In the early 1990s Cuba initiated a new phase of social transformation, driven forward by an economic reform. Some aspects of that reform resembled orthodox structural adjustment, while others differed from it. In agriculture the reform reshaped state farms into multiple cooperatives, subdivided cooperative production, liberalized produce markets, and ceded land to individual parceleros. Through interviews with policy makers and cooperative leaders, and a survey of small farmers in western and eastern Cuba, I examined the reform's impact on small farmers' production. I found that two important patterns characterized the 1990s:first, repeasantization occurred; and second, income disparities between these two regions were maintained, if not expanded. Yet, even in poorer regions, small farmers are modestly better off than the average salary earner, while in other regions they are substantially better off. In sum, Cuba's economic crisis forced the reshaping of agricultural policy in ways that fortified the position of small farmers.

One of the most significant developments in Latin American politics and political economy in the last two decades has been the increasing decentralization of government. This development has generated a substantial literature on the pros and cons of decentralization and on subnational politics but few attempts to explain differences in the pattern of decentralization across countries. Fiscal decentralization must be understood as a political bargain involving presidents, legislators, and subnational politicians, each having somewhat conflicting preferences. How these bargains are struck will depend heavily on the lines of accountability within political parties. In systems with centralized political parties, the central government has exercised greater control over resources and uses than in countries with decentralized parties, in which subnational politicians exercise strong influence over legislators. The article explores this hypothesis through a comparative analysis of decentralization in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico.

This essay explores the impact of new consumer cultures on rural women in Chile's fruit-export sector during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, 1973–1990. It challenges the longstanding assumption that the “consumerism” associated with Chile's neoliberal makeover was overwhelmingly reactionary in its political consequences and debilitating for working-class communities in particular. It argues that while new consumer cultures emerged within, and sometimes exacerbated, conditions of extraordinary exploitation and want, consumption was also a site through which women fruit workers challenged family patriarchy and created new forms of community with each other. Taking the central valley province of the Aconcagua Valley as its focus, the essay examines women's enthusiasm for the proliferation of imported commodities such as ready-made clothes, makeup, televisions, refrigerators, and electronic music devices, whose availability resulted from employment in the fruit-export sector as well as new sources of consumer debt. It concludes that while such new consumer desires and practices positioned rural women as validating certain aspects of the military's modernization project, it simultaneously encouraged women to resist necessarily linkages between “authoritarian” and “modernity” and to embrace gender ideals that were quite oppositional to those the regime promoted.

The varying colors that distinguish each year's issues of LARR from the preceding year's numbers are a practice inherited from the early years of the journal, as well as a rough guide to the contents (“that article was in one of the yellow issues”) and a source of visual pleasure. The editors were once told by a subscriber that one of her colleagues, on seeing a deep lavender LARR, observed, “Any journal that color must be worth reading!”

This essay reconstructs the history of the Instituto Fisico-Ceogrdiico Nacional, its scientists, and their activities. After surveying the historical context and the first scientific activities in Costa Rica, it narrates the institutional history of the IFG. Also covered are the main activities of the Instituto-meteorology, botany, agriculture, andethnography, especially theefforts to mapCosta Rica in the 1890s. Theworkof this institute and the scientists associated untn it markthefitful beginnings of the institutionalization of modern science in Costa Rica. Thecase of theIFG clearly demonstrates theenormous obstacles facing scientists and scientific institutions in the agro-exporting economies of modern Latin America. As a small country on the "periphery of the periphery," Costa Rica offers an extreme example of the problems of cultivating modern science in developing nations.