Chapter 3 statistically tests implications of my theory of the coup trap. I try to disconfirm my hypotheses by using event history or duration models of instability on a database of military coups, economic variables, political system characteristics, and levels of instability for eighteen countries between 1900 and 2014. While controlling for economic and political variables, statistical models show that autocracies are more unstable than democracies and that instability breeds coups. The likelihood of a successful military coup, in other words, remains high in the wake of the overthrow of a president, especially in non-democratic political orders and during election years. Logit models comparing golpes that manage and do not manage to overthrow governments also confirm a key implication of my theory of the coup trap: that military conspiracies are much more likely to prosper if they count upon the support of the opposition. These findings cement my argument that the overthrow of governments is a function of military as well as civil coalitions that reflect the unstable nature of political competition in less institutionalized political systems.

The urban and rural collectivization campaign of the Great Leap coincided with a nation-wide debate on the law of value, bourgeois right, and the socialist economy. This chapter demonstrates how what appeared to be an abstract discussion among economists, social scientists, and party theoreticians was in fact intimately connected with and relevant to the praxis of urban collectivization. This was neither the case of a theoretical position or an ideological argument at the top fueling a policy change at the bottom, nor that of a political experiment at the street level which needed to be justified and rearticulated at the level of Marxist theory. Rather, the two aspects – as it often is for Marxist politics – were interdependent, co-determined, and yet always in a state of profound tension. Understanding the Great Leap Forward requires insights into both theoretical abstraction and the world of quotidian praxis.

Ginsberg was not just a primary figure in the literary and countercultural movements of the decades following World War II. As this chapter details, he also provides a crucial link, too infrequently acknowledged, between these postwar movements and the Old Left ideals and communities of the 1930s and early 1940s. Touching on the numerous moments in Ginsberg’s poetry and biography where he recalls a youth shaped by his parents’ communist and socialist commitments, including their support for labor unions, this essay explains briefly why those commitments needed to be reformulated as Ginsberg began his poetic career in the mid 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War.

The first of this chapter’s three goals is to unveil a new catalog of more than 320 military coups, slightly less than half of which succeeded in overthrowing the executive. A second goal is to remind ourselves that elections were an integral part of constitutional or quasi-constitutional political orders – regimes best described as electoral autocracies because their incumbents ran the risk of losing regularly scheduled elections. This chapter concludes by combining data on military coups and regimes to produce a typology of political trajectories – and whose origins and persistence the rest of this book explores, documents, and explains.

Approaches to La consagración de la primavera tend to consider that its central aspects are the historical and the autobiographical, judging the text for its ideological dimension and its stance on the Cuban Revolution. However, the omnipresent discourse on the arts and the figure of the artist, the way in which this is dealt with within the narration, as well as the intermedial devices used in it, confer on Carpentier’s penultimate novel the timelessness and universality of the Great Works. By textual analysis and a comprehension of the functioning of Carpentier’s aesthetic system, this chapter offers a humanist reading of a novel rooted in the dream of being a total work that metaphorically encompasses all arts and the writer’s own previous oeuvre.

This poses the problem of American civic fracture and failing civic attachment, and points to renewed civics as the remedy.

It is hard to overstate the importance of William Blake (1757–1827) within Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetry. The numinous event that Ginsberg experienced in 1948, which he would later call his “Blake vision,” became a key part of his self-fashioning as a countercultural visionary, a prophet in a tradition that stretched back through Blake to Milton and the Bible. As an expert salesman, Ginsberg also became a dedicated proselytizer for Blake, whose work he promoted not only through poetry but also college classes, interviews, music, and his vast personal network. Ginsberg thereby positioned Blake as a lodestar of the counterculture and ultimately influenced Blake’s position within popular culture and academia itself. However, Ginsberg’s narrative of his “Blake vision” also changed significantly over time, and Ginsberg’s strong link to Blake has sometimes obscured the importance to Ginsberg’s work of other Romantics, such as William Wordsworth.

This essay interprets Carpentier’s American cycle of novels from the perspective of the environmental humanities. It defines Carpentier’s “ecological marvelous realism” as a literary motif in which organisms interact with their environments in ways that are ordinary yet marvelous. Most important, Carpentier’s ecological marvelous real features surprising shape-shifting capacities of peoples, plants, animals, and insects in the New World that destabilize boundaries and hierarchies between humans and nonhumans.This new ecocritical reading of the Cuban author’s most famous works aims to reassess his status in the canonical Latin American literary tradition and question a central tenet of the field of multispecies studies.

This chapter discusses the circumstances of Ginsberg’s arrival and deportation from Czechoslovakia in 1965. Although it is often thought otherwise, Ginsberg did in fact have long-formed plans to travel behind the Iron Curtain, and his expulsion from Cuba only expedited, rather than facilitated, his arrival to Europe. During his stay in Czechoslovakia, Ginsberg had the opportunity to look behind the façade of the Communist Party and observed firsthand that Czechoslovaks lived in an oppressive regime they increasingly tried to challenge through various means, one of them being the publication and performance of Beat poetry. However, he underestimated the surveillance practices of the regime, which only intensified after Ginsberg was elected the King of May in front of a 100,000-strong crowd during May Day celebrations. Ultimately, his often frank discussion of his views and experiences not only placed several of his associates in danger, but also led to his deportation from the country.

Chapter 5 of The Coup Trap in Latin America examines the political systems of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay, the three most unstable of the region. The model anticipates 89 percent of the years of instability in these systems. It presents qualitative evidence that false positive predictions tell us something important: that conditions can be ripe for a military coup for decades at a time. What I call an atmosphere of crisis – that conflicts between pro- and anti-government supporters are severe enough so that it is increasingly certain that the president’s survival is uncertain – can, in other words, persist for decades. To explain when assaults on the executive take place requires analyzing micro-political factors, which the statistical model cannot easily grasp. This chapter also begins to explain what makes T such a powerful predictor of instability; it turns out to be a proxy for factional strife, which, among other things, disseminates the practical knowledge necessary to organize and execute a military coup d’état.

El recurso del método (Reasons of State), published in 1974 by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, has often been analyzed along with other dictatorship novels focusing on recurring themes, such as violence, rebellion, US imperialism or the dictator’s solitude. This essay introduces a “sensory approach” arguing that Carpentier revisits the traditional hierarchy of the five senses. Thematically, the novel emphasizes the “spectacular” and panoptical dimension of the dictator’s regime; however, this visual (and aural) domination is questioned by the Marxist opposition embodied in the character of the Student. From an intertextual perspective, Carpentier’s use of quotations from Descartes paradoxically undermines the Cartesian cogito, and the protagonist’s behavior ultimately evolves toward an anti-Cartesian and anti-ocularcentric stance, as epitomized by the figure of Mayorala Elmira. Reflecting on these two dimensions of the novel from a sensorial point of view contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Carpentier’s poetics.