This article explores the example of Cuba in order to understand how a contentious politics has evolved since the 2000s and especially after the semi-liberalisation of internet access in 2008. My aim is to analyse how use of new technologies impact the fragmented arenas of contention that already existed in Cuba. My argument is that they have reinforced existing dynamics, while creating new channels of expression and linkage, between contentious spaces within Cuba and with specific segments of the Cuban diaspora. Those dynamics have in turn allowed for the emergence of a transnational Cuban public arena and a more intricate contentious space in Cuba itself.

Cooperation among developing countries in the form of economic integration has received increased attention as a development strategy. About one-half of all developing countries currently participate in integration schemes.1 Yet there have been few attempts to measure the effects on trade flows associated with these integration efforts.2 The scarcity of such studies stems from a dissatisfaction on the part of some investigators regarding the applicability to developing countries of evaluative criteria formulated by Viner to assess world-wide allocative gains from industrial nation integration schemes.3 A lack of interest in the traditional method of evaluating integration efforts is also motivated by the expectation that static gains will be small or nonexistent in developing country integration schemes, where even collectively markets are often small and members display little differences in relative factor endowments.

‘No one is unaware,’ stated Brazil's Minister of Finance Ruj Barbosa in 1891, ‘that commerce, especially large-scale commerce, in our most important trade centers resides in greatest part, not to say in its near entirety, in the hands of foreigners.’ Rui was calling attention to a situation of increasing concern to Brazilian leaders: the preponderance of foreigners in big business. Another Brazilian Minister of Finance, Felisbello Freire, remarked on the subject in 1894, ‘to my mind this phenomenon is an indication of a subjugation which, dating from colonial times, threatens the annulment of native commerce.’.

On 1 April 1980, Brazil concluded sixteen years of military-dominated government. While political scientists have taken the lead in examining the origins and methods of the regime in terms of civil-military relations, the role of the military in society, and what might be called military politics, historians have lagged behind in providing analysis from an institutional perspective.1 While the Revolution of 1964 might have occurred even if Brazil had never entered World War II, the Brazilian army's involvement in that conflict and its readjustments to the post-war situation gave shape and substance to that revolution.

A number of scholars have analysed lynching in Latin America as a response to the recent upsurge in insecurity and crime in the region. This article turns our attention to historical and deeper socio-political undercurrents behind this practice. Drawing on several cases of lynching that took place in post-revolutionary Puebla, the article argues that, rather than signalling state absence, the occurrence of lynching expressed communities’ reactions towards a state presence that was perceived as intrusive and illegitimate. It furthermore shows that lynchings emulated the brutality and visibility of extralegal forms of violence perpetrated by public officials at the local level.

Before 1898, the most sustained attempt by the United States to acquire Cuba occurred during the presidency of Franklin Pierce when the debate about slavery was roiling US domestic politics. Spain responded to the threat with a dramatic change of policy: in order to gain the favour and protection of Britain, it ordered that the slave trade to Cuba be ended. This article analyses Pierce's strategy and examines the complex jockeying it precipitated among Washington, London and Madrid. Mining US, British and Spanish archives, it is the first international history of the crisis that Washington's avarice provoked.

Studies on the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) have tended to emphasise popular support for the Cardenista regime while underestimating the domestic opposition to the president. The story of Enrique Rodríguez (‘El Tallarín’), a former Zapatista militant from the state of Morelos, reveals the breadth and complexity of the opposition to Cárdenas. The rebellion led by Rodríguez from 1934 to 1938 forced Cárdenas to renegotiate the terms of Zapatista loyalty to the federal government in order to secure peace in Morelos and represented a broad critique of the post-revolutionary state's advancement during the 1930s. Rodríguez stood as a defender of agrarian self-reliance, traditional chieftainship and pueblo religious liberty.

This article focuses upon the cacicazgo of the Indian leader, Gabriel Barrios Cabrera, who controlled the Sierra de Puebla, Mexico during the 1920s. An analysis is made of the methods employed by Barrios to establish a loyal following, and how his military potential gave him the opportunity to attain regional political dominance and beneficial relationships with his federal military and political superiors. It is argued that Barrios's actions were so strongly influenced by the Sierra's singular history and socio-ethnic characteristics, that previously identified trends in post-revolutionary regional politics cannot easily be applied to this isolated mountainous region.

Over a period of half a century, from the 1940s to the 1990s, Edmundo O'Gorman came to occupy a unique place in Mexican historiography. Though he might be considered as quasi-aristocratic in his thought and in his bearing, he spent his entire career as teacher and scholar at the popular Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), not at the more elitist El Colegio de México. Unlike Daniel Cosío Villegas, with whom he is often paired as the leading Mexican historians of their generation, he was not politically engaged, nor was he a ‘cultural caudillo’; he appeared to shun the attractions of academic administration and power. He was, however, an avid intellectual organiser and provocateur, who relished debate and welcomed polemical interchanges with colleagues at home and abroad.

This paper focuses on the question of whether and how rural industry contributed to the advance of modern industrialization in Colombia. The question is of considerable interest to students of developing countries, since rural industry remains quite important (especially when assessed by the level of employment created) in many such countries, and there is evidence that it may be relatively efficient under the prevailing conditions of labour abundance and capital shortage.

The literature on political participation has consistently found that protest positively and significantly correlates with voting. However, Chile can be considered a deviant case to this pattern. During the last decade, Chileans who participated in street demonstrations were unlikely to participate in elections. What explains this anomaly? We argue that this rupture between participation in protest and in elections results from an effective distancing between social-movement organisations (SMOs) and institutional politics. However, this distancing of SMOs from party politics has not been homogeneous. To examine this heterogeneity, we conduct a comparative design of two cases: the labour and student movements. Based on a mixed-methods study that combines interviews with movement leaders and surveys of protest participants in marches, we seek to highlight the mediating role of SMOs in the promotion of different forms of political participation.

