It has become rather common to say that the economic importance of Latin America for the United States has declined sharply, mainly owing to the fact that the region's relative position in the external trade of the United States has deteriorated progressively. While the figures do indeed reveal that the region now plays a lesser role in U.S. foreign commerce than it did some decades ago, it would be grossly misleading to assume that the overall economic importance of Latin America for the United States and other core powers also has declined. Economic relations between the Latin American periphery and the United States should not be analyzed merely in quantitative terms, on a bilateral basis, and only at certain points in time. It is necessary to shift attention to the structural level, to verify, for example, whether this decrease in the Latin American share of world trade necessarily implies a breakdown of the bonds that have existed historically between core and periphery economies.

Brazil and Mexico occupy distinctive positions in the structure of the capitalist world economy. They bear little resemblance to the classic model of a “peripheral” country: they are too industrialized, having many of the modern industries typically found only at the center of the world economy; they supply themselves with too large a share of the finished goods consumed domestically; their exports are too diversified and include too many manufactured items; and they have developed unusually strong states with sophisticated administrative apparatuses capable of promoting and protecting local interests. But neither do Brazil and Mexico possess the characteristics commonly associated with “developed” or “core” nations. Their gross domestic product per capita is far below that of the United States, Japan, or almost any of the countries of Western Europe; their distributions of income are highly skewed compared to those of the developed countries; they are recipient rather than source countries of foreign investment; they are debtor rather than creditor nations; and they are on the receiving rather than the originating end of product innovation and new production techniques.

In recent years, a body of literature analyzing development and modernization since the world wars has emphasized the diverse tasks women perform in premodern agrarian societies as compared to incipient industrial economies. The greater input of women in many nonmechanized societies, compared to their role thereafter, has been seen as the key to understanding why the introduction of machine technology has often resulted in the subsequent general unemployment or underemployment of working-class women.

In two decades, Brazil has shed the image of a stagnant agrarian state and emerged as one of the world's largest agricultural exporters. The price of this metamorphosis has come high: land, resource, and capital concentration; massive rural-urban migration; shortfalls in domestic food supply; and ecological deterioration along the expanding agricultural frontier. Major transformations in the structure of agricultural production have accompanied these changes, and they have led to new patterns in the organization of agricultural work and associated social relations in production. Perhaps the most visible social product of agricultural modernization has been the temporary wage laborer, known commonly in Brazil as the boia fria.

The extensive post-1973 literature analyzing and comparing national energy policies across countries has generally excluded Cuba, purportedly because of the unavailability of appropriate data. As a result, very little serious work has been carried out assessing Cuba's current energy balances and the efficacy of its policies in adjusting to the new global energy situation. While it is incontrovertible that available official Cuban energy data are weak, it can be argued that, when supplemented with data from other sources and with reasonable estimates, they can serve as the basis for tentative analysis of energy policies. This note attempts to lay the groundwork for such future analyses by bringing together and evaluating energy supply and consumption data covering the first two decades of revolutionary government. While the emphasis is on the period 1959–78, pre-1959 data are introduced when appropriate in an effort to put recent trends in historical perspective. The first section focuses on primary energy production and considers the contribution of commercial and noncommercial sources to domestic energy supply. In the second section, imports of primary energy products are considered and their role in total energy supply evaluated. The last section examines tentatively some aspects of Cuban energy consumption and attempts to relate consumption patterns to policies that were in effect during the period.

It is generally agreed that the artistic world of eighteenth-century Brazil was dominated by the sculptor/architect, Antônio Francisco Lisboa—“O Aleijadinho” (“the little cripple”)—who has been called one of the most important artists ever to develop in Latin America. The peculiar circumstances of his life, combined with his obvious artistic genius, have resulted in considerable scholarly interest and study. The annotated bibliography that brought Aleijadinho scholarship from 1940 through 1973, in combination with the earlier bibliographies of Martins and Smith-Wilder, provides a relatively complete chronicling of works dealing exclusively with A. F. Lisboa.

