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.

The rise of authoritarian regimes in Latin America has fueled a long-standing interest in the social bases of democratic and authoritarian political systems. One commonly asserted explanation posits a close relationship between political structure and political culture, holding that authoritarian regimes are likely both to stem from and to perpetuate authoritarian political cultures (Kornhauser 1959; Inkeles 1961; Lip-set 1960, 1981). Some theorists have applied this thesis to Latin American politics, linking, for example, Argentina's frequent experiences with authoritarian governments with the presumed authoritarianism of its citizenry (Fillol 1961; Alexander 1968; Lipset 1960, 1981).

Writers from Jorge Luis Borges to Alejo Carpentier have celebrated the role of literary journalism in Latin American cultural life. The periodical press mediates between author and public, between the heavy sea of tradition and the rising tide of the new, between the institutions that sustain convention and the spontaneous, vibrant eruptions that give life to the avant-garde. Literary journalism thus traces the struggles of writers against the canon while revealing their engagement in the political and aesthetic events of the day. But as one might expect, literary journalism also unravels the neat boundaries of the finished work or the book in the ongoing dialogue with contemporary publications and multifaceted speculations on culture. In this way, the pastiche of materials found in the modern review exposes the vivid heterogeneity of the intellectual field.

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.

The Maya of Guatemala are today, as they have been in the past, a dominated and beleaguered group. Few have expressed this enduring reality more poignantly than the late Oliver La Farge. Commenting forty years ago on why Kanjobal Indians take to drink, La Farge observed that “while these people undoubtedly suffer from drunkenness, one would hesitate to remove the bottle from them until the entire pattern of their lives is changed. They are an introverted people, consumed by internal fires which they cannot or dare not express, eternally chafing under the yoke of conquest, and never for a moment forgetting that they are a conquered people.”

Since the term Mesoamerica was coined in 1943, it has been used widely as an inclusive analytical unit. Paul Kirchhoff's original definition was based on “geographic limits, ethnic composition, and cultural characteristics at the time of the Conquest” (Kirchhoff 1943, 94). He employed these criteria to delineate an area from northern Mexico south through Central America to the Gulf of Nicoya (1943, 98).

Attempts have been made at Latin American regional integration since the late 1950s, but on each occasion, high expectations have met with disappointing failures. In July 1986, however, a new phase began in the history of Latin American integration as Presidents Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina and José Sarney of Brazil signed the Argentina-Brazil Economic Integration Pact (ABEIP).