POLI 319 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Cuban Revolution, Comprador, Nicaraguan Revolution
13 May 2018
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POLI319: Friday Feb. 2nd, 2018
Communism and Leftist Insurgencies
Examining the Cases of Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Peru
I. Which sectors of society have generated revolutionary movements?
a. Lower classes, workers, but especially peasantry
b. There are obstacles to uniting and mobilizing them, however
II. What are revolutions aiming to overthrow?
a. A full revolution not only overthrows the government but uproots the political and
economic structures within society
b. To qualify as a revolution there needs to be this uprooting and changing of social
structures
c. Relatively easier to change a regime
d. This usually requires coalition building among various classes and interests
groups
i. Midlarsky and Roberts R
III. Land scarcity
a. In and of itself a key form of inequality in rural societies
i. If people have limited access to land that represents a form of poverty for
them
ii. Land scarcity isn’t only when there isn’t enough land to go around but it
speaks to an inequitable power arrangement that has manifested in
distribution of land
b. The greater polarization between classes, the more you get zero-sum game
(winner takes all) between them
i. The likelihood of compromise much smaller
c. Not specific to Latin America but all over, starting in Europe
IV. Nature of the State
a. Midlarsky and Roberts identify 2 key types of state that have been the target of
uprisings/revolutions
i. Instrumentalist
ii. Personalist
V. Cuba
a. The first country in Latin America to undergo socialist or communist revolution
b. Represented a dramatic shift in the country, not only in terms of the rise of
communism, but in terms of the fear of those movements on the part of the US
government and local governments within Latin America
VI. Cuban Revolution
a. An uprising against a personalist regime—Batista
i. Batista was unpopular and corrupt, seen as a tool of the united states
ii. Specifically, very close ties to US business (Havana)
iii. A comprador elite—a local elite who is serving the interests of an external
power. Who is seeing the extraction of resources and creation of wealth
that benefits an external power
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