The twelve years of military rule in Peru between 1968 and 1980 witnessed few abuses of human rights, in marked contrast to the activities of military governments in Southern Cone countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Yet paradoxically, the return to democracy in Peru, with the election of Fernando Belaúnde in 1980 and Alan García in 1985, has brought sharp escalations in political violence and terror. Guerrilla activity by the Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) in the highlands, urban terrorism, and a severe economic crisis have combined to pose a serious challenge to the authority of the state. Thus it is problematic to speak of a “return to democracy” while Peruvians are being subjected to expanding military control and repression.

On 28 February 1986, the Brazilian government announced a “heterodox” inflation stabilization program that rapidly came to be called the Plano Cruzado. It was intended to halt an inflation that appeared to be escaping control and untamable through orthodox stabilization policies. Although at first the Plano Cruzado seemed to succeed dramatically in eliminating inflation without recessionary side effects, it failed by the end of 1986, as inflation revived, external accounts collapsed, and real growth sagged.

During 1986 and 1987, Cuba found itself once again debating the relative merits of material and moral incentives. Analysts outside Cuba have rushed to their word processors to pronounce judgment on the Cuban economy's alleged uncertain footing. Some writers have erroneously declared that Cuba has abolished its post-1973 system of tying pay to productivity, and some have interpreted changes in the Cuban economic system as marking the failure and demise of the Sistema de Dirección y Planificación de la Economía (SDPE), Cuba's system of economic management and planning since 1976. This essay will endeavor not to uncover the errant interpretations of Western observers but to explore the underlying problematic and dynamic that Cuba confronts in attempting to balance moral and material incentives within the framework of central planning.

During the two decades preceding the abolition law of 1880, Cuban sugar planters pursued two parallel goals. The first undertaking was a concerted effort to increase the efficiency of agricultural and industrial production. A sophisticated railroad network was constructed to the interior from the ports of Havana, Matanzas, Cárdenas, and Cienfuegos in the 1840s and 1850s. Railroads opened high-yielding virgin land in frontier regions to production, and in the 1860s and 1870s, planters attempted to further the transportation revolution by developing rail systems within their estates to carry cane from fields to mills. Because the sucrose content of cane begins to drop immediately after the cane is cut, internal railway lines had the potential to revolutionize sugar production by moving cane quickly to the processing phase. Railroads also helped to resolve the recurring problem of roads washed out by heavy rains, which often precluded transporting harvested cane to mills for refining. In addition to revolutionizing transportation, planters also sought to raise industrial yields by installing modern milling equipment with greater processing capacity. The Jamaican trains of the early nineteenth century were replaced by vacuum-pan evaporators and centrifuges on the most modern mills by the 1860s and 1870s, a change that produced higher grades of sugar more efficiently.

Civilian rule was installed in Brazil in March 1985, following a gradual liberalization process that had been largely controlled by the military since the mid-1970s. Because no decisive rupture with the previous regime occurred, the first several years of the Nova República were marked by continuous debate about the extent to which the Nova República had broken with the authoritarian past or represented simply a continuation of the old “system.”

The beginning of the so-called Nova República was inauspicious for both Brazil and Brazilian cinema. The events surrounding the illness and death of President-elect Tancredo Neves and the subsequent inauguration of former government-party leader José Sarney are well-known. Perhaps less known is the fact that one of the first pieces of legislation Sarney signed into law while Acting President during Neves's illness sent shock waves through the national film industry, which was already suffering one of the worst economic crises of its recent history.

Until now, discussions of theories of media and society or media and the state in the North American literature have been limited. The four theories of the press advanced by Fred Siebert, Wilbur Schramm, and Theodore Peterson cover the main approaches of Western liberal society, the libertarian and social responsibility models, and some aspects of the Eastern bloc in the “totalitarian” model. Under the heading of “authoritarian,” however, a number of very diverse systems are lumped together. One major variation seen in Brazil is the continued vitality of the corporatist model of state and society, which has distinct implications for the role of mass media. In particular, aspects of corporatism seem to be combining with aspects of democracy and mass mobilization politics in ways that shed light on the role of the media in constructing or undercutting ideological hegemony in the heterogeneous, class-divided societies of Latin America.