This is a piece of comparative history, not an exercise in folkloric whimsy. It does not attempt to probe the secrets of lo mexicano, la mexicanidad, or any of the other quasi-metaphysical concepts which litter the field of Mexican cultural history.1 Nor does it pay too much attention to those more positivistic analyses which try to encapsulate Mexican (political) culture in terms of statistical comparisons.2 Rather, it offers some comparative generalisations about Mexican history in the national period, stressing both broad patterns of socio-economic development and specific politico-cultural factors. Thus – for better or worse – its model is Barrington Moore rather than, say, Octavio Paz or Gabriel Almond. It also draws inspiration – and borrows its title – from the work of E. P. Thompson, which in turn has been developed by Eley and Blackbourn in the German context, Corrigan and Sayer in the English.3 Its purpose is to offer some explanations of the distinctiveness (as well as the commonality) of Mexico's history, compared to the history of Latin America, in the national period.4

Let us begin at the end. In the last fifty years, Mexico has experienced relatively rapid economic growth coupled with relative political and social stability.5 The achievements of the ‘stabilised development’ of the 1950s and 1960s are well known: a solid regime, rapid growth rates, low inflation, rising per capita income.6 And, while the 1980s were a decade of relative stagnation, Mexico's relative position within Latin America has not deteriorated.7 Furthermore, the prospects for future development – of a capitalist kind, with all that that entails – look better now than they did in the late 1980s; all the more if the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.A. is concluded, as now seems probable.

The politics of inflation in Latin America

In recent years inflation has accelerated in Latin America to become a seemingly intractable problem. In many countries, even when high inflation or hyperinflation has been brought down, the inflationary ‘floor’ has remained high, with all the appearance of a series of upward and irreversible steps. The underlying average annual rate of inflation has tended to rise steadily, as can be seen in the table overleaf.

The reasons for persisting high inflation and for the seeming inability of government policy to bring inflation down in a lasting manner are complex and controversial. Moreover, as a number of authors have noted,1 the reasons for the failure of anti-inflationary policy are often, in some measure, political as well as purely economic. For one thing, inflation, and efforts to control inflation, involve a redistributive struggle the political costs of which the government may be unable or unwilling to bear. In addition, the government simply may not have the administrative capacity to implement certain measures effectively. For example, one way of restoring fiscal balance may be to increase taxes on wealth-holders, but this may not be a politically feasible option for many governments. Central governments may have limited control over the spending of regional and local governments, or over state-owned corporations, and may therefore have difficulty in controlling expenditure. Moreover, effective anti-inflationary policy may require political conditions that may simply not be present in many Latin American political systems. For example, in September 1989, towards the end of the Sarney government in Brazil, inflation was running at 38% per month.

Beginning with Brazil's origins as a nation, and continuing to the present, the relationship between race and politics in that country has been a close and integral one. Portuguese state policy made black slavery the very foundation of Brazil's social and economic order during three centuries of colonial rule. That foundation remained in place even after independence, with the paradoxical result that Brazil became ‘the last Christian country to abolish slavery, and the first to declare itself a racial democracy’. Indeed, perhaps nowhere is the connection between race and politics in Brazil more evident than in the concept of ‘racial democracy’, which characterises race relations in that country in explicitly political terminology.

This article explores some of the connections between race and politics in Brazil by examining four moments in the history of black political mobilisation in that country. Geographically, it focuses on the south-eastern state of São Paulo, which by the time of emancipation, in 1888, housed the third-largest slave population in Brazil (after neighbouring Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro), and which has formed a centre of black political action from the 1880s through to the present. Chronologically, it focuses on: the struggle for the final abolition of slavery in the 1880s; the rise and fall of the Frente Negra Brasileira in the 1930s; the black organisations of the Second Republic; and the most recent wave of black protest, from the mid-1970s to 1988.

The purpose of such an exercise is twofold. First, placing these moments of black mobilisation in a century-long time-frame makes it possible for us to see them not as isolated episodes, but as chapters in a long-term, ongoing history of black protest and struggle in Brazil.

Cuban scholars are not noted for fashioning consensus, much less unanimity. Yet it is unlikely that a Cubanist could be found who would not agree with the proposition that Cuba in 1992 is in the worst crisis of the revolution. It is perhaps arguable that the material situation on the island in 1969 was as difficult as it is today, but back in 1969 the revolution was young and the Cuban people for the most part were energetic and hopeful. Cuba was then an increasingly accepted and economically integrated member of the large world socialist community.

