Víctor Alba’s activities as a journalist and scholar place him in the tradition of the pensador—facile, fluent, more notable for eloquence than solidity. The present volume, a collection of eighteen essays (most of which have been published before), gives us once again his analysis of the Communist threat, the menace of “a new oligarchy of impatient technicians,” the need for cooperation between labor unions and peasant communities, the proper role of the United States in fostering Latin American development, and the urgent necessity for creating “a continental conscience.” Like most such gatherings of fugitives, the book is repetitious and poorly organized. Alba’s style leans heavily on rhetorical questions in the manner of the Stalinists he detests, and, like them, he answers with lists: fifteen characteristics of the middle classes, four myths about Latin American economic growth, four tendencies of “negative nationalism.” Despite frequent felicitous phrases, the book seems remote from reality and far too long.
Readers who have sampled the sizable literature dealing with contemporary Latin America will find nothing that is new and a great deal that is trite or outdated. The chapter on communism adds little but obscure rhetoric to Robert J. Alexander’s survey of that topic. Alba’s views on the middle class as the decisive force for social change have been expressed more forcefully, and with some positive evidence, by John J. Johnson and others. The author’s economic ideas are secondhand and second-rate. The book has some symptomatic interest, however, as an example of the almost complete loss of support for fidelismo among Latin American liberals, and the consequent willingness to forget or forgive past American sins of omission or commission there. And the Latin Americans to whom these essays were primarily addressed may learn something from the author’s discussion of the ignorance of “Marxists by osmosis” or his view of dictatorship as “the historic punishment for the failure of democratic revolutionary movements.”
