Abstract: The Strategic Integration of Latin America: A Disputed Project, Article by Giuseppe Lo Brutto and Carlos Otto Vázquez Salazar

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Commentary

The Strategic Integration of Latin America: A Disputed Project 

by Giuseppe Lo Brutto and Carlos Otto Vázquez Salazar

The integration of Latin America and the Caribbean is a disputed process. In the new phase of integration represented by the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América and the Unión de Naciones Suramericanas, the control of natural resources has acquired central importance in a global scenario characterized by hegemonic reconfiguration and a tendency toward the creation of a multipolar world. For the integration to be viable, it must overcome the extractivist model and establish new forms of state-society relations.

Cuban Exceptionalism by Ken Cole

Cuban Exceptionalism: A Personal View 
by Ken Cole
Ken Cole is a member of the International Institute for the Study of Cuba at London Metropolitan University. 

January 1, 2009, marks the fiftieth anniversary of victory in Cuba’s third war of independence. In his first speech of the Cuban Revolution, given in Santiago de Cuba on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro declared that for the first time in four centuries Cubans were free. Whereas Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and José Martí had led the previous wars, in 1868 and 1895, against Spanish colonial dominion, Castro’s July 26th Movement (named after the day in 1953 when the attack on the Moncada barracks marked the commencement of the revolution) challenged the economic domination of Cuba by the United States.