During the years 1917-1918 Mexico stood at the crossroads between revolutionary nationalism and foreign control. Nevertheless, much of the diplomacy of this wartime period and the variety of foreign threats to the regime of Venustiano Carranza remain obscure. Only very recently have scholars (Glaser, 1971; Machado and Judge, 1971; Trow, 1971; Tulchin, 1971; Smith, 1972; Meyer, 1968) realized the extent of the American movement for armed intervention in Mexico in 1919. But the more subtle strategy to guide the Mexican government's policy through economic pressure has received little attention. Likewise, the anti-Carrancista policy of the British Foreign Office has been ignored (see Fabela, 1958-1959; López de Roux, 1965; Zorrilla, 1965; Smith, 1969, 1972; Meyer, 1968). If one focuses less on the possibilities of overt military intervention and more on the economic issues of monetary exchange, food, loans, and oil, the years 1917-1918 (usually quickly sandwiched between the Pershing incursion and the 1919 interventionist movement) acquire major significance.

Many authors (for example, Ostrogorski, 1964; Michels, 1962: 175 ff.; Weber, 1946: 101 ff.; Duverger, 1967: 182-197; Schlesinger, 1965: 766-767, 1967: 268; Seligman, 1967: 315; Stinchombe, 1965: 153; McKenzie, 1963: 581-591; Epstein, 1967: 167-233, 289-314) have noted that contemporary political parties are predominantly electoral organizations engaged in public office-seeking and dominated by elected officials. While American parties have always been characterized by office-seeking, this phenomenon was not intially characteristic of socialist, labor, or communist parties which endeavored to create a working-class subculture and to whom public office-seeking was only one of several activities. In many such parties, however, office-seeking has come to dominate or even replace a previously wide range of activities.

A marked improvement has occurred since 1968 in Havana's relations with Moscow and the traditional Communist parties of Latin America. Previously, however, from approximately 1966-1968 Fidel Castro's actions and words came perilously close to precipitating a formal split between his regime and the pro-Soviet parties of the hemisphere. At one time, sporadic criticisms of standard Communist party revolutionary strategy and tactics escalated in frequency and gravity. An ideological offensive advanced as Castro flaunted an independent Marxist line in both domestic and international affairs. Havana proceeded to exacerbate growing tensions in the uneasy alliance between guerrilla movements and Communist parties in several Latin American countries.

Attempts to establish the factors prompting these actions have to date focused on Cuban reactions to developments in the Venezuelan revolutionary movement during 1964-1966.