Presentation

In this issue of Memoria y Sociedad, corresponding to the second first 2014, we are pleased to deliver to the academic and research community as well as to our wide general public, a new issue devoted to Temas abiertos, with which we continue addressing important issues about Latin America and its many regions in a formal and rigorous way, according to our editorial guidelines and plans from the recent years.

Thus, the issue that we present today covers broad topics that discuss from political relations between Cuba and Europe through the Italian fascism in the thirties to the neogranadinian colonial problems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries related to representations of the Holy Family or the money supply. We present research on the Pentecostal pastors in Chile and the study of the mechanisms of the Soviet, British and American espionage during the Cold War, addressed by the Spanish historiography.

Along these lines, in the article "Cuba: Diario de la Marina, the 'Missionaries of Mussolini' and the Pro-Italian Cuban Intellectuals during the Second Italo-Abyssinian Conflict (1935-1936)", Alberto Consuegra Sanfiel shows the polarization that this conflict generated worldwide: although there were voices for freedom and respect of Abyssinia, there were also voices "in favor of fascism who supported the armed aggression". In America, a group of Cuban intellectuals sympathetic to the Fascist Italian emigration enacted a series of favorable criteria for Mussolini's actions in this conflict and, although they were not the most representative case, they had wide di-fussion and resonance.

The following text entitled «Red Ink: the Liberal Journalism in Bogotá, 1890-1900», by Shirley Tatiana Pérez Robles, takes up the issue of opposition press censorship in Colombia through the analysis of the ideological content of four liberal newspapers during the Regeneration period. The findings highlight the main contributions made by the liberal reporters sector in the context of a country dominated by conservatives.

Ángela Isabel Rodríguez Leuro, in "Problems of Hygiene and Overcrowding in Bogotá in the Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century and the First Neighborhood for the Working Class" presents a valuable contribution to the urban history of the capital city. The author reconstructs the various problems that the growth of Bogota brought with it, which stimulated the emergence of working-class neighborhoods with better hygienic and sanitary conditions.

On the other hand, the text "The 'Crusade' Group - 'Tradition, Family and Property' (TFP) and Other Traditionalist Lay Undertakings Against the Third-world Sectors. An Approach to their Practices and Dissemination Strategies in the Sixties", written by Elena Scirica, reflects about the relationship between the church and the politics in Argentina in the sixties. This is made through a sharp analysis of several devices used by lay groups like the TFP such as —books, journals, pamphlets and flyers— which were designed to face the progress of the sectors "labeled" as progressive, third world and which they saw as the invasion of Marxism in the Church.

Miguel Ángel Mansilla Agüero and Luis Orellana study the important and fundamental role of women's leadership on the revivalist and Pentecostal movements, mainly from metaphors built by Chilean Pentecostals on the role of female pastors. Thus, in "Female Pentecostal Pastors: Metaphors about Women's Leadership in the Pentecostal Evangelical Church (1972-2001)", the authors focus their analysis on the mortuary stories published in the journal Fuego de Pentecostes, between 1972 and 2001, within which there are representations of the different roles of female pastors: pastors' wives, preachers, co-pastors, mothers and social visitors.

The text "The Painting of the Holy Family. A Manual of Family Relationships in the World of the Seventeenth Century in Santa Fe", by Juan Pablo Cruz Medina, aims to evaluate the discourse contained in the paintings of the Holy Family made in the seventeenth century in the colonial Santa Fe. The analysis of images evidence the use of such paintings as political tools for the configuration of society articulated by families regulated by principles such as "piety", «chasti-ty» and "mortification". The author focuses the analysis on the construction of a colonial subject, through his political stylization based on images of Christ, the Virgin and various saints.

James Vladimir Torres Moreno, in his article "Coins with Old and New Marks: Debasement and Re-coinage in the New Kingdom of Granada in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century", analyzes, from primary sources, the different monetary variations occurred in the colonial period within the neogranadinian system under Bourbon rule. Thus, it examines two central elements of the monetary policy during the regime: the debasement and the recoinage. The research result shows that both measures altered the composition without affecting the size of the money supply and, on the other hand, that although the new coinage reduced the operating costs, the debasement prevented the unification of the circulating currency in the same sense. The text shows that the mentioned measures affected the behavior of variables such as inflation, currency in small denominations and the Gresham's Law.

Finally, "The Congress for Cultural Freedom Seen from the Dynamics of the Cold War» by Francisco Ruiz, problematizes the espionage mechanisms arisen from the Communist International, specifically regarding the propaganda secret operations and the manipulation of intellectuals. In the same vein, the strategies and responses orchestrated by the U.S. and British intelligence services during the Cold War which were designed to counteract the ideological influence of the Soviet bloc are reconstructed. It also highlights the political and cultural importance that the Congress for Cultural Freedom kept to the extent that, due to the significant amount of journals, exhibitions, scholarships, concerts, congresses and conferences conducted within the framework of this congress, the West was able to implement within its space the conception of a policy of "No Communist Left" that ultimately, and in the author's words, "laid the foundation of the social democracy within the Western "bloc".

We hope you enjoy reading this new issue as much as we enjoyed doing it.

Editorial Staff