‘As far as salaries go, there is chaos all over the country’, Fidel Castro exclaimed in 1986,1 and as he and other revolutionary leaders made clear throughout that year more than salaries was involved. Prices, credit, employment practices, administrative procedures and many other important aspects of the economy could be characterised as ‘chaotic’. It would be wrong, however, to take such characterisations at face value. For underlying this ‘chaos’ was a certain order: patterns of behaviour that this article will seek to disclose and explain.

Among historians of the US Marine Corps, Major-General Merritt A. (‘Red Mike’) Edson's Río Coco Patrol is well known.1 His expedition up Nicaragua's Coco River in 1928 represented a significant step forward in what the US military would later call ‘riverine’ operations. The mission also made the career of a young officer who would lead one of the Raider Battalions in the Second World War and receive the Medal of Honor for his participation in the campaign to capture Guadalcanal.