Although there exists a significant body of literature documenting the under-representation of black Cubans in the island's most important governing institutions throughout the forty-four years of Fidel Castro's rule, these analyses have emphasized limited access to political power as the sole factor responsible for this state of affairs. However, this comprehensive analysis contends that with the aging of the Cuban Revolution, other factors such as low holdover and high replacement rates for blacks during periodic reshuffling of the political elite have become crucial, albeit unacknowledged, explanatory variables for the paucity of blacks among the country's leadership. An important determinant for this pattern is the existence of inter- and intra-institutional stratification among blacks, the reasons for which remain unknown. Nonetheless, the presence of this factor increases the vulnerability of nonwhites as decisions are made about which individuals should be retained or replaced in key government institutions.

This issue marks the start of LARR's thirty-sixth year of publication, the twentieth year of LARR's tenure at the University of New Mexico, and the beginning of the process of moving the journal to a new host institution, yet to be determined. The history of LARR is in some ways the history of Latin American studies as an interdisciplinary field. Before LARR, research on Latin America was essentially a disciplinary endeavor, carried out primarily by historians, political scientists, and faculty in literature. LARR's establishment represented a declaration that the complex realities of Latin America and the Caribbean required the interaction of information and perspectives from many fields. It also reflected a leap of faith in the untested notion that those conducting disciplinary research on Latin America would be interested in research from other fields.

Conceived as a contribution to debates about the role of state institutions in perpetuating racial inequality in modern Brazil, this article explores the relative importance of social and racial characteristics in determining defendants' treatment in Rio de Janeiro's criminal courts between 1930 and 1964. Focusing on rarely noted aspects of defendants' class and citizenship status, and emphasizing the importance of judicial procedure, it argues that social discrimination was open in Rio de Janeiro's courts, but that race alone was a relatively poor predictor of defendants' fates. At the same time, it suggests that racial and social characteristics ought not to be seen as separate and competing categories, both because “social' language had important racial meanings and because ”social“ discrimination had significant racial implications. Institutionalized social prejudice may thus go far in explaining the stubborn persistence of racial inequity in an age when ”racial democracy“ became a national hope and mantra.

The related Latin American doctrines of structuralism and dependency had important repercussions in Spain and Portugal, two nations of the European “periphery” in the postwar era. This paper establishes the influence of the two Latin American ideas in those countries, focusing on the moments of their greatest impact—the 1950s and the 1970s. It explains such influence as a result of three factors — the previous existence of local traditions of structuralist thought, to which the Latin American doctrines could be assimilated; the relevance of Latin American ideas and techniques to pressing economic issues; and the utility of such ideas for foreign policy. It also illustrates that structuralism and dependency were perceived as closely related, and mentions the impact of the two doctrines in another country on the European Periphery, Romania, in the same two decades.

Thearticle explores popular opposition to the nineteenth-century liberallaws thatmandated privatization ofthecommunal lands held byIndian communities in Mexico. It argues that peasants in Michoactin responded to the reparto withacomplex mixtureof resistance, negotiation, andaccommodation in attempts to retain local control over the definition and distribution of property rights and to defend local religious and political institutions. The first section provides a briefoverview of liberal thinkingand legislation on the privatization of communal lands, highlighting the legal and ideological ambiguities and contradictions that provided opportunities for resistance and negotiation. The second section explores howand why peasants sooften opposed the reparto in Michoacdn, stressing the complex natureof popular resistance and state responses to it. Thethirdsection offers a briefoverview of nineteenth-century agrarian development in Michoactin as background for thetwo case studies of the politics of privatization at thelocal level. Zacapu peasants managed to delay thereparto for thirty-five years but ended up losing muchof theirlandto statetax officials and neighboring landowners. SanJuan Parangaricutiro successfully retained its substantial woodlands as communal property, evenas local mestizo elites appropriatedthe best of cultivated landas private property. Thearticle concludes with a comparative analysis of the liberal reparto in the two communities, linking the different outcomes to peasant partisanship in theagrarian andpolitical struggles of theMexican Revolution.

The Argentine workfare program known as the “Trabajar” program shared many characteristics with other targeted social welfare programs implemented in Latin America in the 1990s, including being subject to accusations that program funds were misused for political gain. This paper tests existing hypotheses concerning the political manipulation of public spending using data from two phases of the program and a measure of fund allocation that improves on that employed in previous analyses of the program. It finds that partisan criteria most often cited in the literature affected distribution under one administration only. It further demonstrates that political protest had a differential impact on the distribution of program funds across time and suggests some reasons for this.

This research note seeks to explain why a large number of Latin American countries have privatized their pension systems in recent years. It argues that the privatization schemes are a response to the severe capital shortages that have plagued their countries intermittently in recent years rather than to the financial problems facing some of the pension systems. The likelihood of pension privatization, I argue, is determined in large part by the vulnerability of countries to capital shortages as well as the influence wielded by international financial institutions, especially the World Bank. Whether such reforms are politically feasible, however, depends largely on the strength of organized labor and the president's degree of control over the legislature. A statistical examination of recent pension policy in Latin America provides support for most of these arguments.

For more than a century, the Dominican sugar industry has hosted seasonal immigrations of neighboring Caribbean islanders as harvest laborers (most recently, Haitians). This migrant labor system is fully comparable to systems of labor control after slavery in other parts of the Caribbean. But the regional historical trend toward more liberal labor relations in commercial agriculture seems largely to have been reversed in the case of Dominican sugar. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the recruitment and employment of harvest labor changed from something resembling free wage labor into a government-managed system of semicoerced exploitation. Processes of state formation in Haiti and the Dominican Republic are crucial in explaining this transformation. Fuller understanding of historical change in the case at hand is afforded by broadening the scope of inquiry beyond the direct confrontation between labor and estate owners and by recognizing that governments and their agents have not always acted in accordance with private agro-industrial interests.