The book’s title is misleading. A seventeen-page prologue states on page fifteen that the book is about Haya and his doctrines. Baeza Flores then proceeds to illustrate (what he began on page one of the Prologue) that a better title might be “The Influence of the Mountains and the Sea on Latin America’s Great Heroes of the Last Two Centuries, Castroism, and Incidental Notes About Haya de la Torre and Other Revolutionary Conductors of the True Latin American Left.” The reader interested in contemporary developments in Peru—which bear a remarkable resemblance to events in the 1930’s—would do better to buy or read Harry Kantor’s Ideology and Program of the Peruvian Aprista Movement, Robert Alexander’s section on Haya in Prophets of the Revolution, the up-dated biographies of Luis Alberto Sánchez or Felipe Cossío del Pomar, or the five-volume pocket-book Pensamiento Político de Haya de la Torre (Ediciones Pueblo, Lima, 1961). The book has some value for its presentation of Haya’s viewpoints on recent events: “I do not believe it is necessary to throw rocks [at the Alliance for Progress] when we should be making plans [and presenting programs]”; Castro’s rejection of Cuban elections “goes against all the ideology of genuine Latin American revolutionary movements”; the Latin American Free Trade Area is a further strengthening of the Indo-American Common Market idea [of the APRA]; “There is a mania for liberty of opinion in the United States [where] one hears about the failure of a satellite while in a totalitarian regime the news is published only when it goes into orbit”; “Latin America is going to miss the bus of history if we continue divided and dismembered”; “Scandinavia offers a model of industrialization without dictatorship . . . [of] how human nature can enjoy bread and liberty together.”
Book Review|
November 01 1963
Haya de la Torre y la revolución constructiva de las Américas
Haya de la Torre y la revolución constructiva de las Américas
. By Flores, Alberto Baeza. Buenos Aires
, 1962
. Editorial Claridad
. (Colección América Libre: Vol. I
). Pp. 205
. Paper.Hispanic American Historical Review (1963) 43 (4): 605.
Citation
Neale J. Pearson; Haya de la Torre y la revolución constructiva de las Américas. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 November 1963; 43 (4): 605. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-43.4.605
Download citation file: