de ideas y creencias que sobre la figura de los monarcas españoles en particular se construyeron durante los períodos tardo-virreinal y revolucionario, en los que no dejaban de incidir los avatares político-revolucionarios y los proyectos de organización institucional.

Milagros Camayon Guerrero. Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898–1902 (with an introduction by Vicente L. Rafael). Quezon City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2015, 295p.

Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898-1902 (with an introduction by Vicente L. Rafael) Milagros Camayon Guerrero Quezon City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2015, 295p.Luzon at War has been long in coming. As a dissertation at the University of Michigan in 1977, it has eluded Filipino historians for years; that it is finally out as a book is a happy occasion. Prior to the writing of Luzon at War, its author-Milagros Guerrero-has co-written with the celebrated Filipino historian Teodoro Agoncillo the highly influential History of the Filipino People, and has also worked with renowned historian Renato Constantino in the edition of the five-volume compendium The Philippine Insurgent Records. As such, when she arrived in the United States for her graduate studies, wrote Vicente Rafael, she was already known as a scholar of the Philippines (p. 3). She has delved into the genre of history from below and studied the tumultuous period of the Philippine Revolution and the nascent republic from the perspective of the periphery and the marginalized. She has looked beyond the political developments in social and political centers of and Manila, examining the social realities of the Revolution among the masses in the provinces instead. Using declassified sources on the Filipino state, taxation, landownership, and popular movements in particular, Luzon at War illustrates the variegated discord in society from 1898 to 1902, as the Spanish colonizers exited and the republic fought for its existence by warding off the onslaught of the American imperialists on the islands and its people.Five chapters comprise the book. Guerrero painstakingly provides a serious and realistic analysis of the mechanisms of political and social change outside Manila and Malolos and introduces her readers to the difficulties of both the government and the governed during the birth of the Philippine nation state (p. 23). She claims that in 1898 the Tagalog provinces of Luzon welcomed the Revolutionary Government by Emilio Aguinaldo. Townsmen organized militias, which attacked Spanish outposts and welcomed state envoys and other insurgent troops. To underline the country's independence and prove that Filipinos could govern, Aguinaldo called for a nationwide reorganization. In response Manila, still at a quandary from the occupation of American and Filipino forces and nearby provinces elected prominent members from the cacique ilustrado or principalia (landowning, educated or privileged) class. Conflict characterized the transfer of power-civilian appointees contended with military commanders, who were uneasy to share powers or refused to accept their subservience to civilians. Free from the constraints of the outgoing colonial regime, which they also served, and far from the central Aguinaldo government in Malolos, new provincial officials collected taxes and rents and maintained peace and internal security with impunity. Longentrenched ruling families used their new position to demand personal services, extort old and new taxes, and embezzle public funds, earning the ire of the masses who expected real and lasting change following the Spanish colonizers.In Luzon support for the revolution, according to Guerrero, rested on people's opposition to the colonial taxation and friar control of political and social life and vast tracks of arable land. Correspondingly, upon its ascent to power, the Aguinaldo government abolished forced labor and took control of friar lands. To support itself and its ongoing war with the Americans, the Aguinaldo government enforced a war tax on every citizen, required those who could not pay to serve either in civil or military public works and demanded rent from the use of agricultural land. It disbanded militias and encouraged citizens to return to cultivation. The economy stagnated, nonetheless. From 1898 to 1902 typhoons, floods, and epidemics like malaria and rinderpest repeatedly hit Central Luzon, its people, and animal resources. …

