Although most government leaders espouse the principle of “health for all,” few pay more than lip service to the ideal by allocating adequate resources for its development. In Cuba, however, health care is a basic human right and the responsibility of the state. Cuban leaders consider health indicators to be measures of government efficacy, and as a result, health care has assumed an inordinately prominent place in Cuban government policies despite the present world economic crisis. Although affected to a lesser extent because of its integration into the Community for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), Cuba has nevertheless been increasing health care expenditures in the face of economic adversity.

The purpose of this article is to review recent trends in the process of urbanization in major Latin American cities. Abundant literature on Third World urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s painted a fairly coherent picture of the process during these decades. That image, which has been generally accepted in both academic and policy circles, serves as the backdrop against which contemporary trends will be evaluated here. The population in Latin America was becoming rapidly urbanized, but the process has been frequently described as “distorted” in a number of ways by the common condition of underdevelopment in which these countries found themselves.

Political parties in Venezuela have historically played a mediating role between the state and the working class and also between labor and the private sector. Indeed, the political party system has been widely credited in the literature with sustaining the rather remarkable electoral democracy in Venezuela since 1958. Yet structural change in the world oil market and the Venezuelan economy in the early 1970s combined with the dynamics of past state-labor-party relations have produced an expanded role for the state in the economy as well as in the system of industrial relations. New patterns of interest mediation have emerged that have facilitated the adjustment of the democratic regime to changing political and economic conditions, thus helping to ensure its survival.

The twelve years of military rule in Peru between 1968 and 1980 witnessed few abuses of human rights, in marked contrast to the activities of military governments in Southern Cone countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Yet paradoxically, the return to democracy in Peru, with the election of Fernando Belaúnde in 1980 and Alan García in 1985, has brought sharp escalations in political violence and terror. Guerrilla activity by the Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) in the highlands, urban terrorism, and a severe economic crisis have combined to pose a serious challenge to the authority of the state. Thus it is problematic to speak of a “return to democracy” while Peruvians are being subjected to expanding military control and repression.

The Mexican automobile manufacturing industry experienced rapid sociopolitical change in the 1960s and 1970s as workers in several firms overthrew entrenched labor leaders and instituted democratic forms of union governance. These reform movements sought increased participation by the rank and file in union affairs and heightened worker control over different aspects of the production process. For many workers, democratic unionism promised increased leadership responsiveness in resolving workplace conflicts and more effective representation of worker interests in a changing industrial environment. Specific measures of democratic unionism included the election of key union officers and their accountability to members, regularly held general assemblies, an enhanced role for the general assembly in internal decision making, procedural safeguards of workers' union rights, and opportunities for the emergence of identifiable and relatively stable internal opposition factions. By 1975 workers in five of the seven major terminal firms (those manufacturing vehicles) had won control over the selection of union leaders and other phases of internal union decision making.

José Carlos Mariátegui devoted the most productive years of his short life (1894–1930) to analyzing contemporary Peru. Because of this emphasis, a substantial portion of the research conducted in the past thirty years has addressed his political and social thought. More recent investigations, however, have sought to document the significance of his aesthetic ideas, an appropriate development in light of Mariátegui's extensive writings on literature and the visual arts. For example, the periodical Amauta, which appeared under his editorship twenty-nine times between September 1926 and March 1930, was primarily a magazine of the arts and intellectual life, notwithstanding its political agenda and indigenista orientation. Also, Mariátegui's detailed essay on Peruvian literature, “El proceso de la literatura,” is the most extensive of the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928). In addition, between 1924 and 1930, the widely read Lima weeklies Variedades and Mundial regularly published his critical articles on national and international topics, including a large number of pieces on literature and the arts. Recent inquiries into Mariátegui's literary thought have addressed such issues as his modern concept of literary realism, the relationship between his artistic concerns and a Marxism that has been repeatedly characterized as “open,” and the role of aesthetic issues in his social agenda for Peru. This research has established Mariátegui's importance in the arts, not as a creative writer (although he did write poetry, plays, and short stories in his youth) but as one of Latin America's first practicing literary critics.

On 28 February 1986, the Brazilian government announced a “heterodox” inflation stabilization program that rapidly came to be called the Plano Cruzado. It was intended to halt an inflation that appeared to be escaping control and untamable through orthodox stabilization policies. Although at first the Plano Cruzado seemed to succeed dramatically in eliminating inflation without recessionary side effects, it failed by the end of 1986, as inflation revived, external accounts collapsed, and real growth sagged.

During 1986 and 1987, Cuba found itself once again debating the relative merits of material and moral incentives. Analysts outside Cuba have rushed to their word processors to pronounce judgment on the Cuban economy's alleged uncertain footing. Some writers have erroneously declared that Cuba has abolished its post-1973 system of tying pay to productivity, and some have interpreted changes in the Cuban economic system as marking the failure and demise of the Sistema de Dirección y Planificación de la Economía (SDPE), Cuba's system of economic management and planning since 1976. This essay will endeavor not to uncover the errant interpretations of Western observers but to explore the underlying problematic and dynamic that Cuba confronts in attempting to balance moral and material incentives within the framework of central planning.

