"There are laws of political as well as of physical gravita- tion," John Quincy Adams observed in 1823, drawing an anal- ogy between the fate of an apple severed from a tree and the destiny of a beautiful island 90 miles off the coast of the newly acquired territory of Florida: "Forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, [Cuba] can gravitate only toward the North American Union,
Copyright @ I977by Martin J. Sherwin andPeter Winn.
The...
One day last spring, while walking along the breakwater in the once fashionable western section of Havana, I spotted a pair of massive high-rise buildings facing the ocean on an isolated promontory. "What are they?" I asked my Cuban companion. "Those are the living quarters of Soviet and East European technicians and their families," he said.
What did he think, I asked, of Soviet "influence" on Cubans and the Cuban Revolution? "It doesn't exist," he replied....
The story starts with Columbus. But the explorer's October 27, 1492 landing on Cuba (after he had blundered about for a couple of weeks in the Bahamas), did not cause a sudden, disrupting change of the sort that has characterized much of Cuban history.
Convinced that he had found Marco Polo's fabled Asian island kingdom of Cipango (probably Japan), Columbus sent men inland seeking gold and "the Khan." They found neither, and he sailed on, leaving no settlement behind.
Britain's Hugh T...
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GROWTH OF MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES
The Founding Fathers saw no place for political parties in their vision of
America. But, inevitably, competition for the presidency produced two
political groupings that have survived occasional factionalism. Jefferso-
nian Republicans ultimately became Democrats preferring a strong chief
executive. Federalists moved in the opposite direction as they became first
Whigs, then Republicans. Leftists of a Communist or Socialist persuasion
stood apa...
For decades the Swedish welfare state has simultaneously fascinated and troubled outsiders. After the rise of the Social Democrats to long-term political power in 1932 and their subsequent success in initiating a comprehensive program of social and educational reforms, sympathetic Western jour- nalists and social scientists began to celebrate the Swedish system as a "middle way" between capitalism and socialism, a "model for the world," and the "world's most modern society." L...
Few Americans, even those who know a bit about Sweden, have ever heard of the Swedish economist, Gosta Rehn. Nor have they heard of the so-called Rehn model named after him. But understanding the controversial Rehn model is crucial to understanding where Sweden has come from and where it may be going. First, the Rehn model of the economy has embodied Sweden's recipe for combining economic growth with in-creased wage equality-and full employment with controlled inflation. It has also illustrated t...
rce Government Printing
Office,
Money
and
The Pursuit of Plenty
in America
As the United States recovers from its worst recession since the 1930s, economists and other scholars continue to seek new data on the changing patterns of family earning, spend- ing, and "status" in America. Scholars have reached general agreement on at least one point: In 25 years, for all its defects, the growing U.S. "consumer economy" has brought most American adults (and even most American p...