Almost without exception, Latin American countries have experienced rapid urbanization during recent decades. The population living in urban areas, mainly that in large cities, has been growing much faster than the rural population. There is, of course, a wide range of variation between different countries. Venezuela's urban population grew during the fifties at a rate ten times that of the rural population while Costa Rica's rates of urban and rural growth were approximately equal. Internal migration accounts for a large part of the increase in the urban population and especially for the difference between urban and rural rates of growth.

After a decade of revolution, Cuba is more than an open question to be answered, an experiment to be observed. It has become an exciting research topic which appeals to social scientists throughout the world. Yet several problems have obstructed the scholar in his research on Cuba and its revolution. Primarily, travel limitations have forced him to gather his material mainly from secondary sources (or from primary sources whose objectivity is questionable) rather than from direct observation. Even when travel barriers are overcome, free movement and inquiry are not always possible. The government's screening of visitors to Cuba introduces another problem, i.e., the ideological bias of the outsider has often been a distorting factor in the search for truth. In a sizeable number of cases, articles and books on Cuba written by the visitor or observer are frustrating: either the author has been limited in his information and therefore does not present a total picture of the subject in question, or he is biased either in favor of or against the socialist regime of the island, and has allowed this to interfere with an accurate presentation of the facts.

The recent burgeoning of interest in agrarian reform throughout Latin American countries (Schaedel, 1965; Smith, 1965) has been accompanied by unprecedented attention on the part of social scientists in Latin America and elsewhere in what is called colonization. This is largely because what often is designated as official colonization (or projects to establish on the land groups of families headed by the operators of small or medium-sized farms) is one of the major measures used in attempts to achieve agrarian reform, and also because what frequently is referred to as spontaneous colonization (or the process by which settlers established new farmsteads for themselves on portions of the public domain) is another. In this article attention is concentrated upon the books, monographs, and articles dealing with colonization and settlement, and particularly those that have been put into circulation during the last decade.

There Have Been Few Scholarly Comparisons of Latin America With other areas of the Third World. As a contribution to such comparative study, the University of California Colloquium attempted to examine links between Brazil and Portugal's African territories of Angola, Guinea and the Cape Verdes, and Mozambique. The objectives were to overlap the traditional area boundaries that separate specialists of Latin America and Africa, to focus on common themes from the perspective of varying social science disciplines, and to reassess and evaluate, first, a series of historical cases of crisis, protest, and resistance and, second, nationalist trends and events in relation to patterns of change and development. The specialized essays were to be analytical and exploratory, raising questions for possible future research.