To understand Mexico, an outsider should put aside his images of cactus and sombreros and even of Oscar Lewis’ Children of Sanchez for a while, and take an evening stroll down Avenida Revolucion or Avenida Insurgentes, or the ancient streets behind the Zocalo, or any of the other frenetic shopping areas of Mexico City. While the snarled and sometimes decrepit cars honk incessantly and puff out black fumes in the streets, the laborers and clerks of the city rush from shop to shop for after-work purchases, perhaps cheap bread, cheap shoes, expensive jeans. Families join for the excursion, mothers carrying blanketed infants, fathers tugging moonfaced children. The crowds are colored gaily by the neon storefronts that occasionally obscure the delightful porfirian or baroque architecture of old buildings. The shoppers wear hip-length sweaters or rebozos or windbreakers. Many wear clothes that are old but rarely tattered, neat and functional but rarely fashionable. By American standards, they are a poor people. Yet it is a poverty with which an American can sympathize, even if he has not experienced it. By all measures, Mexico is a developing country of the Third World, but Mexico City does not have the exotic and incredible, pervasive poverty of Calcutta, with its thousands of human wretches hunting for a piece of sidewalk on which to sleep. Nor does it have the poverty of the African Sahel, with its stick-boned, starving old people and little children. These are miseries so terrible that they blunt the senses and elude the imagination of most Americans. But this is not so in Mexico...

As another American and I walked down La Rampa, a street in Havana, three little schoolgirls dressed in blue uniforms called out to us. “Tovarich, ” they said, using the Russian word for “comrade.” I approached one of the Cuban girls, a dark-skinned child of about ten. “Do you think we are Russian?” I asked her in Spanish. She nodded, grinning, her eyes shining in good fun. “But we’re not Russian," I told her. “We’re Americans.” The grin vanished. Her head pulled back. She frowned and tightened her eyes in fright. She was sorry that she had ever called out “tovarich.” It is not a pleasant feeling to frighten a child, but it is a feeling that an American ought to experience, or at least understand, before trying to analyze Cuba and the future of its relations with the United States. Relations will probably get better. Fidel Castro has sent out clear signals that he wants some kind of accommodation. In fact. I was in Cuba only because the Cubans need new channels for those signals...

When Generalisimo Francisco Franco executed five revolutionaries in Spain in September, the fiercest reaction came from Mexico. That reaction surprised many outsiders and made some veteran diplomats at the United Nations shake their heads at what seemed like naiveté. But in fact Mexico was behaving consistently. It is the only country in the world that still harbors an embassy of the old Spanish Republic, and perhaps 20,000 aging Spanish Republicans still live in Mexican exile. In his reaction to Franco, President Luis Echeverria Alvarez was powered by his sense of Mexican history. That Mexico still recognizes the Spanish Republic in exile is to some Mexicans diplomacy based on fiction. Journalist José Natividad Rosales once called the policy “a romantic absurdity.” For many other Mexicans, however, the recognition affirms their country’s political ideals. “I do not want to assume dramatic or declamatory tones,” wrote journalist Pedro Gringoire recently, “but some day it will be universally recognized that, in giving aid to the Republic and then taking the defeated to its breast, Mexico lived through one of the purest and most glorious hours of its history." In a sense, by his reaction to the September executions, President Echeverria was trying to recall that hour...

The most desperate people on the Caribbean island of Jamaica grow their hair in fierce, matted locks, smoke marihuana much of the day, and dream of salvation in Africa. They call themselves Rastafarians. Their response to poverty and rejection is a strange one, but it helps the government. For the poor are not clamoring in the streets; they are sedated in the alleyways. This gives Jamaica time. Prime Minister Michael Manley is trying to use that time to turn Jamaica socialist. Manley’s socialism, however, is rather idiosyncratic. A Marxist would barely recognize it. Manley’s government has defined socialism as “the Christian way of life in action.” A popular singer, Max Romeo, has composed a song that amplifies the definition for Jamaicans: "Socialism is love for your brothers. Socialism is linking hearts and hands. Would you believe it? Poverty and hunger is what we’re fighting. Socialism is sharing with your sister. Socialism is pulling people together. Would you believe it? Love and togetherness — that's what it means." Jamaican socialism is obviously mild stuff. Yet Manley is being attacked bitterly for it. Businessmen are in panic. American diplomats and investors are fretting. One rightist group has condemned Manley’s “recent speeches about socialism being Christianity” as “blasphemous and cheap politics.” The great problem for Manley, however, is that his socialism may be too mild in the long run to relieve Jamaica’s desperation...