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Latin America

Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York

Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York

When Bernardo Vega arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1916, he was at the forefront of a migrant stream that was soon to become a flood. His memoirs—perceptive, lively, and politically aware—provide us with a unique and often humorous firsthand account of the life of an immigrant, as well as of the concerns and activities of the Puerto Rican community in New York in the period between the wars. | more…

The Sugarmill: The Socio-Economic Complex of Sugar in Cuba 1760–1860

The Sugarmill: The Socio-Economic Complex of Sugar in Cuba 1760–1860

This extraordinary work deserves to be called monumental for its scrupulous and exhaustive analysis of the development of the sugar industry in Cuba, for the imposing originality of its approach, and for the unsentimental but no less passionate vision of history it embodies. The product of twenty years of historical research combined with ten years of economic and technical work in the industry, The Sugarmill is a landmark in post-revolutionary Cuban scholarship. | more…

Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution

Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution

In his second book, Andre Gunder Frank expands on the theme presented in his influential study Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. It is the colonial structure of world capitalism, in his view, which produced and maintains the underdevelopment characteristic of Latin America and the rest of the Third World. This colonial structure penetrates everywhere in Latin America, forming and transforming all its features in obedience to its own imperatives and thereby imposing upon the region those characteristic features of poverty and backwardness which are not primarily the remnants of an ancient “feudal” past but the direct products of capitalism. This development of underdevelopment will persist, therefore, until the people of Latin America free themselves from world capitalism by means of revolution. The Cuban Revolution is thus viewed as the first effort in a continent-wide revolutionary process direct against both imperialism and the national bourgeoisie. | more…

Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil

Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil

The four essays in this book offer a sweeping reinterpretation of Latin American history as an aspect of the world-wide spread of capitalism in its commercial and industrial phases. Dr. Frank lays to rest the myth of Latin American feudalism, demonstrating in the process the impossibility of a bourgeois revolution in a part of the world which is already part and parcel of the capitalist system. | more…