A Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously (review)

A Culture of Its Own: Taking Latin America Seriously. By Mark Falcoff. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998. Notes. Index. 337 pp. Cloth, $32.95.

During the past fifty years, three views have defined the debate on the causes of Latin America's history of authoritarianism, injustice, and poverty, a history that contrasts so starkly with the evolution of Canada and the United States: (1) the dependency view, driven largely by ideology, which dominated universities in the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Europe for two decades and is now rarely mentioned; (2) the view that Latin America's modernization largely depends on magnanimous U.S. policies, a view driven in part by guilt feelings about our wealth and power; and (3) the view that Latin America's problems are substantially of its own making, a view that is least popular in U.S. universities but one that is gaining currency in Latin America, and is advocated by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Mariano Grondona, among others.

Mark Falcoff, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has been a leading spokesman in the United States for the third view. His new book, A Culture of Its Own, is a kaleidoscopic collection of 22 essays, organized into five sections, that explore both Hispanic and Hispanic American letters and history. The essays make clear, in elegant prose, how broad and deep is the foundation on which Falcoff's views have taken shape.

The first section entitled "Ideas and Ideologies" is an indictment of those who have impugned Christopher Columbus, the symbol of the westernization of the Western Hemisphere; of Latin American intellectuals, politicians, and business elites who are responsible for the "mercantilism" that Hernando de Soto exposes in The Other Path; of Latin American writers who have explained the region's problems as the consequence of malign external forces and have extolled the Cuban model; and of those academics in the United States who have applauded the antidemocratic, anticapitalist, anti-Yankee ideologies of their Latin American counterparts.

Hispanic literature is a passion of Falcoff, and the second section looks at the great and not so great writers. He is an admirer of Ortega y Gasset, García Lorca, Gerald Brenan, and Victoria Ocampo's Argentine literary review, Sur. He is less admiring of Carlos Fuentes, particularly his views on the United States, and the American radical, Carlton Beals.

The third section focuses on the Cuban Revolution. Falcoff examines its historical antecedents and the question of whether mismanagement of U.S. policy drove Castro into the arms of the Soviets. He concludes, correctly, in my view, that there was nothing we could have done to prevent the unhappy outcome. Falcoff, who has lived in Argentina, addresses in the fourth section the "Dirty War," the Falklands adventure, and his curious 1968 meeting with Juan Perón in the latter's villa outside Madrid. The last section, "Latins and Europeans," looks at Erich Honecker's strange relationship with Chile; the Spanish novelist Manuel Vásquez Montálban's treatment of the disappearance in 1956 of Jesús de Galíndez, a critic of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo; and Falcoff's visit to six European countries to explain U.S. policy in Central America during the Sandinista years.

Some generations hence, historians and social scientists looking back at the Western Hemisphere during the period from the Cuban Revolution through the end of the twentieth century will, I believe, judge dependency theory's hold on academe as bizarre. They will be struck by the naiveté of those who believed that U.S. magnanimity--obliged by our prosperity, power, and errors--could solve Latin America's problems. And they will conclude that Mark Falcoff came much closer to the truth.

Lawrence E. Harrison
Harvard University

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