In 1970, as part of a comprehensive program of institutionalization, new economic policies were introduced in Cuba emphasizing more extensive use of material incentives, wage differentials, and piece rates to stimulate productivity. Those policies raised the incomes of Cuban workers and created new demands for a better diet and more consumer goods. Yet problems in the state-run domestic food sector made it difficult for Cubans to secure the higher standard of living promised by their increased salaries and wages. In May 1980, the mercados libres campesinos (MLCs) were introduced as part of a strategy aimed at harnessing the productive capacities of the peasant sector to help satisfy the resulting pent-up demand. The MLCs provided sites where agricultural producers (free peasants, cooperativists, workers on state enterprises, and owners of small plots and gardens) could sell their surplus production directly to consumers. The law governing the MLCs contained several significant restrictions, but the markets were “free” in regard to prices and quantities sold.

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.

The subject of industrialization has become almost an obsession with Argentines. The image of a belated, weak, incomplete, and truncated process of industrialization has become associated with the frustrated destiny of Argentina. At some moment in its history, the country must have taken a wrong turn and, squandering opportunities, set off on a perverse downhill, an inexplicable turn in the first place, and not only for those who think of the country as being richly endowed. In the search for some explanation, the issue of industrialization has always occupied a central place in the debate.

“Scholars and intellectuals, like human beings in other walks of life, need to interpret and come to grips with the crises plaguing the contemporary global political and social system. Indeed, their obligation to do so may be a particularly special and important one.” This credo might properly be etched on the minds of all those who study the politics of Latin America. Scholarship is not restricted to an academic preserve in which the principal, even sole commitment must be the intellectual task at hand. Rather, the study of Latin American politics requires a heightened sense of self-consciousness, which is linked in turn to the parameters and strictures of the several professional disciplines involved.

This article will focus on the interactions between the Venezuelan government and FEDECAMARAS, the umbrella organization of most Venezuelan private-sector groups, while a strategic policy was being formulated and implemented that FEDECAMARAS regarded as seriously detrimental to the interests of the Venezuelan private sector. This policy was developed after the official devaluation of the Venezuelan bolívar on 18 February 1983 and consisted of two stages: first, the government refused to supply foreign currency at the rate of 4.3 bolívares to the dollar, the predevaluation rate (PDR), for any foreign debts contracted by private enterprises prior to 18 February, a decision that forced many debtor companies to obtain foreign currency at the floating rate. This rate increased from approximately 8 bolívares to the dollar in March 1983 to some 25 to the dollar in late 1986. Second, the government imposed a price freeze and then price controls. This policy, which was simultaneously regulatory and redistributive, was vehemently opposed by FEDECAMARAS. Yet the results of the organization's efforts indicate that its actual influence has been overstated.

Writing of nineteenth-century Peru, historian Jorge Basadre observed, “To discuss the commercial life of the country is to discuss the role of the foreigner.” Historian Francisco Calderón similarly stated that during the late nineteenth century, “it may be affirmed that various foreign houses with great capital generally dominated Mexican overseas commerce.” A visitor to nineteenth-century Brazil remarked of Rio de Janeiro's foreign trading houses, “these large firms are the main prop of Brazilian commerce; almost every shopkeeper in the country is, more or less directly, dependent on them.” Nor were Peru, Mexico, and Brazil atypical. In almost every Latin American nation, foreigners dominated international trade during the nineteenth century. As the above authorities imply, this domination was not only economic but numerical: the majority of overseas traders in most Latin American nations were aliens (only Colombia constituted a clear-cut exception). Foreign numerical domination among overseas traders may have had a profound effect on Latin American development.