This article compares and evaluates performance of two main current socialist economic-social models. One is Cuba’s central plan characterized by state large enterprises predominant over the market and private property, with mild market-oriented structural reforms that are ineffective in generating sustainable socioeconomic development. The other model is the successful Sino-Vietnamese “socialist market,” typified by small, medium, and some large private enterprises and the market, all predominant under a decentralized plan (a guideline rather than a central plan). In this the state regulates the economy and controls the largest enterprises. The article identifies the characteristics of the three countries, addresses potential barriers to comparison, and summarizes a history of the reforms and their five key economic policies in the three countries. It also assesses performance based on a selection of the twenty most relevant and comparable indicators, elaborates a composite average to rank the three countries, and discusses potential methodological issues. The conclusions summarize the results of the comparison, recommend reforms for Cuba based on successful Sino-Vietnamese policies, and outline the research agenda for the future. The article is an important contribution to the fields of comparative economics systems, socioeconomic development, methodology, and Latin American studies.

Diverse elements have driven inflation in the Cuban economy in the early 2020s, but the big-bang devaluation of the peso in 2021—the key measure that unlocks monetary reform—stands out as the main determinant. Analysis indicates that the inflation rate ranged between 174% and 700%, well above the government’s 2021 consumer price index estimate (77%) and closer to the deflator of household consumption derived from the national income accounts (442%). Even with this larger inflation, there is room for a real depreciation of the peso in the short term. The relative rise of tradable goods prices and incomplete pass-through from the exchange rate to inflation create new incentives and enhance financial transparency in the short term. However, the absence of sufficient structural reforms, the complex macroeconomic scenario, and the persistence of high fiscal deficit, inflation, and devaluation of the peso in the informal market after 2021 put most of the potential benefits of the monetary reform at risk. Monetary instability is a deep, continuing problem.

This article examines the adaptive market hypothesis in the five most important Latin American stock indices. To that end, we apply three versions of the variance ratio test, as well as the Brock-Dechert-Scheinkman test for nonlinear predictability. Additionally, we perform the Dominguez-Lobato and generalized spectral tests to evaluate the Martingale difference hypothesis. Moreover, we consider salient news related to the plausible market inefficiencies detected by these four tests. Finally, we apply a GARCH-M model to assess the risk-return relationship through time. Our results suggest that the predictability of stock returns varies over time. Furthermore, the efficiency in each market behaves differently over time. All in all, the analyzed emerging market indices satisfy the adaptive market hypothesis, given the switching behavior between periods of efficiencies and inefficiencies, since the adaptive market hypothesis suggests that market efficiency and market anomalies might coexist in capital markets.

This study seeks to determine the impact of remittances and nonlabor income on the duration of unemployment, and therefore on the hysteresis phenomenon in Colombia for the period between January 2010 and January 2021. The long-term unemployment rate in Colombia (LAPU) is calculated, and a vector autoregressive (VAR) model is subsequently estimated to evaluate the impact of remittances and nonlabor income on the LAPU. The results suggest that the increase in nonlabor income significantly affected LAPU in Colombia in the period analyzed. The growth of remittances instead turned out to positively and significantly impact LAPU only during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. This suggests that remittances have become a fundamental income in times of crisis that allow for financing the search for work for a longer period of time, thus increasing the duration of unemployment and generating a hysteresis effect.

This article examines the encounter of activists from the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA) with African, African American, and Asian anticolonial intellectuals through the League Against Imperialism (LAI), founded at the 1927 Brussels Congress. Drawing from LADLA’s newspaper El Libertador, letters from LADLA leaders, and speeches and resolutions in the LAI archive, it studies how exchanges begun in Brussels influenced debates in radical circles in the Americas. The article builds on extant scholarship and makes two primary interventions. First, it argues that a closer look at LADLA’s participation in the LAI shifts the traditional understanding of interwar Latin American regionalist ideologies, which LADLA rejected in favor of drawing connections to anti-imperialist movements around the world. Second, it argues that the exchange in Brussels influenced LADLA to eventually expand its initial focus on Indigenous struggles to think more critically about Black communities, including Black migrant labor, in political organizing.

This article explores Mexico’s overlooked importance in the Central American armed conflict, the limits of its influence, and its connection to the late Cold War. Mexico’s policy toward Central America attempted to prevent an American and Cuban military intervention in the area and avoid a Cold War confrontation along its southern border. Mexico attempted to build detente in the region and prevent a global escalation of tension between the great powers. Meanwhile, it sought to propose a “third way” for the revolutionary actors shaped after Mexico’s political system and history. Studying Mexico’s efforts to create detente-like arrangements can shed light on the efforts of peripheral actors and their projects to influence the international system despite the actions of hegemonic powers.

This article explores how Francisco de Aguirre used the Copiapó Valley encomienda to negotiate political power during the transition from conquest to colonial rule in northern Chile. Simultaneously, we analyze the circumstances of how a native society was incorporated into the Spanish Empire after a decade of fighting and resistance on the fringes of the empire. The strategic use of the fear of native rebellions to close the road from Peru to Chile gave Aguirre enough power to negotiate an important political position, which in the future would clash with the colonial authorities. Copiapó Valley’s peripheral location in the southernmost Atacama Desert constituted a political gray zone for the colonial administration. This space contributed to consolidating power for Aguirre and enabled locals some negotiation power within the possibilities afforded by the colonial system.

This study reconstructs remittances from different regional haciendas to the main treasury of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, located in Buenos Aires, between 1800 and 1810. It estimates the extent and periodization of the decline of the situado of Potosí during the last colonial decade, determining whether the contributions from regional treasuries made up for it. It also estimates the impact of transfers on the regional treasuries. By drawing on the accounting books of various treasuries, the article identifies the main mechanisms that the Royal Treasury of Buenos Aires implemented to seize surplus resources of the viceroyalty’s interior haciendas at the end of the colonial period. The ability of the Royal Treasury to seize those surpluses was significant and implemented through various mechanisms of the ancien régime.

This article explores contemporary discourses of deviation in early twentieth-century Colombia. Through analysis of a presidential assassination attempt in 1906, known as the Crime of Barrocolorado, it discusses the social construction of notions of criminality and danger in the light of the history of emotions. The assault on the president triggered a series of commentaries and reactions that revolved around anarchism, medicine, and criminology, topics that are dissected and connected here in search of their emotional components. In this way, the study brings forth the importance of emotions in the construction of social and political ideas in the past.

Studies of the “people’s spring,” the period of unprecedented social mobilization in Argentina in the early 1970s, frequently omit rural women even though they were among the sectors that rallied for social justice. In most of Latin America at the time, rural women were prevented from equal participation in social movements; in contrast, rural women in northeastern Argentina actively participated in the Movimiento Agrario Misionero (MAM). This article uses letters and newspaper articles in Amanecer agrario to answer two questions: First, what did womanhood mean for rural women in northeastern Argentina during the early 1970s? Second, what did the “people’s spring” mean for these same women? Although the movement split, with women from small farms generally wanting MAM to expand its efforts to broader societal problems and women from medium farms generally wanting MAM to stay focused on the concerns of Misiones farmers, throughout it all, rural women communicated their hopes, desires, and concerns for themselves, their families, and their communities.