PETROCARIBE AND THE VENEZUELAN CLAIM OVER THE ESSEQUIBO: A POLITICAL CULTURE VERSUS THE POLICY OF THE CULTURE

Cultural identity can define political interests through particular policies that advance such identity, while, on the other hand, there is political culture where political calculations are pre-eminent. Both of these tendencies are present in the case involving the Venezuelan energy initiative PETROCARIBE and its very poor outcomes. The PETROCARIBE initiative launched by Hugo Chávez as a part of a pact to assist in the economic and social development of countries in the Caribbean while enhancing Venezuelan ideological influence and regional power countered challenges, among which were cultural barriers embedded in the very making of the Carribean as a region. Cultural barriers were also evident in the recent ‘betrayal’ of Venezuela by the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM), which backed Guyana over Venezuela in the competing claims over the territory of Essequibo. Is culture the real obstacle to Venezuela’s quest for its Caribbean identity? Though there are many examples in the world of successful integration involving countries of different cultures, this article argues that the PETROCARIBE initiative in a region whose region-ness is complex and more imagined than real was a huge political mistake that may contribute to the fall of the revolutionary government in Venezuela.

The Rise and Fall of Dairy Cows in Socialist Cuba

Abstract The Cuban revolution of 1959 represents in some sense a reaction against the traditional and omnipresent dominance of sugar cane agroindustry in the countryside and national economy. The first agrarian reform of 17 May provoked reaction from estates under foreign and local ownership and the confrontation with the US government, who supported their companies and maintained a secular control over Cuba’s economy. Consequently, the revolutionary government moved towards new alliances with the communist block and proclaimed the socialist character of the revolution. With this new support and because of difficulties with programmes for agricultural diversification and industrialisation, from 1964 there began a new age of sugar exportation under the control of the State, as an engine of the economy. At the same time, the government developed programmes for other crops and the modernisation and diversification of livestock production to create the basis for industrialisation. Until the 1980s, the intensification of Cuban agriculture depended on the huge increase of mechanisation, chemical fertilisation and irrigation in order to increase yields and replace human and animal labour. Besides increasing agricultural exportation, the goal was the growth of local food supply, for example of animal protein sources. This model had some achievements, but in parallel increased dependency on external inputs and created different environmental problems. Finally, the vulnerabilities of this model were evident after the crisis of the Cuban economy in the 1990s, when the support of the former Soviet Union ended. Intensive agriculture suffered a big collapse, mainly in the export-oriented crops and intensive livestock markets, opening a new age for an agricultural model less dependent on external inputs, with more attention to local resources, and the beginnings of some level of recovery from centuries of ecological deterioration in the rural landscape.

Dangerous lessons

Contemporary research on the international diffusion of civil conflict privileges physical, proximity-based variables like conflict spillover and refugee flows. I argue that the international diffusion of civil strife can occur through a learning mechanism, and that this phenomenon may occur on a worldwide basis. Individuals most likely to rebel, or proto-rebels, may learn about the utility of rebellion before mobilizing and violently challenging the state. Such international learning therefore occurs during the pre-conflict process. International sources by which proto-rebels learn include active, ongoing civil wars, as well as revolutionary governments that have been founded by rebels victorious in past wars. Revolutionary governments radically shock the international system, teaching proto-rebels about the possible benefits to be gained from violently challenging the state. In order to test these assertions, I undertake empirical analyses using militant organization data that capture the year in which rebel movements first emerge, during the period 1968–2001. I then explore the spatial and temporal relationships between rebel movement emergence, civil conflict, and revolutionary regimes, using the country-year as my unit of analysis. I further examine how these relationships are attenuated by cultural and regime-type similarity. I find, in line with the literature, that active civil conflicts generally inspire rebel mobilization only in directly neighboring states, while revolutionary regimes established after rebel victories are associated with mobilization on a global basis. I conclude that proto-rebels learn and take inspiration from some global sources of information, and that significant analytical utility is to be gained by focusing on revolutionary regimes established as a result of rebel victories, as well as mobilization in the pre-conflict process.