From 1978 to 1980 the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), using funds granted to the committee by the Tinker Foundation, sponsored a Working Group on Latin American Urbanization and Urban Research. During that period the group held two three-day seminars, the first in London in February 1978, and the second in Carmel, California, 31 March-2 April 1980. Both meetings, as well as the interim activities of the group, were planned and coordinated by Jorge Hardoy (Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales, Buenos Aires) and Alejandro Portes (The Johns Hopkins University), in conjunction with SSRC staff. The intention was to unite established scholars from a variety of countries in a context that would encourage collaborative research projects, sharing both substantive focus and conceptual perspectives. The original group included Henry Coing, Wayne Cornelius, Jorge Hardoy, Larissa Lomnitz, Alejandro Portes, Bryan Roberts, Paul Singer, John Walton, and Oscar Yujnovsky.

The Centro Paraguayo de Estudios Sociológicos (CPES), founded 17 March 1964 in Asunción, is a private institution dedicated to research and teaching. Initiative for the creation of the center came from a group of university professors who felt it was necessary to incorporate new theories and methods into Paraguayan scientific work. On 11 February 1971, Executive Decree No. 24.354 gave the center legal existence, with administration by a committee of directors and an assembly of founding members, and executive responsibility resting with a general director.

The lively exchange in the Latin American Research Review between D. C. M. Platt and Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein over dependency and autonomy in nineteenth-century Latin America raises a number of significant questions in the field of historical interpretation. It illustrates once more how difficult it is to support sweeping generalizations about so large and complex a region as Latin America, especially in a time period so filled with changes (in at least parts of the region) as the nineteenth century. The controversy over sources of action and their motivation, which characterizes dependency analysis, is unresolved. The argument is flavored with attributions of moral blame for events that may turn out, in a broader historical view, to have been highly fortuitous. The present comment is an attempt to insert and assess the force and direction of a vector usually passed by in the controversy. The case will be confined to Argentina, the country most often cited by Platt, and certainly the Latin American country most affected in its emerging pattern of economic development by marked shifts from Spanish to criollo to British influence over the century.

The publication information for THE ECONOMY OF SOCIALIST CUBA: A TWO DECADE APPRAISAL by CARMELO MESA-LAGO (William M. LeoGrande, “Two Decades of Socialism in Cuba,” LARR 16, no. 1 [1981]: 187–206) was incorrectly given as New York University Press, forthcoming. This work, which appeared in July 1981, was published by the University of New Mexico Press. In our effort to make the review as comprehensive and up-to-date as possible, our reviewer worked from galleys. The publishers have indicated that “several of the objections he raises concern points which are either not present or treated differently in the final galleys and pages of this book.” LARR regrets any inconvenience this may have caused.

In the last decade in Peru, there have been substantive changes in thinking about Peruvian history and society. Although this change is visible in all the social sciences, in a special way economic analysis and historical investigation have made some important gains. Economics no longer consists, in the works of its better adherents, of vague meditations or the crude accounting of a druggist; and historical studies are also finally beginning to reach a minimal level of seriousness. Once the end product of only a few particularly lucid minds, the concept that we have today of history and the work of the historian is now shared by a much larger group. It is interesting, therefore, to see where these changes have been made, not only because of the academic necessity of giving a correct accounting, but also because the outlines of this new consciousness of its past that Peruvian society is acquiring need to be underscored. The study of history in Peru, more than any other social science, is part of the continual struggle to redraw the past of Peruvian society and to destroy the collective amnesia of the masses. These two objectives have always been sought but only now are they being achieved by works of indisputable rigor.

In a significant survey article published in the American Economic Review ten years ago, Leopoldo Solís could regret, not without justification, the lack of a serious tradition of empirical economics research in Mexico. There was no lack of well-trained and creative applied economists; but they were often engaged, then as now, in political action or public administration. Meanwhile, academic economists were engaged in the transmission of received theory (usually foreign) without reference to the realidad nacional or else in vague generalizations. However, the recent bibliographical survey by the Colegio de México, as well as the publications discussed in this review, indicate that the 1970s saw a flourishing of empirical and quantitative work among the two main groups identified by Solís: the neoclassical and monetarist economists on the one hand and the structuralists and radicals on the other. Moreover, there has emerged an increasing differentiation within these groups, spreading the scope of the debate outwards from the center, reflecting the polarization of political attitudes in Mexican society as a whole. Further, as the economists gained positions of power previously reserved for professional politicians, both structuralists such as Tello and neoclassicals such as Solís himself were in a position to translate at least some of their ideas into practice. However, although Solís had suggested that the intellectual advance would be made by economists of the neoclassical persuasion, in the event it was the monetarists and radical writers who appear to have been most fertile in the 1970s.