| Netting Fidel
- Cuba was the last place you'd expect to see a freewheeling Internet
revolution. Then Robert Sajo, an oddball businessman with a bizarre
past, arrived. The Industry Standard - April 10, 2000.
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for full text>
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The New E-Man - Imagine a communist venture
capitalist. That's only one idea pushed by Cuba's e-commerce
czar.
The Industry Standard - April 10, 2000.
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for full text>
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Chile Takes on the World - Often touted
as the poster boy for free trade, Chile finds that the second
stage of open development becomes an even greater challenge
as it faces the true complexities of globalization. Worldlink
magazine. May/June 1999.
<click
here for full text>
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Book Review: The Quest for
Cultural Identity - How Did
You Get to be a Mexican? is the story of a mother who dearly wanted
to
assimilate but could not, and her son who could have but finally
would
not. It is the story of a man of mixed white-Latino heritage engulfed
in
self-doubt about his place in a society obsessed with race. It
is the
story of a prominent young lawyer and college professor who can
never
fully enjoy his success because someone always pops up to accuse
him of
being a "box checker," a counterfeit Latino who claims
his heritage for
affirmative-action purposes. <click
here for full text> |
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Land Of No Return? Not Brazil:
The Urban Poor Are
Fleeing To The Countryside and Joining the Landless Movement
- Beyond
São Paulo's skyscrapers and Rio de Janeiro's teeming beaches,
a
low-intensity civil war simmers in the rural outback of Latin
America's
largest and richest country. Like many things in Brazil nowadays,
this
conflict is largely privatized. It pits those with land against
those
who want it. <click here for full
text>
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Soccer
in the Favela - Skinny youths clad in flimsy
blue and red jerseys scamper after a cheap soccer ball on a dusty
dirt
field. Beyond looms not a grandstand but a steep hill thickly
covered by
brick shanties. The simple act of hauling a refrigerator up the
steep
rise and through the maze of makeshift pedestrian pathways would
seem a
Sisyphian task for residents. Down below, at midfield, stands
Mirandinha. Twenty-four years ago, fans cheered as he charged
onto the
field in Munich's Olympic Stadium to defend Brazil in the World
Cup.
Today he and Deodoro, another former soccer standout, serve as
coaches,
referees, de facto psychologists and surrogate fathers for scores
of
poor kids in a São Paulo favela (shantytown) called Jardim Ibirapuera.
<click here for full text> |
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The Story of Bahian music -
Between sessions, house musicians at a
Salvador jingle factory threw together a spicy version of Simon
and
Garfunkel's Mrs. Robinson and packed the single off to local
DJs. The
jocks went for it. So did listeners. The rest is Brazilian musical
history. <Click here for full text>
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Route 66: Asphalt Legend
- Travel America's Main Street and hear the
story of the song that immortalized it. <click
here for full text>
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Ana Maria Tavares: Impractical Practices
- "I'm very interested in the
idea of passage of nonpermanence in other words in the way we
live our
lives today," says Brazilian sculptor and installation
artist Ana Maria
Tavares "We are surrounded by places of passage, places
that are
nonplaces: shopping malls, bus stations, toll booths. We are
bombarded
by appeals to us and by excess." As befits such preoccupations,
Tavares
crafts objects that both invite and reject practical use. <Click
here for full text>
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Alex Cerveny: Twisted Dimensions
- Those familiar with Alex Cerveny's
work won't be too surprised to hear that the lanky artist was
once a
circus contortionist. The São Paulo native is best known for
elegantly
symmetrical en-gravings and drawings that invariably reveal
an
incongru-ous figure or two, adding a twisted dimension to an
other-wise
peaceful form. <click here for full
text>
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Land Reform of the Airwaves -
Leo Tomaz is the driving force behind
Radio Reversão. That's 106.5 on your FM dial on the outskirts
of São
Paulo, where the homes of rural immigrants and their upwardly
mobile
children sprawl across what is called the East Zone. It was
106.5 until
April 9 anyway. That morning, federal police arrested Tomaz
for
operating a station without a license and confiscated Reversão's
equipment. Far from being treated like a criminal, however,
Tomaz found
himself something of a hero.<click
here for full text>
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