The Aztecs discovered petroleum in Mexico and used it before the arrival of the Spanish in 1519. They burned it in tribute to their gods, caulked their canoes with it, smeared it on their bodies as a medicine, and utilized it as a dye and a glue. Over three centuries elapsed before an effort was made to turn black gold into cash. Ten years after Edwin L. Drake drilled his famous well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, a group of Mexicans unsuccessfully attempted to produce oil on the “Furbero” hacienda near Papantla in Vera Cruz state. It was not until May 1901 that Edward L. Doheny, a wily product of the rough-and-tumble American oil industry in which he had amassed a fortune, struck oil in Ébano, a jungle region of San Luis Potosí. Another pioneer in the development of Mexico's petroleum industry was Weeman Pearson, later Lord Cowdray, a Yorkshire entrepreneur who formed the fabulously profitable Mexican Eagle (Aguila) Company after discovering the “Golden Lane” fields in 1908 (Bermúdez, 1963; Sampson, 1975: 83-85; Grayson, 1978a).

During the Cuban revolution's first decade, Fidel Castro's charismatic authority and predominant position eclipsed the significance of the new institutions created to replace the prerevolutionary political order. The “institutionalization” under way in Cuba since 1970, however, has strengthened and formalized the political structure to the extent that the island's institutions can no longer be regarded as peripheral to the dynamics of Cuban politics. This is particularly true of the Communist party of Cuba, which has emerged from the 1970s as the central political institution. The way in which the party has developed not only highlights some of the problems inherent in the process of creating a new political order, but is also essential for understanding contemporary Cuban politics.

The relationship between ideas and political action represents a continuing, albeit frustrating, point of contention among political analysts. Referring to the literature on ideology, Robert Putnam reflects this sentiment by noting, “Few concepts in social analysis have inspired such a mass of commentary yet few have stimulated the production of so little cumulative knowledge about society and politics. The lack of cumulation is due, above all, to recurrent confusion of empirical with definitional issues and of both with normative concerns” (Putnam, 1971: 651). The proliferation of definitions, measurement techniques, and frameworks for analyzing the concept should not be surprising because “for the political scientist the term ideology points to a cluster concept, i.e., belongs to the concepts that bracket a variety of complex phenomena about which one tries to generalize” (Sartori, 1969: 398).

In 1973 Alfred Stepan published an article with the descriptive title “The New Professionalism of Internal Warfare and Military Role Expansion.” In this article, he used the cases of Brazil and Peru to discuss “how the ideology of new professionalism arose and how it contributed to the expansion of the military's role in politics.” He proposed to do this by identifying “some of the institutional and political variables that are peculiar to Brazil and that help account for some of the special characteristics of the present military regime” (1973). He then set out the paradigms of the “old professionalism” as formulated in the carefully constructed analysis of Samuel P. Huntington (1957) and compared these to the stated missions and observed activities of the Brazilian army in the 1960s. This comparison led him to conclude that because the army's missions and activities were clearly different from those in the Huntington model they must flow from a different definition of the military profession rather than merely being lapses from the “old professionalism” (Stepan, 1973: 48).

In geographic studies of modernization, attention has tended to focus on the processes of urbanization and the characteristics of urban areas rather than on rural areas. The latter have been included in macro-scale studies such as those of Gould and Soja in Africa investigating the spatial diffusion of modernization. In their studies of change in the Pacific, Brookfield (1973) and his associates also worked in rural communities, concentrating on the micro-scale. In research dealing with change in rural Latin America, emphasis has been on colonization studies and ruralurban migration, (Parsons, 1973; Preston, 1974; Stouse, 1971) but study of the effects of urbanization on change within a traditional rural areas has been neglected. Further, there have been few attempts in research on modernization to integrate macro and micro studies or to work at an intermediate scale.