The proximate cause of Cuba's present predicament is not hard to identify. Cuba has a small and heavily trade-dependent economy. In the presence of the US embargo, Cuba came to depend on the former Soviet trade bloc (CMEA) for over four-fifths of its imports. Without access to the US market, with access to other markets restricted and with imports from the former CMEA countries reduced by roughly two-thirds, Cuba's economy and its people are struggling to survive.

The government's response to the crisis has been deliberate but inadequate. A number of reforms initiated prior to 1989 are being continued,1 others are being accelerated and some new programmes are being put in place. The new emphasis on foreign investment and tourism, structural reforms in the operation of foreign trade, and the impossibility of central planning in the presence of ubiquitous supply uncertainties have combined to transform the nature of Cuba's economic mechanism. Despite the promise of some extension of private enterprise and the market in the service sector, however, the needed and more concerted introduction of a broader market mechanism has not been forthcoming.

Transitions into democracy: convergence and distinct paths

In mid-1982 Mexico's Minister of Finance, Jesús Silva Herzog, arrived in the United States and announced that his country was not going to continue paying its foreign debt. Silva Herzog's declaration was soon followed by debt defaults in many other Latin American countries, marking the beginning of the region's most serious economic crisis in this century. This crisis involved the partial breakdown of Latin America's financial and trade linkages to the world economy; the cessation of new credit money paralleled an interruption in the flow of capital investments, amounting to a total reversal of the financial patterns of previous decades. (The level of foreign investment, especially in manufacturing and mining, had been relatively high since the mid-1950s, albeit with significant differences from country to country).

The debt crisis coincided, not incidentally, with a convergence of the political trajectories of five of the region's more industrialised countries: Mexico, Brazil, and the three Southern Cone nations of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. All five governments – the South American military dictatorships and Mexico's stable authoritarian PRI regime – experienced periods of political turbulence closely related both to the severe economic disruptions and to other domestic and international influences.

One of the remarkable aspects of this 1982 political convergence was that it came after the ‘long decade’ of the 1970s, during which the governmental routes of the five countries had been extremely divergent. In Argentina, for example, instability, militarism and political violence had intensified, starting in 1969; these phenomena then spread to its traditionally more democratic neighbours, Chile and Uruguay.

Introduction: the Repudiation of the Centenário

13 May 1988 was the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. In honour of that date, various official celebrations and commemorations of the centenário, organised by the Brazilian government, church groups and cultural organisations, took place throughout the country, even including a speech by President José Sarney.

This celebration of the emancipation was not, however, universal. Many Afro—Brazilian groups staged actions and marches, issued denunciations and organised cultural events repudiating the ‘farce of abolition’. These were unprecedented efforts to draw national and international attention to the extensive racial inequality and discrimination which Brazilian blacks – by far the largest concentration of people of African descent in any country in the western hemisphere – continue to confront. Particular interventions had such titles as ‘100 Years of Lies’, ‘One Hundred Years Without Abolition’, ‘March for the Real Liberation of the Race’, ‘Symbolic Burial of the 13th of May’, ‘March in Protest of the Farce of Abolition’, and ‘Discommemoration (Descomemoraçāo) of the Centenary of Abolition’.1 The repudiation of the centenário suggests that Brazilian racial dynamics, traditionally quiescent, are emerging with the rest of society from the extended twilight of military dictatorship. Racial conflict and mobilisation, long almost entirely absent from the Brazilian scene, are reappearing. New racial patterns and processes – political, cultural, economic, social and psychological – are emerging, while racial inequalities of course continue as well. How much do we know about race in contemporary Brazil? How effectively does the extensive literature explain the present situation?

Although in the literature there is almost a consensus that there was an advance of modernity in Brazil after 1870, tradition was sufficiently strong to maintain the values of a rural, patriarchal and hierarchical society. This modernity assumed characteristics that distinguished it from the classic model, represented by the Anglo-Saxon experience. In the period between 1870 and 1914 the ground was cleared for the conservative modernisation of the 1930s.

