Seminars

Cuba equals crisis. This framing has been the hallmark of most scholarship on the island over the last four decades - and it is incomplete. State planning, informal markets, dollarization, global capitalism, the US embargo and everyday survival coexist in a fragmented and dysfunctional economic order. Yet these contradictions--and "crisis" itself--are not temporary failures but the organizing principle of a politico-economic system that has morphed over the decades. Binary readings (formal/informal; socialist planning/market failure) obfuscate the fact that economic governance in Cuba operates through schizoid patterns—simultaneously prohibiting, enabling, and depending upon formal, informal, a-legal and illegal economic practices in a system where market driven inequality, egalitarian rhetoric, and US imperialism coexist uneasily. Thus schizonomics is a dysfunctional yet lasting and stabilizing mechanism of survival rather than a symptom of imminent collapse. This means rethinking the assumed keywords of economic policy in Cuba: Money becomes a pharmakon: cure, poison, and scapegoat. Economic distortions in the context of an endemic crisis produce a new culture: rebusque (making do). Any assumed 'transition' to capitalism belies the "recombinant" nature of the Cuban economy: schizonomics is not a temporary phenomenon but a framework that will operate in years to come.The question therefore is not whether specific reforms will succeed or fail, but what kind of economic system is reproduced through these recurring contradictions. The main focus is not on policy outcomes as much as on the political economy that generates them.

Brazilians’ experiences of democratic transition reveal a persistent tension between political change and institutional continuity. This paper draws on debates about the Lei de Anistia (1979 Amnesty Law), reparations for victims of the dictatorship, and disputes over memories of and responsibility for earlier human rights violations in order to examine how an incomplete sense of justice contributes to the preservation of practices, institutions, and authoritarian forms of political culture within Brazilian democracy. The analysis connects this legacy to more recent democratic crises, especially the militarization of politics, attempts at institutional rupture, and new far right movements. It thus discusses a broader question: In what ways do democracies that fail to adequately confront their pasts remain vulnerable to a repetition of those pasts? The Brazilian example therefore permits us to think of redemptive transitions to social justice and democratic openness not simply as phenomena directed at resolving political issues inherited from the past, but as a permanent part of the construction, protection, and resilience of democratic politics.

Professor Joseph’s presentation draws upon a sustained collaboration among Latin American, North American, and European scholars that reassesses the end of the Cold War from a Latin American perspective. Too often this “end” has been framed by global events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union—or in Latin America, limited ‘transitions to democracy’ brokered by national elites. Instead of a single episode or rupture marking the triumph of U.S.-led liberal democracy, the present collaboration explores how the Cold War’s conclusion in the region was neither top-down nor uniform, and certainly not complete. The project grapples with pressing historical questions that continue to resonate in the present day: How should we understand the Cold War’s conclusion in a region where violence and repression permeate everyday life? How did struggles for democracy, burdened by Cold War legacies, nevertheless open new political possibilities? And what does it mean to speak of an “end” when viewed from Latin America—especially as China’s growing influence and current U.S. policy have fueled talk of a “new Cold War”? The presentation introduces exciting collaborative work in progress, as the organizers plan a cutting-edge international conference at Yale and Fairfield Universities next October with a view to producing a substantial edited volume. This collection, which will be published by Duke University Press, will constitute the third work in a Latin American Cold War trilogy. The two previous volumes, In from the Cold (2008) and A Century of Revolution (2010), redefined understandings of the conflict’s origins and process; the proposed new collection, No End in Sight, will turn to the Cold War’s unwinding and afterlives, which remain seriously understudied dimensions of Latin America’s recent past.

The presentation will offer a long-term history of memory in the Andean region, focussing on the meanings of the Andean Revolution of the early 1780s for subsequent political actors, intellectuals, artists, social movements, and national narratives. It will include comments on the study of history, memory, and myth as well as a survey of visual representations of Tupac Amaru and Tupaj Katari, who were outstanding leaders of the massive Andean insurrection.

In the aftermath of President Trump’s military assault on Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro, this talk will look at the dynamics of immigration to the United States from Venezuela and Cuba, from President Biden’s administration to the present. It will consider how immigration from those countries affected the exercise of U.S. power in the region as well as domestic politics in the United States.

In this talk I share research from my current book manuscript on the history of government efforts to identify human remains exhumed from Patio 29, the largest anonymous burial site used by the Pinochet dictatorship to conceal those it executed and disappeared. By 2002, government scientists had identified 96 sets of remains and returned them to families for burial. Yet in 2006 it emerged that at least half of these identifications were incorrect. The talk examines how these settled truths of identification unraveled and connects them to Chile's process of democratic transition.

For many years, Guatemala was in the international spotlight for its successful campaign against impunity. This campaign included cases of grand corruption and organized crime as well as serious human rights violations during the internal armed conflict (1960-1996), which left 200,000 dead and missing and more than one million displaced. Today, that campaign against impunity has been resoundingly defeated, even after the 2023 victory of anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo, who promised to restore good governance and resume anti-impunity efforts. Academic and journalist writing on Guatemala’s anti-impunity efforts have focused on its anti-corruption work. For the past ten years, I have led a project monitoring war crimes trials in Guatemala. In this presentation, I will examine Guatemala’s efforts to pursue accountability for wartime atrocities and how a coalition of far-right politicians, old guard military officials, and economic elites have worked to obstruct these efforts, and how survivor groups are fighting back.