States + War + Movements = Repression

Sidney Tarrow. (2015). War, States, & Contention: A Comparative Historical Study. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, xiv + 314 pp., $27.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-5317-5). Sidney Tarrow has written a rich, insightful, and depressing book. In tracing the interplay between war, state-making, and popular movements across European and American history, he shows how states have generally emerged ever stronger and more controlling over time. Tarrow’s latest work is inspired by his long relationship with Charles Tilly, as co-author and joint researcher. Tarrow noted a major gap in Tilly’s work: while Tilly had developed a theory of how war contributed to state-making, and had written extensively on social movements, Tilly had not linked the two strands of work. Tarrow, however, shows that wars produce movements and movements produce wars, and that state-making is profoundly shaped by the movements that produce wars or result from them. Tarrow begins by looking at two major historical episodes in which movements led to wars, and one in which war produced a state-changing movement. The first case is France and its revolutionary wars. The movements to rationalize the French monarchy’s web of tax and status laws and to limit absolute state and church authority in 18th-century France eventually led to the French Revolution. The revolutionary change of regime then spurred two kinds of wars. The first was an international war, as other European states reacted to the anti-aristocratic character of the new regime and the revolutionaries sought to protect and extend their new domain of liberty. The second was a civil war, inflaming regions where the nationalist and centralizing actions of the revolutionary government clashed with local pro-clerical, regionalist, and traditionalist views. Tarrow makes much of the well-known contradictions of the Revolution: that the new regime with its claims of equality and liberty for all citizens was able to raise an ideologically inspired mass citizen army, which swept through all the aristocratically structured militaries … jgoldsto{at}gmu.edu

Cities under Siege: Flood in 1931 and Environmental Challenges of Chinese Urban Modernization

The paper explores the connection between China’s urban modernization and the resulted environmental vulnerabilities revealed in the 1931 flood. The flood in 1931 is believed to be the deadliest disaster in 20th century China with one-fourth of China’s population affected. The paper challenges the conventional view that the flood was an “unavoidable” natural disaster mainly caused by bad weather conditions (namely heavy rain, a historic high water level, and low-lying ground of the Jianghan plain). The explanation does not address why key urban centers along the Yangzi appeared unusually vulnerable and suffered great loss in the flood of 1931. The paper takes the worst affected urban region in 1931—Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang as focus of the study. Flood prevention was historically important to the three riverine cities. In traditional China the walled cities with designed hydraulic schemes often provided shelters for people from rural hinterland during the time of flooding. However the three cities were only found defenseless in 1931 after experiencing the rapid urban modernization since the late 19th century. The study specifically examines the urban reconstruction efforts made in the Qing and the Republic and their impacts on the urban flood protection prior to 1931. It explores how the shifting focus of the government from agriculture to trade prioritized urban developmental pattern incompatible with the traditional water-control design. For instance, the rapid urban sprawl since the late Qing caused the reclamation of wetlands and lakes outside city walls preserved as high-water discharge zone. The dismantling of the flood-resistant city walls, locks and moat seriously weakened the traditional urban drains system. In addition, the birth of “the developmental state” in the Republic era marked a new chapter of the Chinese centralized urban modernization with technocratic confidence and industrial ambition. After 1927 the urban social reform reflected a drastic rupture in the government’s policy and societal practice in water control. The concentration of power on the revolutionary government in the cities resulted in the decline of local organizations used to assume water control responsibility at the community level. They were replaced by centrally appointed modernist urban planners who were often ignorant about local condition and traditional wisdom and practice of water control.

Women in Cuba: The Emancipatory Revolution

The triumph of the Cuban Revolution has created the most remarkable political, economic and social upheaval in the history of Latin America. Since its beginning in 1959, the new government, led by Fidel Castro, has placed the poor – especially women and people of colour, the principal victims of the discrimination inherent in patriarchal and segregationist societies – at the centre of their reformist project. The Revolution ‘of the humble, by the humble and for the humble’,1 was designed to lay the foundation for a new era, one marked by equality and freed from the throes of the injustice linked to the history and social structures of the country. Cuban women were the immediate priority for the revolutionary government. In 1960, the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) was created. Its president was Vilma Espín Dubois, the wife of Raúl Castro and a fully committed activist in the struggle against the dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista. This article examines the status of women at the triumph of the Revolution, and assesses the concrete steps taken to disseminate and implement the idea of equal rights and equal opportunities between men and women and to erase prejudice and cultural stereotypes. Firstly, special attention is paid to the role of women before the triumph of the Revolution. Secondly, the new government's actions aimed at enabling this sector of society to achieve true emancipation and full citizenship are analysed. Finally, beyond the soaring declarations of principle, the article examines the status of Cuban women today and assesses their integration into the political, economic and social life of the country.

