Exorcismos de esti(l)o is one of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s least studied books. It is nevertheless of essential importance for understanding the entirety of his poetics. It is a book that condenses the pain of the ostracism and the betrayal inflicted by the revolutionary regime that Cabrera had so strongly supported. The purpose of this article is to highlight the implicit elements of the text that support this hypothesis. It considers the strategies used by the author throughout Exorcismos de esti(l)o to practice the language with which he obsessively tries to draw, in his novelas del yo, a portrait of a lost and unrecoverable Havana, the hopeful Havana preceding the Cuban Revolution. It is an impossible yet obstinate mission. This is why the texts that articulate the impossibility of representation and the anguish that this mission generates deserve special attention.

Observers have increasingly described the drug-related violence and corruption affecting Central America as the region's ‘Colombianisation’. This narrative is not just confused and misleading; it is dangerous. The Colombianisation discourse perpetuates ineffective and destructive anti-drug policies. It also obscures the circulations and connections that make the drug trade, the drug war and their associated economies of violence possible. We do, however, recognise one form of Colombianisation that actually is under way, but it is not the one imagined by security pundits. The real Colombianisation is a convergence of geopolitical and economic interests that have seized upon the geographical realignments of the drug trade to expand the same agroindustrial-military nexus in Central America that proved so ‘successful’ in Colombia.

This paper analyses economic interaction in Castilla del Oro (Panama) at the beginning of the 16th century. By applying network analysis to fiscal records, the paper reconstructs, represents and tests business networks in the mining sector and how they became more complex with the arrival of emigrants and the appearance of new gold deposits. Results show a dynamic population with a high mobility degree despite the adverse geography and the inexistent communications.

This paper uses the theoretical and empirical contributions of recent international literature on the determinants of long run economic growth to explain the historical origin of the enormous regional economic inequalities which characterize Colombia. The results indicate that geography and culture are not direct determinants of differences in regional per capita income. Nevertheless, geography did play a central but indirect role through its influence on settlement patterns during the colonial period. Although econometric estimations indicate that the colonial legacy influenced contemporary differences in regional income, it is not clear if this effect operates via the institutions or human capital.