In the 1990s the Cuban regime displayed two unexpected characteristics. One was survival. The other was the implementation of uneven economic reforms, meaning that some sectors of the economy were revamped, while others remained untouched. This article connects these two outcomes by arguing that uneven economic reforms explain regime survival. Uneven economic reforms served to strengthen the power of the state vis-à-vis society, and within the state, the power of hard-liners. This new type of state, which I call “the gatekeeper state,” dominates society through a new mechanism—it fragments the economy into different sectors of varying degrees of profitability and then determines which citizens have access to each respective sector. While some authoritarian regimes stay alive by providing widespread economic growth, the Cuban regime in the 1990s survived instead by restricting access to capitalist rewards. This has permitted the incumbents to navigate through societal pressures and postpone regime transition.

This essay seeks to expand our understanding of state formation in Venezuela by examining the business enterprises established by Juan Vicente Gómez and his political allies to exploit the agrarian economy, especially the cattle trade. It argues that these enterprises were critical both in cementing the allegiance of officials to Gómez, and in establishing the regime's authority over society. Venezuelans engaged in a variety of forms of protest against officials' profiteering and occasionally won concessions from the regime, signaling that corruption constituted an issue around which the terms of state control were negotiated. Relying on Gómez's correspondence, as well as British and U.S. diplomatic records, this essay argues that business networks among members of the regime fundamentally shaped not only the internal dynamics of the state, but also its relationship to society, a topic usually neglected in studies of Venezuelan state formation.

This issue begins the last volume of the twenty years of LARR edited at the University of New Mexico. A new team of editors at the University of Texas at Austin, led by Peter Ward, is already at work selecting and editing the articles and review essays that will appear in next year's Volume 38 (2003). The transition offers an appropriate time to reflect on the broader issues involved in the enterprise of academic publishing of a journal such as LARR.

In the age of corporate empires and free trade, little attention has been paid to those who live and work on the margins of the mainstream capitalist economies. In Ecuador, these workers constitute a vast sector of the national population. Some 60 percent of urban dwellers and probably a much larger proportion of rural families exist below the poverty line, eking their living out of family plots of land or micro-enterprises (World Bank, cited in Larrea and North n.d.). Many of these belong to indigenous ethnic groups and nationalities. What is the effect of capitalist expansion on these workers and the way in which they organize their economy? Are they destined for Marx's “dustbins of history,” or have they been able to adapt to and even take advantage of capitalism without losing their historical specificity as noncapitalist producers?

The Mexican Constitution was revised in 1992 to foster privatization of agrarian reform lands. Legal inheritance protections for spouses were removed, and individual title holders (85 percent male) obtained rights to sell land formerly considered family patrimony. State disinvestment contributed to economic crisis in the land-reform sector. This longitudinal study of four communities in northern and central Mexico explores the counterintuitive effects of agrarian law, customary inheritance norms, and women's changing roles in household economies and community sociopolitics on the material and ideological bases for women's entitlement to land. Quantitative and qualitative data show that women's rights to land under customary inheritance norms were upheld locally and that women's control of family land increased along with growing responsibility for production and community activism. Women's property rights were enhanced rather than eroded as families and communities struggled to meet the economic and social challenges posed by the neoliberal agenda.