El automóvil y los mapas en la integración del territorio mexicano, 1929-1962

This article examines a new social geography opened by the use of the automobile and maps in the Mexican territory between 1929 and 1962. In this temporary scenery, the construction of roads during a considerable span of the 20th Century has been identified as part of the modernization plan of the revolutionary governments of Mexico. This infrastructure furnished the opportunity of getting to know the wide variety of landscapes of the country as never before. A set of new traveling experiences was offered to the middle class at the same time that such diversity of Mexican landscapes caused different emotions through the “pleasure” of personally contemplating the rivers, mountains, trees, vegetation, the sea, the hamlets, towns or cities.A central element of this perspective was occupied by the automobile; its presence in Mexico meant a cultural novelty with deep effects and changes in the Mexican society of the 20th Century. The new technological element worked as a new mechanism that started circulating by the roads to observe the landscape. Because of this, we propose the application of three key concepts of space analysis: the circulation territory, the visual territory and the experience territory. Each one of them represents the many sides of the landscape as one study object, and of geography interest, as described below.The territory of circulation came about when the railroads decline started in the twenties and consolidated in the sixties of the past century. That is why in this section we first place a comparative perspective of the motorization levels through the number of inhabitants per automobile in several Latin-American countries having available ordered historical statistics on the matter. Results show a long construction of the automobile culture in this geographic region; construction that incorporated new communication and evolution forms of social groups. This set of elements was later related with the construction of roads and the cartographic production. In the first case, Mexico took important steps to pass from ten thousand kilometers to almost sixty thousand in the study period. This evolution, between 1929 and 1962, was registered, in the second case, in a series of maps showing paved roads and the national scale. The set of maps registered the evolution of the country roads and broadened the conventional or domestic freedom of transit to adventure beyond the Mexican capital and immerse in the landscapes around the country's three main roads.In the following section, the visual territory was examined. This concept leads to inquire about the representation of the landscape in some guides for motorists published in Mexico between the twenties and sixties of the past century. Attention is focused, in this point, in the maps, the photographs and texts in the pages of these consultation materials that, as cultural products, have the capacity of changing what is far away and unknown of the landscape in familiar and desirable among a middle class public that was getting deeper into that territory. In this section, two points are remarkable: first the preference shown towards the Valley of Mexico in the guides selected, making it the first option before the travelers sight, that is, to know the closes landscape thus transforming this region in the “nation's visual emblem”. On the other hand, in each studied guide, the car's departure was placed in the central gate of the National Palace, where the National Roads Commission fixed the starting point of all the roads constructed in Mexico. Thus the center was set in the ancient Vice-royal building associating this historical site with the geographical origin of the country. This cultural reference was established as the place of national identity and the automobile as the icon of mobility disseminating modernity through Mexico.In the last section, the territory of experience was presented. Through it, the impressions of some travelers were identified as part of the traveling experience, the expanding horizon and the new visual experiences arising from a variety of landscapes crossed by the automobile, in the mountains, and towns of destination after hours of driving. For this part, traveler's testimonies have been selected that originating in Mexico City, enjoyed and appreciate the landscapes in the three main open roads of the country: the Pacific one, and the North, and West ones. This perspective of granting more attention to the automobile and the maps is integrated to the processes of homogenization and integration of the territory in the Mexican 20th Century.

