Notes1 Americans are immigrants—people whose origins are various but whose destinies made them American. Immigration—voluntary or involuntary—is what created all multiracial and multicultural nations. The United States is a prime example. Sometimes the migrants moved freely from the area of origin to the area of destination. Such was the experience of the European immigrants. Sometimes […]

Cuba was the last country in our hemisphere to emerge from the Spanish colonial empire. As such, it was also the last country in our hemisphere where the application of Spanish laws prevailed, and—at least in some areas of the law—continued to prevail well into the Republican era. One of those laws, was the Spanish […]

Notes1 In 2004, ECLAC published a volume titled Política Social y Reformas Estructurales: Cuba a Principios del Siglo XXI that focuses on social policies during the period 1997–2002 (CEPAL 2004b). A collaborative effort among ECLAC’s Regional Office in Mexico, Cuba’s National Economic Research Institute (Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Económicas, INIE), and the United Nations Development […]

In developing countries much of the teeming mass does not consist of oppressed legal proletarians but of oppressed extralegal small entrepreneurs. —(De Soto 2000: 216) Instead of the Trojan Horse that will ultimately break down the fortress of “mercantilist” privilege, the informal sector represents part of the routine operation of capitalism as it is presently […]

Notes1 Everyone agrees that the Washington Consensus did not contain all the answers to the questions of 1989, let alone that it addresses all the new issues that have arisen since then. So of course we need to go beyond it. —John Williamson, 2004 …it is probably better to be cautious and correct than ambitious […]