Search results

Enthält Rezensionen von:‡‡Alberto Lleras Camargo y John F. Kennedy: amistad y política internacional ; recuento de episodios de la Guerra Fría, la Alianza para el Progreso y el problema de Cuba / ed. by Carlos Caballero Argáez. - Bogotá : Universidad de los Andes, 2014.‡‡Fifty years of revolution : perspectives on Cuba, the United States and the world / ed. by Soraya M. Castro Mariño ... - Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012.‡‡Field, Thomas C. (jr.): From development to dictatorship : Bolivia and the alliance for Progress in the Kennedy era. - Ithaca, NY [u.a.]: Cornell University Press, 2014.‡‡Rabe, Stephen G.: The killing zone : the United States wages Cold War in Latin America. - 2nd ed. - New York [u.a.]: Oxford University Press, 2015.‡‡Siekmeier , James F.: The Bolivian revolution and the United States, 1952 to the present. - University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.‡‡Smith, Tony: America's mission: the United States and the worldwide struggle for democracy. - Princeton, NJ.:Princeton University Press, 2012.‡‡

AbstractThe system for electing the President of the United States remains essentially as it was prescribed in the Federal Constitution drafted in 1787. The individual 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) are accorded a number of votes in the (so‐called) Electoral College; each state's Electoral College vote is then attributed to the candidate gaining a plurality (most) of the popular vote in that state; and the candidate with a majority (50% + 1) of these aggregated Electoral College votes is declared the incoming president. What has changed have been the methods of nominating the candidates, chief of which are the political parties from the nineteenth century with their stage‐managed quadrennial conventions and the primary/caucus campaigns from the twentieth century which precede and now determine the formal nomination. President Obama's 2012 re‐election campaign showed both the crucial importance of the much‐maligned Electoral College in winning the presidency and the demographic divisions hidden in the larger American political landscape.

One of the first acts of the new administration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 was to promote an 'Alliance for Progress' throughout Latin America. JFK's stated goal was 'to transform the American continent' by improving the often desperate living conditions of its peoples; advancing industrialization; diversifying and increasing exports (especially away from heavy dependence on single items such as coffee); encouraging interstate trade and communications; and-above all-strengthening democracy: a term to inspire but one rarely, if ever, defined. The primary means for achieving these ends would be the extension of loans by the United States and others, thereby building up capital for industrial production while increasing food and raw material supplies to maximize foreign exchange-all with the aim of reversing the 'dependency' of 'underdeveloped' Latin America upon the more 'advanced' economies of the north Atlantic area. Kennedy's expressed fear was that Latin America, its impoverished peoples ripe for revolution, would follow the path of Cuba under the new regime of Fidel Castro. In the first part of a two-part analysis the historical and political origins of the Alliance are traced to both US and Latin American sources, including schemes within the Organization of American States and 'Operation Pan America'; in the second part the economic failures and the strategic successes of the Alliance during the presidencies of Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon will be evaluated as another, if varied, stage in the evolving 'hegemonic presumption' of the US towards its southern neighbours. (International Affairs (Oxford) / SWP)

For over fifty years relations between the United States and Cuba have been antagonistic, with each side blaming the other for the continuing impasse. This Caribbean Cold War has seen an unsuccessful armed invasion of Cuba (popularly known as the Bay of Pigs invasion), the threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR (the 'Cuban missile crisis'), and an intensifying series of measures by the US government to reverse the Cuban social and political revolution of the 1960s. Since the early nineteenth century Washington has sought to control Cuba; and the US conditions for relaxing its pressure on present-day Cuba continue this tradition, itself part of a broader ideology (often short-handed as the Monroe Doctrine) which sees the western hemisphere as America's legitimate and exclusive 'sphere of interest'. This article examines a number of recent works dealing both with the US-Cuban relationship, placing this relationship in historical and geopolitical contexts, and with the impact on Cuban society of the economic crisis of the 1990s caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. (International Affairs (Oxford) / SWP)