‘Shrouded in Some Mystery’: The Governor General's Invitation and the 1983 Grenada Intervention

ABSTRACTOn 25 October 1983 the United States, supported by several Caribbean states, intervened militarily in the commonwealth Caribbean island of Grenada. Operation Urgent Fury followed the implosion of the Marxist-Leninist People's Revolutionary Government and execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and several colleagues. This article examines the alleged request for external assistance made by the Grenadian governor general, Sir Paul Scoon. It will examine the discrepancies between Scoon's memoir account of the episode and the official record to reveal that Scoon made no such request. The origins of the request emerged from discussions between Caribbean and US officials and it was brought to fruition by the Barbadian prime minister, Tom Adams.

The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front ed. by James J. Gigantino II

Reviewed by: The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front ed. by James J. Gigantino II Mark Edward Lender (bio) KEY WORDS American Revolution, Revolutionary War, New Jersey, Patriots, Tories, Slavery, Homefront The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front. Edited by James J. Gigantino II. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Pp. 209. Paper, $29.95.) The Revolutionary experience of the small state of New Jersey was in many ways a microcosm of the larger struggle for American independence. The colony saw more combat than any other province, its civilians struggled to survive seven years of fiercely contested civil war, and its Revolutionary government labored under enormous difficulties to establish an effective polity. These subjects, as well as the efforts of New Jersey loyalists, women, blacks, and others to find their ways in the midst of military and social upheaval, remain an active focus for scholarship. Among the latest contributions in this regard are the nine original essays in The American Revolution in New Jersey, edited by James J. Gigantino II. As a rule I dislike reviewing essay collections: Without a firm editorial hand contributions tend to be of uneven quality, overlap in subject matter, or drift off the stated focus of the collection. This volume, however, avoids these pitfalls and is well worth reading. The essays, all by different authors, deal with the intersections of military and domestic affairs; the goal, as editor Gigantino puts it, is to allow “a fuller understanding of the personal impact of the American Revolution on the lives of the colonists.” That is, the essayists use a local focus to draw wider conclusions (either directly or implicitly) on the nature of the Revolution and its [End Page 821] meaning for those who lived through it and built on its aftermath. Contributors explore “how ordinary New Jerseyans dealt with Patriot, Loyalist, British, Hessian and French soldiers in their own backyards” and resulting connections with “the larger global conflict” (5). Within this context, the authors address the social implications of militia service, war-related production and labor, the changing roles of women, questions of political loyalty, the dilemmas of slavery in a war fought in the name of liberty, and the nature of the Revolution itself. Some of these essays are gems. Robert Selig, whose previous scholarship has offered revealing insights on the Franco–American alliance, turns his attention to the French army in New Jersey. The French arrival in 1781 amounted to yet another invasion as thousands of troops under the Comte de Rochambeau marched into the state. Selig rightly points out the ambivalence of residents toward the mostly Catholic French; they had been feared enemies during the French and Indian War. But the French were disciplined and injected thousands of dollars in hard cash into New Jersey’s war-ravaged economy. That fact alone was enough to make new friends of old foes. Michael S. Adelberg, whose work in quantifying the physical and economic costs of political loyalties already is the best in the literature (of any state), once again proves a master of micro-analysis. Despite a vicious civil war, property-holding among Monmouth County residents remained generally at pre-war levels, allowing Adelberg to make some interesting speculations on the nature of “revolution” in the New Jersey context. If there were no massive losses or additions of property, then how radical was the Revolution in social terms? This is a fine piece of scholarship. So is Todd W. Braisted’s hard look at the fighting around Fort Lee in 1781, which offers a graphic view of the bitterness of the patriot–Tory struggle and the social impact on the region as the fighting impinged on civilian life. Most of the essays demonstrate a firm command of the pertinent primary sources and secondary scholarship on the Revolution, and several do so particularly well. For example, drawing on the pioneering work of T. H. Breen’s The Marketplace of Revolution (Oxford, UK, 2004), Donald Sherbolm skillfully ties the loyalism of a successful Hunterdon County farming family (the Voughts) to its “assimilation into the British Atlantic culture” (168). Sherbolm then traces the plight...

