Contenu du sommaire : Indépendances et révolutions

The conquerors and the missionaries were not the only ones to invent the Americas in accordance with the mythologies teachings of the time, European and North American intelligentsia of the 19th and 20th centuries did not yield to them on the matter. Better, many contemporary Latin American intellectuals and artists have adopted these visions. If this imaginary encounters enabled the birth of great literary, the consequences have been far less fruitful in the political and social fields.

What were the French Revolution's consequences on the iberian world and its projections over the Atlantic? How did they weigh on Latin American independences in the Hispanic and Portuguese worlds? It is at once the first break with the monarchical order because of the Napoleonic iberian peninsula invasion and the agenda setting of a liberal political revolution. Then come the war years and the political identities changes that were consubstantial, and finally the independences revolution of 1820s.

One hundred years after its independence, the country of “crops and herds” has a well-established State, a Republic that looks a bit like a monarchy, and an often conflictual nation, made out of massive immigration. One hundred years later, the divide of the seventies is still present in the country. Until then, the interventionist state's foundations were a plebiscitary regime that gave in to corporate interests. In a context characterized by political instability, the army imposed long and unbearable dictatorships. From then on, the Army, the Church and national political forces embodied the nation that replaced Republic. Nationalism became belligerent. The return to democracy in 1983 raised expectations that were disappointed with the economic crisis. Nowadays, Argentina still has to restore a pluralist nation and a political regime that respects division of powers, as well as to reconstruct a state free from corporate interests and arbitrariness.

If the passion for the Cuban revolution has been challenged, this is not the case of the worship to Guevara's person, unaltered for fifty years. More than anyone, he embodies the revolutionary hero. The reading of his famous books Guerilla warfare and Reminiscences of the Revolutionary War, as well as Regis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution? Shows indeed that he was the main theoretician of the absolute power of Castro, and that he made a significant contribution to the legitimation of what Soljenitsyne called the « power of the Egocrat».

According to Roger Bartra, Mexico's problems are neither just about its political actors nor the lack of spaces dedicated to participation and discussion. It is also a temporal problem: in Mexico, all the public actors are living in different historical times. How can we synchronise them? Bartra proposes to adopt a cosmopolitan attitude that would enable to understand what Mexico is living from a global perspective.

This article follows the emergence of a territorial security paradigm in Mexico, which became obvious when the government used the army to fight against drug-trafficking. This is the result of a late convergence with United States' new security policy, the socalled Homeland Security, which appeared after 9/11. In spite of contradictory games of actors and conflicts of territorial ladders, this de facto convergence is leading to a greater collaboration between United States and Mexico in order to deal with their self-identified major risks, that is to say, islamic terrorism and drug-trafficking.

Cubans generally perceive the racist expressions, prejudices, fantasies and behaviors that pervade them as cultural phenomenon. The former-they argue-are part of an emotional relationship with the Other that is engrained in the island's long-term history. This “cultural racism” is, however, emphasized in the process of leveling of conditions that results from material insecurity, the criminalization of behaviors and the collapse of moral reference marks in the “Special Period”. The aim of this article is to propose a phenomenology of this “cultural racism”, beginning with an ethnographic description, and then through a reading of Ronaldo Menéndez's novel, Las Bestias.