Introduction: the genesis of ‘informal empire’

In 1953 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson published an article entitled ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, which has since become a landmark in the study of nineteenth-century British imperialism. Seeking to overturn long-cherished notions of a mid-Victorian ‘indifference’ and a late-Victorian ‘enthusiasm’ for empire, it proposed a basic continuity of policy whereby British industrialisation caused an ever-extending and intensifying development of overseas regions for both strategic and economic purposes. Hence the suggestion of a working definition of imperialism as ‘the sufficient political function of this process of integrating new regions into the expanding economy’. In switching the focus of a definition of imperialism from the way in which Britain was able to assert her superiority over weaker, subordinate nations to the impetus and motivation behind such expansion, traditional conceptions of empire were suddenly shattered. Indeed, as Robinson and Gallagher maintained, ‘The conventional interpretation of the nineteenth century empire continues to rest on the study of formal empire alone, which is rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line’.2

The whole framework of reference for a study of British imperialism was being recast, the revised assumption being that the empire of formal dominion, which can loosely be defined as control through annexation and constitutional subordination, is not comprehensible in isolation. Rather, the assertion of British paramountcy, which for Robinson and Gallagher lies close to the very heart of imperialism, was achieved by informal means if possible, or by formal annexation when this was deemed necessary.

In 1949 Raúl Prebisch, an Argentine economist, published a study for the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), in which he attributed the failure to reach sustained economic growth in Latin America to the international division of labour. Based on research carried out by ECLA on the terms of trade between manufactures and primary goods, he concluded that – contrary to expectations – they moved against primary products. If prices decline as productivity increases (in competitive markets), industrial goods, where the technological improvements had been more significant, should have declined in price more than agricultural goods. The empirical results of the study showed the opposite.1 If the Latin American countries therefore wanted to benefit from technological progress, they should move towards industrialisation. Almost at the same time, based on the same empirical study, Hans Singer not only argued that the gains from trade had not been distributed equally, but also that foreign investments in the export sector were not part of the domestic economy, but represented an enclave belonging to the countries of the centre which received its benefits.2 Singer advanced an argument that became popular later on; he noted the existence in the underdeveloped countries of a dual economy with two sectors each with different productivity and segmented markets: a modern sector linked to the central countries and a traditional sector linked to the rest of the economy. Also, from the critics of the classical theory of trade, another argument was put forward: the different income elasticities of demand for manufactures and agricultural goods (Engels’ law) suggested that expenditure on agricultural goods would decline in relative terms as incomes rose, hurting the terms of trade for primary products.3

The current enthusiasm for trade liberalisation in Latin America, and indeed for a broad-ranging return to the market, has as its backdrop the widespread disillusion with the protectionist model of the 1950s and 1960s. Import substituting industrialisation (ISI) is seen as having used tariff barriers and controls to generate an extremely inefficient industry, suffering under a weight of state bureaucracy, with often inappropriate direct state participation. Its excessive import needs, for all its import-substituting origin, are directly related to the generation of the debt crisis.1 The high and poorly-structured tariffs brought tariff-hopping foreign investment on inappropriate terms. Repressed domestic interest rates allowed such firms to borrow locally at negative real rates and crowd out locals who then borrowed abroad. This inefficiency, plus the overvalued exchange rates implicit in heavy protection, made exports of manufactures unthinkable, and thus condemned the incipient industry to severe limitations of market size as well as condemning the economies to growing balance of payments non-viability. This in turn severely affected industrial progress by limiting growth and exposing firms to stop-go policies.

In turn, ISI policies themselves are seen as having originated with the turning point of the 1929 depression, when the export-led growth mechanism essentially broke down and at least the more sizeable Latin American economies turned fatally inwards. The trajectory from 1930 to the ‘fully-fledged’ ISI model of the 1950s and 1960s is typically left vague.

This article will attempt to show that recent research now allows us a much fuller and more nuanced view of the evolution from the export economy model of the early century through to the later ISI model.2

In the thirty years between 1950 and 1980, Latin America experienced rapid growth. During this period, output expanded at an annual rate of 5.5% with per capita increases averaging 2.7% a year. Table 1 provides country details. The star is clearly Brazil, whose share in regional product increased from less than a quarter to more than a third. At the other extreme are two groups: the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay), whose mid-century leading position in the region was eroded by below average performance; and a group of smaller countries, including several in Central America. On average, Latin America's record, viewed from an immediate post-World War II perspective, is impressive. It far exceeded the target of the Alliance for Progress implemented in 1961, which called for an annual rate of 2% per capita. It also compared very favourably with European per capita income growth in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, which was 1.3% from 1850 to 1900 and 1.4% between 1900 and 1950. Long-term US economic growth has been at 1.8%.

Yet two factors combine to make the 1950–80 Latin American growth performance seem less positive. One is its dramatic reversal in the 1980s, a period in which GDP per capita fell by 8.3%. By 1989, with the exception of Brazil, Chile, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, per capita GDP had fallen below its 1980 level. At the extreme, Venezuela, Nicaragua and El Salvador show levels below those attained in 1960. The 1980s have truly been a lost decade and thus one tends to underestimate the earlier achievement.