A Policy Long Past Its Expiration Date: US Economic Sanctions Against Cuba

The embargo against Cuba is the oldest and most comprehensive U.S. economic sanctions regime against any country in the world. It comprises a complex patchwork of laws and presidential determinations imposed over half a century. Presidents have tightened or relaxed it to suit their own strategy—some seeking to punish the Cuban regime by economic pressure, other seeking to improve relations by resorting to soft power rather than hard. The impact of U.S. sanctions has also varied, at times inflicting serious harm on the Cuban economy, and at times being merely as an expensive annoyance. But the embargo has never been effective at forcing Cuba's revolutionary regime out of power or bending it to Washington's will.

“Mexicans are good flyers”: militarized airpower, aviation idols, and aviation diplomacy in revolutionary Mexico

This article examines the evolution of military aviation in Mexico, a process that started in the final months of the Porfiriato and continued throughout the 1910–1920 Revolutionary War. The improvements and gradual standardization of government aircraft through the reconstruction period of the following two decades helped ensure the defeat of numerous military rebellions and popular insurrections. The revolutionary regimes of this period also manipulated the image of famous federal aviators to promote a discourse of modernization and development prior to World War II. The pervasive influence of private and public US influences was evident throughout this time, in spite of nationalist government rhetoric.

The social contract and the Iraqi state

Abstract The Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003 destroyed the Iraqi state in an effort to implant a neoliberal order consonant with wider global design. Despite the humanitarian devastation, however, the destruction of the Iraqi state was insufficient to fracture the national sense of commonweal developed over the modern period. The occupation and implanted new political regime, therefore, focused on the elimination of the widespread and popular Iraqi commitment to beneficial social goods arising out of the exploitation of national resources. Akin to the modern Iraqi state’s effort to develop national citizenry as informed by the ancient archeological record of civilized habitation, a project that met with the defilement of Iraqi culture following 2003, the modern state project had also bound Iraqis to a citizenship based on social programs supported by the natural wealth found under Iraqi soil. With the CPA and its successor governments, the tether between Iraq’s various communities was ruptured through sectarianism and immense political violence. Through a novel exploration of the concept of social contract, this article explores what held Iraqis together as a community and the concerted effort to fracture those ties. The revolutionary government under Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim is highlighted for its role in crafting the progressive and aspirational social compact that successor regimes – regardless of orientation – heeded in order the legitimize themselves. The Ba’thist alterations and modifications are explored in an effort to better understand the landscape prior to the devastation of war, sanctions and occupation that came to confront the Iraqi people with such ruthlessness. Such an analysis presents potential for the formulation of future research to identify successive indigenous solutions to the cleavages found within Iraqi society. Such native solutions would seemingly better inform potential pathways out of the conflagration escalated through external imposition.

The Ethiopian Revolution after 40 Years (1974–2014)

In this article, I reflect on the sociopolitical impact and memory construction of the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. Decades have passed and a new political leadership has reshaped Ethiopian society after the demise of the Ethiopian revolutionary regime in May 1991, but the effects are still felt. The violent political drama of the 1970s and 1980s redefined the Ethiopian political tradition and the practices of (political) violence in the light of new revolutionary ideologies, mainly imported from abroad. The post-1991 regime has shown a particular way of handling the aftermath of the 1974 events, but evinces a number of continuities with the ideologies and practices of that era – if only because all participants and current rulers were part of the same revolutionary (student) generation. The regime presently in power is thus partly a successor regime to the “socialist” regime, having started with largely a similar socioeconomic and Marxist-ideological program. At least in one central aspect, the two regimes differ: in their practical response to the “nationalities question.” The handling of this issue after 1991 by the current regime of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front – Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (EPRDF-TPLF) has confirmed that today we in fact may see “Plan B” of the 1974 revolution being consolidated. We analyze the two strains of the Ethiopian revolution and comment on the how and why of their different paths since 1974.