Temas de Nuestra America. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos

27-34

Authors: Cristopher Montero Corrales

This article deals with the tensions between historiography and fiction in literature, specifically in postmodern textual aesthetics. Initially, it poses generalities of the debate that have made it possible to homologate historical and fictional texts. Later, it analyzes the concept of meta literature or self-referentiality. It concludes with the analysis of the texts Tierra del fuego by Silvia Iparraguirre (2004) and El Libro de Daniel by E. L. Doctorov (2009) as texts that are constituted from these tensions between history/fiction and metaliterature.

43-65

Authors: Jhany Marcelo Macedo Rizo

The fall of real socialism, in addition to various internal problems and the economic embargo, led Cuba to the so-called Special Period during the 1990s. The Cuban government undertook a series of economic reforms aimed at combating its terrible effects and giving a boost to its planned national economy, but with very limited results in macroeconomic terms and in the quality of life of Cuban citizens. Due to the nature of some of these reforms, this article seeks to determine whether they constitute a prelude to the transition to a market economy or whether, on the contrary, they seek to have the State continue to play a preponderant role in the development model, while allowing some private initiatives. Although this new opening brings with it an expansion of civil and political rights, it is defended that Cuba aims to build its own model, tending to reinforce the current political system, in which in any case the reforms will be implemented gradually. In order to achieve this objective, the text starts with a comparative approach to review some relevant figures of the Cuban economy and to overview the most important reforms in the last decade.

83-106

Authors: Rafael Gustavo Miranda Delgado

This study aims to compare the political systems in Central America from a historical perspective. Here, Central America is considered as a very diverse region in experiences and quality of democracy; Costa Rica is the most successful, historical, contemporary case in the subregion. In the rest of the countries, there are relatively young and fragile democracies, without historical experiences of democracy, with very weak States, without social consensus, and with limited citizenship that is treated in a clientelist manner and is a victim of poverty and inequality.

25-40

Authors: Gustavo Hernández Castro

Abstract This article outlines the theoretical contribution of Franz Hinkelammert's thought around the concept of rebellion in the recovery of subjectivity to the deconstruction of instrumental reason and mythical reason imposed by modernity. In his proposal, Hinkelammert places the concept of gnoseological rebellion in a perspective of analysis that allows to articulate the subject as a bearer of ethics for life. Therefore,this perspective provides a theoretical and practical tool so that the subject can halt the destruction of the planet. In this way the subject, as a thinking one, becomes a rebel, in comparison with the acting subject that, by having recourse to the relationship means-end and the calculation of utility, consumes the resources the world gives according to his/her possibilities and ambitions, without realizing that, when devouring those resources, this subject is becoming the author of its own extinction.

63-80

Authors: Julio U. Morales-López

Gender security is a concept the author Úrsula Oswald (2013) has been working on, which is appropriate to analyze values of disadvantages that reinforce certain processes of risk, fear and affronts against the dignity that specifically act on certain types of people. This article describes vulnerability factors that can weaken a comprehensive concept of security, sustainability and development. From the ethnographic research approach, the article discusses the ideal conditions in which primary and secondary schools in Mexico should exercise their activities, ensuring at all times the integral development of children and adolescents, without any prerogative. It proposes a reflection on the Programa Nacional Escuela Segura (PES-National Safe School Program, developed by the Mexican government), and its institutional and community implementation. The aim is to determine if the program contemplates a gender perspective that, in practice, contributes to strengthening gender security, conflict resolution, and peace education. Emphasis is placed on the transfer of community violence toward school contexts, especially turning the school, in this way, into a masculinized space.

95-108

Authors: Jaime Delgado-Rojas

this essay, the Cantata de Santa María de Iquique serves as a framework for reflection on peace and otherness. It argues that the right to peace is an integral part of the legal and political ethic that involves the "others" towards whom it implies not simply tolerance, but respect for differences and conviviality. The range of relationships with the other is a swarm of ethical possibilities, stimulating and provocative, which places us on the level of the culture of peace and commitment to promote an education for peace and a strenghtened democracy.

123-129

Authors: Marcelo Valverde-Morales

This essay analyzes and converses with the work "Notes on Latin American Intelligentsia" by Alfonso Reyes. In it, I develop an approach to Reyes’ main contributions, as well as to questions raised by the author regarding the value and the work of the Latin American intelligentsia, relating this approach to the contemporaneity of diversity, the academy, the culture and society of Our America. The work emerges as part of the work al the Master's in LatinAmerican Studies Programme, at the Institute of Latin American Studies, of the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica (National University of Costa Rica), in addressing the Latin-Americanist thinking, along with contemporary large intellectual proposals of Nuestra America (Our-America).