The View from the Café
Latin America Between the Eagle and the Bear.
by Salvador De Madariaga.
Praeger. 192 pp. $4.50.
A fixture of every Latin American university is the near-by cafe where politically-minded students and professors gather to talk, organize factions, and settle the issues of the day. Never wanting in these gatherings are loud ideologists ready to explain, categorically, just what is wrong with their country’s political and social system, and how these shortcomings can be set right. The solutions offered vary from Marxism and “Indianism” to free enterprise and John Birch nationalism, but the tone of breezy certainty is generally the same: over a cafe table everything sounds easy and plausible.
Now Professor Madariaga has put some two hundred pages of this kind of talk between the covers of a book; but what might be impressive in the give-and-take of conversation looks woefully dull and disorganized in print. Senor Madariaga’s opinions about Spain and Spanish America were formed decades ago, and nothing that has happened recently has caused him to re-examine them. But Fidel Castro and the Alliance for Progress have created a market for books about Latin America, and the author, with the typically facile pen of a pensador, has set himself to satisfying the demand.
Some of the points he makes are valid and familiar enough. Too many Latins want white collar government jobs, and too few are interested in science and technology; there is a shortage of “the truly productive and creative” middle class; governments are unstable; the land is monopolized and inefficiently used; there is not enough native capital and a tendency to export what there is of it. He charges the United States with “intellectual disdain towards Spanish culture,” and with neglect of Latin America. The State Department’s worst sin is its fondness for the Somozas, Franco, Trujillo, Batista, and Peron, “every nation-breaker who had gangstered his way to power,” whom it used “like the handle of a frying pan.”
All this has been said before, with solid documentation, by American scholars and journalists. Señor Madariaga, like a café conversationalist, has not bothered with the tedious business of research and travel. He has apparently read only two or three books and a handful of magazine articles about contemporary Latin America; like many representatives of the Hispanic tradition he does not understand and is not really interested in the problems of economic development, as his use of outdated and misleading statistics for the year 1950 shows. (Similarly, he wrote the section on the Dominican Republic before Trujillo’s assassination, and did not bother to revise it.) His book swarms with errors, not all of which are misprints. President Cárdenas of Mexico is “Cúrdenas”; Ydígoras Fuentes of Guatemala is “Ydagoras”; Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) is “Petróleo Mexicano (Petro-Mex)”; Ambassador Dwight W. Morrow is “Monroe.” Professor Madariaga writes that Communism got a foothold in Guatemala “when Arévalo died (1950)”; but Arévalo is very much alive, and preparing to run for President again in 1963. The errors, if small, are symptomatic of a Quixotic attitude toward facts; no North American scholar of comparable reputation would be so casual or so careless.
Madariaga’s major interpretations are equally dubious. He believes that the Latin American countries’ “primary evil . . . is lack of population.” This is clearly absurd for countries like Peru, with 1,500 persons per square mile of arable land (U.S. = 240) and an average daily diet of 1,800 calories, or Haiti, with 2,400 persons per square mile and a per capita income of $1.50 a week, the lowest in Latin America. Madariaga concludes that Venezuela’s (comparative) prosperity is due to her generous immigration policy—as if oil had nothing to do with it! And Mexico’s remarkable progress in the past two decades is attributed, not to political stability, social reform, proximity to the U.S., and tourism, but to “the strong injection of Spanish blood received by Mexico as the outcome of the Spanish Civil War.”
Indeed, Señor Madariaga is still fighting the long-won battle against the “Black Legend” of Spanish perfidy and foolishness. For it he substitutes his own “White Legend” of a Spain “more sensitive to the elusive and subtle values,” in which there is a “predominance of the individuated faculties of the spirit—intellect and will . . . one of the most intelligent of European peoples; as well as one of those in whose midst intelligence is distributed most equitably.”
These murky maunderings about the National Character are reinforced by a Polly-anna-like review of Spanish imperial history. Cuba in the 1890’s, Madariaga insists, was “not harshly governed”; there were, to be sure, Weyler’s concentration camps (in which 50,000 Cubans died of hunger and disease in the province of Havana alone), but “by Nazi or Soviet standards they were pleasure resorts.” Any attempt by Argentina, Mexico, or Brazil (which Madariaga insists is also “Spanish”) to develop a separate nationality, “any action directed against their common Spanishness must be condemned as either an error or a crime.” This determination to emphasize the Spanish and to play down or ignore the Indian (and English, French, Italian, and North American) aspects of Latin American culture even leads him to miss the significance of some of the little personal anecdotes of which he is so fond:
[A friend in Cuzco] who was showing me the city suddenly hailed a lean, tall Indian of about fifty and asked him in Quechua: “Who are you?” The man gave his name and volunteered to add: “I belong to Don Bartolomé Gonzáles.” He knew perhaps no Spanish; but I had noticed the clothes he was wearing: they were a fairly faithful though shabby version of the Court dress worn in Spain towards 1770.
An interesting cultural survival; but surely the significant facts about this encounter are that, after four centuries, the Indian could not speak Spanish and that he “belonged” to his landlord.
_____________
After the diagnosis, the prescription: Latin America must curb its labor unions, which Madariaga (mistakenly) believes “are powerful enough to challenge the State.” It must put its faith in the military because “there is in all Latin armies a tradition of liberty.” Immigration will help (though food production per capita is lower than it was in 1938, and almost all nations must import foodstuffs). Standards of living and the birth rate, he says, are rising rapidly, “and this may help.” But the standard of living in most countries is stationary or falling, and a continued rapid increase in population would be calamitous. (Madariaga gives three different figures for the birth rate, all of them wrong.)
Madariaga wants a commission made up of an Argentine, a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Swede, and an Italian (all of whom he names) to inquire into “the unsatisfactory practices in the financial relations between the two Americas”—as if these matters had not been studied again and again by ECLA, the World Bank, Congressional committees, and dozens of independent scholars from both sides of the Rio Grande. He would like to remodel the Organization of American States “so that it is composed of only two partners: the U. S. A. and Latin America”; what a howl of outraged nationalism that would call up! He suggests that Puerto Rico be made independent and federated with Cuba and the Dominican Republic, a proposal which all three peoples would emphatically reject. And his comments on the Cuban situation, the most delicate and dangerous in the hemisphere, are vague and useless:
Cuba must be liberated. . . . Let the Doctrine of Freedom be proclaimed from the White House, and, armed with that Doctrine, let the United States lead a spirited operation against all dictators—right and left. Other American nations may join in the crusade. But it must be a crusade.
What are Mr. Kennedy and his advisers to make of this stirring but Delphic oracle?
Professor Madariaga’s book is, then, neither a new scholarly investigation of Latin America’s problems, nor a successful journalistic attempt to explain the findings of scholars to a general audience. He himself notes the Latin Americans’
pronounced tendency to general ideas and their disinclination for the merely utilitarian; their dislike of technical work, [which] arises from . . . three centuries of a scholastic, generally classical and disinterested education.
Many of the national development plans drawn up under the Alliance for Progress suffer from just such vagueness and imprecision; and Latin America Between the Eagle and the Bear is itself a product of these very tendencies.
_____________
