The extensive post-1973 literature analyzing and comparing national energy policies across countries has generally excluded Cuba, purportedly because of the unavailability of appropriate data. As a result, very little serious work has been carried out assessing Cuba's current energy balances and the efficacy of its policies in adjusting to the new global energy situation. While it is incontrovertible that available official Cuban energy data are weak, it can be argued that, when supplemented with data from other sources and with reasonable estimates, they can serve as the basis for tentative analysis of energy policies. This note attempts to lay the groundwork for such future analyses by bringing together and evaluating energy supply and consumption data covering the first two decades of revolutionary government. While the emphasis is on the period 1959–78, pre-1959 data are introduced when appropriate in an effort to put recent trends in historical perspective. The first section focuses on primary energy production and considers the contribution of commercial and noncommercial sources to domestic energy supply. In the second section, imports of primary energy products are considered and their role in total energy supply evaluated. The last section examines tentatively some aspects of Cuban energy consumption and attempts to relate consumption patterns to policies that were in effect during the period.

The military coup that put an end to the government of Salvador Allende terminated a socialist experiment that drew considerable world attention. It also marked the demise of one of the most durable liberal democracies. Deviating sharply from the prevalent Third World pattern of political instability, Chile was able to establish a viable constitutional system by the middle of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the dominant feature of Chilean politics became its political system composed of strong party organizations spanning the ideological spectrum. This was unique in Latin America. Though parties have been banned by the ruling military junta, and the parties of the left have been subject to violent repression, there is little doubt that Chilean party politics will continue to draw the attention of political analysts. The study of the evolution of political patterns in a Third World country, which are strikingly similar to those of France and Italy, should contribute to our understanding of phenomena such as political participation, the historicity of party alternatives, and the social bases of party politics in polarized societies. Furthermore, a thorough understanding of the Chilean party system before the coup will help to clarify the conditions that led to the breakdown, and, more importantly, the prospects for party politics in the future.

Note: I presented the original version of this work at the “Seminar on History and Human Sciences,” held at the University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, May 1975. In August 1975 it appeared as Document No. 1 of the series CEDES publishes for the “Working Group on the State” of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). The version presented herein was prepared in December 1976. Despite all that has happened since, I have restricted myself to corrections of style and to doing away with some unnecessary paragraphs, following the useful suggestions of LARR'S reviewers. In other words, I have overcome the temptation to rewrite this work, which I might have done, above all, to emphasize even more the attempts to stabilize economic variables (including but not limited to inflation) of the period I call the “orthodoxy” and expressly to admit the possibility that cases such as Chile and Uruguay may turn, in a socially even more oppressive sense than the “deepening” that I deal with here, towards a “re-agrarianization” or a “re-primarization” of their productive structure. I would also like to think that today I could present a more sophisticated approach to the theoretical problems surrounding the concept of state. But it is not a question of extemporaneously introducing these considerations here-considerations that owe much to criticisms received on the original version of this article–but, instead, of making timely presentation of them in future works. One explanation is necessary on a point that has led to some misunderstanding: when I speak of “mutual indispensability” I am referring to the relationship that exists between the bureaucratic-authoritarian state (once implanted) and international capital. In contrast, when in other works (above all, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism) I have dealt with the factors that tend to provoke the emergence of this type of state, I have speculated on its “elective affinity” with a certain type of capitalism and its crises. The difference is subtle but important, because it not only refers to two temporally different moments but also because it indicates the distance separating what is mutually indispensable (once the state has been implanted) from a strong but undetermined likelihood (before implanting it) that still leaves room for purposeful political action.

In this decade, sociological and anthropological studies of formal education in Latin America show signs of vigorous growth and promise of substantial future developments. The leitmotiv running through most of the social scientific research on education is education and social change or, more specifically, education and economic development and social progress. There is still no strong evidence of a concerted, cumulative development in this area despite heightened research activity and the fact that scholars are more regularly communicating and integrating their efforts. To the contrary, it is more common of researchers to appear oblivious of the prior or related work of other scholars in other centers of research. However, the common cause of a relatively narrow range of concern has produced a concentration of effort and many-faceted attack by scholars from many disciplines on these problems that promise potent developments in theory, understanding and discovery.

For too many years, women have been missing from or misrepresented in Latin American history. Like women elsewhere, they have not received proper credit for the role they played in their nations' development. Even with the increasingly scholarly attention now focused on women in Latin America, historical research lags far behind that on their counterparts in the United States or Western Europe. Many questions of approach, methodology, and sources, among others, remain to be answered and much labor must be expended before we can know the history of women in Latin America. But if we wish to have the necessary monographs and accumulated data before attempting to write syntheses, we must explore diverse aspects of women's lives, roles, and experiences, often concentrating on women in a single country or time frame.

Some twenty-five kilometers from Huancayo, Peru, nestled in the Jauja Valley, in unbelievable tranquillity, there exists a center of learning: the library of more than twenty thousand volumes in the Convent of Ocopa. This Franciscan monastery now opens the doors of its wealth of printed resources to scholars and researchers, both men and women, from far and near. During a visit of only two days, the author consulted with the librarian, Father Julián Heras, O.F.M., took photographs of the library, examined briefly certain volumes, and photographed title pages, colophons, engravings, and any particular items of interest in the more valuable works. What follows is an attempt to describe the printed resources for research in a library that has been called by Raúl Porras Barrenechea “una biblioteca de insigne sabiduría.”

In the past, Iberian bibliography attracted only limited interest in Poland. In his extensive (33 vols.) Bibliografia Polska (1872–1939), Karol Estreicher included a good number of the Iberian titles that existed in Poland through the end of the nineteenth century; some useful cross-references may also be found in Gabriel Korbut's Literatura Polska (1929–31). Representative collections of old Spanish prints (already indexed), along with contemporary Polish translations of Iberian and Latin American works, are located at the National Library in Warsaw, and at the university libraries in Cracow and Warsaw.

In 1961 twenty latin american countries signed a document which committed them “to reform tax laws, demanding more from those who have most, to punish tax evasion severely, and to redistribute the national income in order to benefit those who are most in need while, at the same time, promoting savings and investment and reinvestment of capital.” Both before and since this declaration a great deal of research on taxation has been carried out in Latin America, and even more has been said about the “need” for tax “reform.”

In recent years there has been an upsurge in what has come to be called “quantitative history.” Despite the enthusiasm for this approach, however, some of its critics have validly claimed that its payoffs have all too often failed to live up to its promises of new and more accurate findings. Perhaps a central reason for this criticism is that although the quantitative historian may have been sufficiently thorough in collecting his data, he has often failed to apply to them the sensitive techniques of modern data analysis. Rather, he has continued to rely on more traditional methods of description such as means and percentages. As a result, quantitative works are often long on tables and short on analysis.