Taking Note

Mark Fried
The cutoff of Soviet assistance to Cuba marks the end of an era. New directions politically and socially will take place in Cuba and, as usual, have major implications for the rest of Latin America.

Report

Sidney W. Mintz
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the Caribbean islands and coastal Brazil were transformed from dense forests, filled with a diversity of life, into seas of sugar cane. The monocrop plantation produced fabulous wealth, but left the environment and the people impoverished to this day.
Daniel Faber
After World War II, the remaining primal lowland tropical forests of Central America were razed to make way for cotton, and with it, an ever-accelerating spiral of erosion and pesticide abuse.
Elizabeth Dore
From the moment Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, mining replaced food security as the organizing principal of American societies, setting the stage for environmental devastation that only accelerated with time.
BEFORE COLUMBUS, AMERICA WAS A LAND of dense ancient forests covering coast and moun- tain alike, which included thousands of plant and animal species unknown today. Until Europeans began to colo- nize the world, no permanent physical change affecting the whole earth had occurred in half a billion years.
Warren Dean
The temperate forest in the southern Andes is being destroyed and valuable ecosystems are are at high risk.
John C. Ryan
Since Columbus encountered the New World, the state of the forest in Latin America has gotten drastically worse. The remainder of the environment, which is directly linked, has also been hit very hard.
William Roseberry
Deforestation, erosion, and soil depletion were the results of the nineteenth-century coffee boom. Ever more forests were felled, only to be routinely abandoned to pasture a few decades later.

Article

Free Trade Missing from your excellent report on North American free trade [Vol. XXIV, No.
Ecological Imperialism: The Biologi- cal Expansion of Europe 900-1900 by Alfred W. Crosby, Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1986, 368 pp.
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.
NOT ALL THE IMPORTATIONS OFFAUNA WERE intentional. The Iberian undoubtedly imported doz- ens, even hundreds, of kinds of insects and animals that he would have preferred leaving behind in the Old World.
Daniel Faber
IN 1979, NICARAGUA'S GOVERNMENT OF National Reconstruction initiated a bold new experi- ment in environmental policy to combat decades of ecologi- cal destruction. The Sandinistas quickly nationalized the country's forest, mineral, and aquatic resources.
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.
THE SPECTACULAR RISE IN THE POPULATION spectacular decline in the population of Native Americans. and disease and exploitation do not entirely explain that decline.
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr.
ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 11, 1492, Christopher Columbus, on board the Santa Maria in the Atlantic Ocean, thought he saw a tiny light far in the distance. A few hours later, Rodrigo de Triana, lookout on the Pinta's forecastle, sighted the Bahamas.