Professor Shapiro thinks that the United States public tends “to pass over in silence the awkward truth” about the real conditions in Latin America where “most of the countries have been slipping toward catastrophe ever since the ending of the Korean War and the subsequent decline of world commodity prices.” Invisible Latin America is Professor Shapiro’s attempt to describe the “awkward truth” of what is happening in Latin America. The work begins with a short chapter (12 pages) discussing such matters as Latin America’s poverty in natural resources, her geographical and political handicaps, the social structure, militarism, the population problem and the difficulty of finding solutions to the area’s problems.
Chapter II sets up a classification of the five “political stages” the various republics have reached: the old style caudillo regimes, (Paraguay, Guatemala, Haiti, and Nicaragua); the conservative regimes with some degree of political democracy (Argentina, Honduras, Ecuador, Chile, El Salvador, Panama, and Peru); the newly established liberal regimes (Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela); the revolutionary regimes (Bolivia and Cuba); and the post revolutionary regimes (Mexico and Uruguay). After having set up his classifications Professor Shapiro “examines closely” one country of each of his five groups: Guatemala, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico as well as Bolivia because it “provides a case study, exaggerated almost to caricature, of the reasons for the economic and political backwardness of Latin America.” A final chapter discusses 17 ways in which the United States can improve its policy thus helping the Latin American republics to solve their pressing problems.
This reviewer believes that the book has not pictured the complex realities of Latin America in its 175 pages. Professor Shapiro writes in his preface that “as a newcomer to Latin American studies I have profited greatly from books, lectures, and conversations with specialists in the field” (p. xi). Unfortunately most of the books now available about Latin America are bad books, and there are few specialists in the field who know much about it. Nor has Professor Shapiro digested and understood much of the information he has collected or placed it within a broader context so that the picture becomes understandable. Perhaps this is why so many silly statements have crept in, such as his comment that Latin American millionaires have no income tax to pay (p. 13); that Uruguay has a one-party system of democracy (p. 23); that the Apra came to power after World War II (p. 46); or that in Mexico “previously deposed leaders such as Madero, Zapata, Carranza, Villa, and Obregón had been assassinated or shot while attempting to escape (p. 109). Perhaps the best example of the type of scholarship on which the book is based is to say that on page 5 “Latin America is not a very rich area geographically” and on page 175, Latin America has “vast resources in oil, iron ore, copper, and the products of tropical agriculture.”
But even more important, by failing to differentiate between the indigenous revolutionists in Latin America and those inspired, financed, and organized by the Russian and Chinese dictatorships, Professor Shapiro makes Latin America’s revolutions incomprehensible. There is a difference between a Betancourt, a Figueres, an Arévalo, an Haya de la Torre, a Frondizi, or a Juan Bosch and a Fidel Castro. One is trying to transform his country into a modern democratic state, the other is trying to develop a base for his spiritual fatherland, Russia or China. In 1963, a serious scholar can no longer argue that a Communist totalitarian is a socialist reformer in a hurry. All of the evidence available is that Fidel Castro is an extreme megalomaniac being manipulated by the Cuban Communist Party to help Russia create a totalitarian state useful to Russia in its attempt to conquer the rest of America. To put Cuba together with Bolivia into a group of “revolutionary regimes” is to confuse and not to clarify. It is just as silly to discover that Chile has the same kind of political system as Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Peru, and Argentina, or that Costa Rica has the same type as Brazil or Colombia.
Nor is it helpful to Latin America to write that “some reports of torture and ‘suicides’ in government prisons [under Rómulo Betancourt’s government] are as bad as anything that occurred under the Batista or Jiménez dictatorships” (p. 57), without quoting a source and more important without discussing the millions of dollars Russia has poured into trying to overthrow the Betancourt government through terrorism.
This is not a book which will make “Invisible Latin America” more visible to its readers. Rather it is another in a long series of books which make it more difficult for Latin America to be understood in the United States.
