Will the denouement of the current Latin American debt crisis be unilateral default or preemptive concessionary write-downs of the debt? If either outcome occurs, what are the implications for the U.S.–centered world trade and financial system and, in particular, for the trade and financial links between Latin America and the United States? The crisis containment strategy instituted by the United States in 1982 presumed a negative answer to the first question, thereby ruling out the second as irrelevant. But by 1986, fading confidence in that strategy has reopened both questions.

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.