This article will examine the development of labor unrest in Argentina between 1887 and 1907. Because official statistics were not compiled until after 1907, new data on strikes have been generated for the earlier period through a detailed reading of newspapers. These data provide information on the occupational and geographical distribution of strikes, their timing, and the kinds of demands made by strikers. The new data also provide helpful insights into the nature of labor organizations and the causes of labor unrest. Most important, these data indicate that changes in the organization of the workplace were a significant factor in altering the composition of demand for labor and in generating labor unrest. Finally, they show that the organization of the workplace also accounted for significant differences in the forms of action and organization adopted by various sectors of the labor force. Hence insofar as the position of different groups of workers in the labor market was itself shaped by the nature of the labor process and workplace relations, the transformation of these spheres constitutes an important analytical point of departure for explaining the central features of the emerging labor movement.

Brazil today constitutes one of the major manufacturers of microcomputers in the world, a seemingly surprising feat for a country that many view as part of the Third World. How was it possible for a developing nation like Brazil to create a high-technology industry and join the exclusive club of highly industrialized countries like the United States, Japan, and Germany as one of the major manufacturers of computers? Many political scientists, economists, and sociologists have tried to explain this exceptional phenomenon in primarily political terms. Most have studied the rise of nationalistic technocrats who began in the mid-1970s to implement a series of regulations that made it possible for Brazilian manufacturers to monopolize the domestic markets for minicomputers and microcomputers.

During the two decades preceding the abolition law of 1880, Cuban sugar planters pursued two parallel goals. The first undertaking was a concerted effort to increase the efficiency of agricultural and industrial production. A sophisticated railroad network was constructed to the interior from the ports of Havana, Matanzas, Cárdenas, and Cienfuegos in the 1840s and 1850s. Railroads opened high-yielding virgin land in frontier regions to production, and in the 1860s and 1870s, planters attempted to further the transportation revolution by developing rail systems within their estates to carry cane from fields to mills. Because the sucrose content of cane begins to drop immediately after the cane is cut, internal railway lines had the potential to revolutionize sugar production by moving cane quickly to the processing phase. Railroads also helped to resolve the recurring problem of roads washed out by heavy rains, which often precluded transporting harvested cane to mills for refining. In addition to revolutionizing transportation, planters also sought to raise industrial yields by installing modern milling equipment with greater processing capacity. The Jamaican trains of the early nineteenth century were replaced by vacuum-pan evaporators and centrifuges on the most modern mills by the 1860s and 1870s, a change that produced higher grades of sugar more efficiently.

It has often been observed that “Where power is, women are not.” Noting women's virtual absence from the realm of conventional politics, Jane Jaquette urged scholars in 1980 to look beyond elections in studying female political participation in Latin America. Arguing for an “expanded notion of the political,” she called for research on female participation within different social classes, especially their role in “informal networks, … clientele linkages, … strike activities, urban land seizures and barrio politics”. This article employs a community study method to investigate women's grass-roots participation in politics and labor mobilization following World War II in the region of greater São Paulo known as ABC (named after the municipios of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano).

The present trend toward democratic regimes in Latin American countries raises the issue of their regime-determined capabilities. Democracy is generally defined in procedural terms and supported on moral rather than policy grounds (Schumpeter 1950, 242). Consequently, very little is known about the policy consequences, if any, of the adoption of democratic forms and procedures by Latin American political systems. One way to examine this question is to analyze the policy performance of the three democratic regimes in Latin America that are the most institutionalized: Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. These three nations, unlike Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, were able to withstand the authoritarian trends of the 1960s and early 1970s. They have been democratic long enough (well over two decades) during a period when development issues were salient to indicate the policy-performance capabilities of democratic regimes operating within the cultural, economic, and political context of Latin America.

Mauricio Font's “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development in Brazil,” raises a number of central issues about the nature of the polity and economy in São Paulo during the critical transition from export-oriented agriculture to domestic-oriented manufacturing. Was the coffee economy fully capitalist? What was the relation between coffee and industrialization? Was there a “sectoral clash” between planters and manufacturers? To what degree did planters control the political parties and the state? In particular, was the state relatively autonomous of the most important economic group?

Civilian rule was installed in Brazil in March 1985, following a gradual liberalization process that had been largely controlled by the military since the mid-1970s. Because no decisive rupture with the previous regime occurred, the first several years of the Nova República were marked by continuous debate about the extent to which the Nova República had broken with the authoritarian past or represented simply a continuation of the old “system.”

For eighteen months, between March 1982 and August 1983, Guatemala was ruled by a born-again Christian, General Efrain Ríos Montt. He drew world attention to Guatemala because of his brutally effective suppression of the nation's guerrilla movement and his idiosyncratic style of rule but above all, because of his religion. The idea that a Protestant could serve as the chief of state in a country as staunchly Catholic as Guatemala struck many observers as an anomaly. Closer examination reveals, however, that it was not anomalous for a Protestant to be president of Guatemala. By 1982 nearly 30 percent of the Guatemalan population were Protestants, the result of a quiet wave of conversion that started during the nineteenth century and has accelerated dramatically in the last three decades. The idea that President Ríos Montt's religion would influence his entire administration was even less surprising, for Protestantism has been wed to politics in Guatemala ever since it first arrived in the country. The purpose of this research report is to examine the development of patterns in the relationship between the Guatemalan state and Protestantism as they evolved during the formative years between 1872 and 1954 and to explore the effects of this relationship on Protestant conversion.

“If monoculture is an evil, this was not so with coffee. Coffee was autarkic; it demanded for its cultivation the simultaneous production of the most varied crops, even cattle raising. These were subsidiary crops, no doubt, but their total production was voluminous. It was cheap production, because it was an accessory that offered the people abundant and healthy food.” Thus asserted Joaquim Sampaio Vidal, a federal deputy for the Partido Democrático of São Paulo and president of the Sociedade Rural Brasileira in 1940.