Geography Archives: Americas

  Four Lectures on Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 1981).  Reprinted by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur, West Bengal.  ISBN 978-81-88401-17-8.  Rs 55. pp 97 Back in the dog days of the Great Depression, “a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student” (as he would describe himself in a letter to a friend decades later) from Harvard landed in […]

After Bolivia beat the Argentine soccer team led by legendary Diego Maradona by 6 to 1, Maradona told reporters, “Every Bolivia goal was a stab in my heart.”  Bolivia was expected to lose the April 1 match as Argentina is ranked as the 6th best soccer team in the world, and Maradona enjoys godlike status […]

  The text below is composed of short excerpts from Kevin P. Gallagher and Roberto Porzecanski’s “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom: A Critical Assessment” (Political Economy Research Institute, 10 February 2009).  The full text of “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom” is available (in PDF) at <www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/ working_papers_151-200/WP192.pdf>. — Ed. INTRODUCTION: China […]

It is not known how many people in the United States write to Obama and how many different topics are presented to him. It’s clear that he cannot read all the letters and deal with everything because he wouldn’t be able to fit it into a 24-hour day or a 365-day year. What is certain is that his advisors, backed up by their computers, electronic equipment and cell, answer all the letters. Their contents are recorded and there are pre-written answers supported by the multiple declarations of the new president during his campaign to be nominated and elected.

  Industrial production fell 1.5 percent in March after a similar decrease in February.  For the first quarter as a whole, output dropped at an annual rate of 20.0 percent, the largest quarterly decrease of the current contraction.  At 97.4 percent of its 2002 average, output in March fell to its lowest level since December […]

Questionnaire/Methodology (PDF) Full PDF Version A majority of Americans feel that it is time to try a new approach to Cuba, according to a national poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org.  More specifically, the public favors lifting the ban on travel to Cuba for Americans and re-establishing diplomatic relations as well as other changes. By a wide margin […]

Today I spoke frankly about the atrocities committed against the peoples of Latin America. The peoples of the Caribbean were not even independent when the Cuban Revolution triumphed. Exactly on April 19th, the day when the Summit of the America finishes, it will be 48 years since the Cuban victory at Bay of Pigs. I was cautious when referring to the OAS; I didn’t say a single word that might be interpreted as an offence to that very old institution even though everyone knows how repugnant it is to us.

Forty eight years ago mercenary troops in the service of a foreign power invaded their own homeland, escorted by a United States squadron, including an aircraft carrier and dozens of fighter planes. That date cannot be forgotten. The great power to the North can apply the same recipe to any Latin American country. It has already happened many times throughout our hemisphere’s history. Is there any declaration guaranteeing that such an action will never repeat again, either directly or through the very armies of other countries, as it occurred in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela and others?

  Within an otherwise bleak reality of capitalist crisis, Mike Lebowitz has provided us with an eloquent restatement of the case for socialism — The Path for Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?  This short text is now circulating widely in Venezuela, in Spanish, as a pocket-sized pamphlet, has been published in Monthly Review, and is […]

Abstract Following the 2000-01 crisis, Turkey implemented an orthodox strategy of raising interest rates and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate.  But, contrary to the traditional stabilization packages that aim to increase interest rates to constrain domestic demand, the new orthodoxy aimed at maintaining high interest rates to attract speculative foreign capital.  The end result was […]

The U.S. administration announced through CNN that Obama would be visiting Mexico this week, in the first part of a trip that will take him to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, where he will be within four days taking part in the Summit of the Americas. He has announced the relief of some hateful restrictions imposed by Bush on Cubans living in the United States regarding their visits to relatives in Cuba. When questions were raised on whether such prerogatives extended to other American citizens the response was that the latter were not authorized.

Abstract The collapse of the European socialist block at the end of the 1980s caused a deep crisis in the Cuban economy.  One of the distinctive features of the process of adjustment and reform of the Cuban economy carried out by the government was that even during the worst period of the crisis, the Revolution’s […]

In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to have told President Barack Obama that either America stops Iran or Israel will.  Not surprisingly, the interview sparked quite a controversy, and only a day later, General David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the Israeli […]

Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror is the most ambitious book yet on the Darfur crisis.  Unlike the vast majority of other writing on the crisis, which is political science, human rights, or ethnographic narrative, specific to the Darfurian or the Sudanese situation, Mamdani places Darfur in deep and […]

  El telón de azúcar (The Sugar Curtain) was the winner of the Premio Coral for the best documentary at the 29th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana in 2007. — Ed. In The Sugar Curtain, the Paradise of the Cuban Revolution Is Put in Crisis The daughter of a Chilean documentary […]

  Obama did what was expected, dispensing good luck charms for all.  What he left behind is a state of delirium, a la the Hunchback of Notre Dame: “He gave me water.” Even though some of Obama’s gestures during the visit — such as Obama reminding the young people he was chatting with of the […]

  VTV’s “La Hojilla” program’s production team republished the images of the coup d’état of 11 April 2002, which kidnapped President Hugo Chávez and trampled on the Constitution and the rights of the Venezuelan people for 48 hours. After seven years, now that justice is beginning to be done in the cases of the massacre […]

Very few writers maintain total indifference toward the ethics of their work.  Those who have thought that in the practice of literature it is possible to separate ethics from aesthetics, however, are not so few.  Jorge Luis Borges, not without mastery, practiced a kind of politics of aesthetic neutrality, perhaps convinced of its possibility.  Thus, […]

Yesterday, Thursday 9, our attention was focused on the tense situation in Bolivia…

Paper presented at the Congrès Marx International V, Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre, October 2007 1.  Introduction About a decade ago the radical left, both in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had been gripped by an understanding of contemporary capitalism as based on a three-pronged tendency: ‘globalization’ as an already accomplished state, the ‘end of labor’ due […]