Two differing views of the economy of contemporary Cuba continue to coexist. One portrays it as dynamic, largely unaffected by inflation, providing full employment for its citizens, diversified, and the unquestioned leader within Latin America in real economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this view is that the Cuban economic model and its implementation in the island have been a success and that other developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere would do well to emulate the Cuban paradigm.

On 10 October 1988, President Miguel de la Madrid authorized loading of the first of two reactor units at the Laguna Verde nuclear power plant, on the Mexican gulf coast above the port of Veracruz. De la Madrid's decision to move ahead with Laguna Verde, Mexico's first foray into commercial nuclear energy production, came as no surprise. What was extraordinary was that it proved to be one of the most controversial policy actions of his sexenio. Culminating twenty years of planning and development, the Laguna Verde project, which had been emblematic of Mexico's technical progress and promise at its outset, had turned into a political albatross.

The Brazilian defense industry has become the country's most dynamic high-tech industry. This article will examine and analyze its remarkable growth and development. In the first section, the matrix of motivations behind the establishment of the Brazilian defense industry will be discussed. The second section will review its growth and strategic directions, and the third will elaborate on the industry's export drive, especially its major markets and products. The following sections will discuss the catalytic role of the Brazilian government in the defense industry, the industry's tripod strategy, and major barriers to further growth and development.

All numbers on the makeup of Peru's republican population are wrong, the one point on which historians can agree. Peruvian governments had neither the capacity nor the will to mount thorough surveys of their scattered and elusive Andean subjects. Between the late viceregal census of 1791 (reporting a population of 1,076,000) and the first modern effort of 1876 (yielding a count of 2,699,000) lies a century of demographic no man's land, despite partial surveys claimed for 1812, 1836, 1850, and 1862. Unfortunately, historians cannot fly back in time and redo the head counts missed or mismanaged by successive governments, although this miracle has seemingly been worked for the older Incan and conquest periods.1 The best scholars can attempt at this point is to untangle the confusions of existing census documents and bring new evidence to bear on their strengths and weaknesses.

The Mexican government recently proposed as a medium-term objective that the minimum rate of economic growth should be twice the rate of population growth (Mexico, Presidencia de la República 1988). This proposal may indicate a renewed interest in Mexico in linking demographic variables to the economic and development issues of the country. In proposing such a target, the Mexican government seems to be suggesting that its long-term development plans will hinge on criteria that depart radically from those recently used to assess the performance of these plans. The proposal seems particularly revealing because it came from President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who is an economist himself.

Jacaltenango is a forlorn, unkempt-looking town lying in the tierra templada toward the western edge of the Cuchumatán highlands of Guatemala. It is perhaps best known to the academic world as a stop on the route taken by Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge (1926, 1927) in their pioneering reconnaissance of Mesoamerica earlier this century, a place to which the latter returned with Douglas Byers to document an intriguing array of Maya cultural survivals (La Farge and Byers 1931). More recently, one of its native sons has given local lore and storytelling eloquent written form, as well as documenting the town's painful experience during counterinsurgency operations in the early 1980s (Montejo 1984, 1987).