Prior to the introduction of the steamboat on the Magdalena River during the 1820s, reaching Bogotá from the Caribbean coast required a two to five month journey. This trip included travelling in bongos (rafts) and traversing mountains on the backs of both men and beasts. Bogotá was the most isolated of all the Spanish viceregal capitals. No other viceroyalty was so dependent on river transportation as New Granada (now Colombia). Even by the late nineteenth century, travel within the country remained dreadfully difficult. In the best of weather most Colombian roads were barely suitable for mule traffic, and, whenever tropical rains poured, human carriers undertook the burden of transportation despite the fact that Colombia, following the newest American and European trends in transport innovations, built railroads to the point where they were the nation's leading technological import during the nineteenth century. The apparent futility of this modernization effort has led many scholars, both Colombians and non-Colombians, to conclude that Colombia moved directly from the age of the mule to that of the airplane.

This article considers Juana Manso (1819–1875) as a crucial nation maker in nineteenth-century Argentina. Usually studied as a novelist, Manso was important beyond her literary production. As the first woman to be appointed to a government position and arguably the most radical feminist in nineteenth-century Argentina, Manso's story informs us about Argentine feminism and education, and illustrates how a woman, who lived in Uruguay, Brazil, United States and Cuba, became a crucial transmitter of ideas about emerging nations and a living example of the interconnectedness of the Americas.

The article utilises oral history, labour and military court records, newspaper accounts, and government documents to narrate the history of rural labour mobilisation in the Aha Mogiana region of São Paulo, Brazil, during the years 1959 to 1964. It shows how rival rural leaders linked either to the Brazilian Communist Party or the Catholic Church organised many workers, led numerous influential strikes, and helped hundreds of workers sue for their rights in court. Eventually, Catholic and Communist competitors joined forces under the guidance of a federal agency (SUPRA). Coordinated by SUPRA, the newly unified Alta Mogiana movement was suppressed by the military regime that took control of Brazil in April 1964.

Observers have increasingly described the drug-related violence and corruption affecting Central America as the region's ‘Colombianisation’. This narrative is not just confused and misleading; it is dangerous. The Colombianisation discourse perpetuates ineffective and destructive anti-drug policies. It also obscures the circulations and connections that make the drug trade, the drug war and their associated economies of violence possible. We do, however, recognise one form of Colombianisation that actually is under way, but it is not the one imagined by security pundits. The real Colombianisation is a convergence of geopolitical and economic interests that have seized upon the geographical realignments of the drug trade to expand the same agroindustrial-military nexus in Central America that proved so ‘successful’ in Colombia.

In late November of 1807 the Portuguese government was loaded on to a fleet of naval and merchant vessels, transported across the South Atlantic and deposited in Rio de Janeiro. On board were fourteen members of the Royal Family; the Counsellors of State; ministers; Justices of the Court of Appeals and the High Court; the upper echelons of the army and navy; the hierarchy of the church; a full quota of high society; a respectable contingent of the professional, scientific, literary, artistic and business elements; a horde of bureaucrats; and as many rank and file citizens as could secure passage. Also on board were the contents of the royal treasury; the store of diamonds derived from the crown monopoly; silver plate, jewels, books, cash and other portable assets; furnishings for a royal chapel; the royal library; a printing press; and a mass of government records.

Dominating the early decades of Spain's New World settlement was the question of how best to apportion the fruits of conquest. Colonists urged Repartimiento General, the division among worthy settlers of all lands in señorio and all indians in hereditary encomienda. Only aristocratic rewards, they claimed, could attract men of quality to the New World. Only caballeros could hold colonies already won and conquer more lands for Spain. Yet, if such demands were met, the Crown could expect little profit from its colonial empire, however large and secure.

The Club 3 de Outubro, overlooked by most studies of the Brazilian revolution of 1930, played a central role in the tenente movement and in the revolution itself. The 1930s were a watershed in modern Brazilian history, when state, society, and economy were altered, sometimes radically. Although some of the changes were responses to the Depression and international conditions, the revolution as a political phenomenon was a dominant force in shaping contemporary Brazil. State authorities ceded power to the Central Government's interventors (delegates), counteracting Brazil's strong regionalist tradition and assuring the dominance of national institutions. In addition, urban voters in the 19305 for the first time had an influential voice in politics, sometimes as allies of the tenentes. The army, strengthened and unified vis-à-vis the state militias, was subordinated to the Federal Government.

The decade of the 1970s has brought a number of changes to Latin America and in particular to the Latin American political scene. The extensive proliferation of harsh, military-run governments, the increasingly strident cries of nationalism and anti-Americanism, the violent demise of the Marxist- oriented regime of Chile's Salvador Allende and the disappointing performance of the Alliance for Progress programs and its modernizing ideology are now all familiar characteristics of Latin America in the modern era.

Fundamental to an understanding of the complex relationships between race and social class in Latin America is an understanding of the process by which the caste societies of the colonial and early national periods were gradually transformed into the class societies of the twentieth century. During the 1850s a number of South American nations struck down the last vestiges of their slave regimes and the colonial Régimen de castas, legislation designed to divide society into racial castes arranged in a well-defined hierarchy. Among these countries were Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay delayed until later in the century. These developments seem at first glance to have paved the way for the integration of the non-whites as fully-fledged participants in the continent' newly formed class societies, as several authors writing on the Afro-Latin Americans have concluded.