In Raíz y futuro de la Revolución, Guillén Martínez permits the reader a startlingly candid glimpse at the psychological evolution of the Hispanic culture, from its medieval manifestation of hidalguismo to its twentieth century expression in the national “irresponsible despotisms.” Avowedly an effort to dispel the myths of social reform as propagated by many of the present-day ruling elites in Latin America, the book is also an attempt to seek the answer to that region’s cultural identity crisis, thereby pointing the way to a genuine and thoroughgoing social revolution. The ultimate futuro of the revolution, consequently, is not to be sought exclusively in economic analysis, but in the psychological roots of the Hispanic character.
It is from these origins in the unique feudalism of medieval Spain, that two powerful traditions emerge: local civic liberty and an obsessive quest for nobility. As the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula is concluded at the gates of Granada in 1492, Columbus’ discovery of America provides a new environment for these contradictory traditions. But instead of recreating local liberty, Spanish development in the New World follows a course dominated by a neurotic craving for personal power and prestige. The liberalism of the nineteenth century fails to reform this ruthless pursuit of privilege and becomes instead another rationalization of oppression, made more heinous by its aura of enlightenment. In such a grotesquely maladjusted society, love becomes only an expedient to prestige, and flowery constitutional proclamations of justice scarcely veil the pervasive moral and political anarchy symbolized in the formula: “Obedezco pero no cumplo.”
With the advent of the twentieth century the increasing centralization of bureaucrats, industrialists, landholders, and militarists gives rise to a “new class,” closely approximating the commissariat in Bolshevik Russia. This “new class” of not-so-benevolent despots (like Laureano Gómez and Gustavo Rojas Pinilla) finds itself strengthened by advances in communications and industry, a phenomenon that in 1948 sparks widespread armed opposition—la violencia. In this final, anarchistic stage of hidalguismo, the elements of a new society appear from the ruins of the old—a society based not on national centralization but on regional autonomy. Regionalism thus becomes the future course of the revolution.
