América Latina: ¿clase media de las naciones?

CUBA'S CASTRO AND AFRICA'S CASTRATION: A CASE-STUDY IN MICRO-DEPENDENCY Ali A. Mazrui in association with Lemuel Johnson and Rovan Locke We" accept the ,proposition that the worst kind of dependency líes in· North-South interaction. But emphasizing th1s dimension should not go to the ·extent of ígnoring other dimensions. It i5 simp1y not true that aH forros of international dependency concern interaction5' bet– ween the Nor,thern Hemisphere and the South, or between industria. l¡sm .and sources of raw materiais. There are important forros of de– pen,dencyamong industrialized nations themselves. Increasíngly, there are a150 formsof dependency between one country in the Third World and another; or between one region of the Third World and another. Dependency i5 a forro of polítical castration. For the purposes oE thisessay dependency between one country in the Northern Hemisphere and another or between one industria– lízed state .afid another, 1S categorized· as macro.dependency. This in– volv.es variations in power within the upper stratum of the world system. Macro.dependency i5 thus upper·horizontal. involving varia.. tions inaffluence among the affluent, or degrees of might among the mighty. Micro.dependency for our purposes here concerns v3!riations of technkal deve10pment among the under~developed, or relative infIuen– ce among the weak, or degrees of power among those that are basi– caHy exploited. The depen,dency of some W'est African countries upon Nigeria, or of some of the Gulf States upon l¡ran or Saudi Arabia, are cases of mkro-dependency. We shall r·eturn to this level more fully Jater, but let us first begin with the phenomenon of macro-tlepen. dency. Twointer-related events in the twentieth century have helped to shape the nature of v.ariations in pOWer among countries of the Northern Hemisphere. These were complex events rather than single occurrences, One was World W-ar JI and its afrermath, resulting in a resilient bi.po' lar system involving two superJpowers, the United States afid the Soviet Union. Thé other factor was itself in part an aspect oí the aftermath oE World w'a,r n. The second factor behind 69