The seventeenth and final conference on the Caribbean sponsored by the University of Florida was to evaluate the area’s situation in the present and to consider possible trends for the future. To do so six topics were chosen: political capacity, economic potential, social patterns, cultural influences, international position, and bibliography and references. The twenty participants (bankers, businessmen, professors, government bureaucrats, representatives of private foundations, and diplomats) could hardly succeed in such an ambitious project.
Two factors militated against them: 1) their papers had to be read; and 2) the definition of the Caribbean was too broad (Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, and the independent islands) to allow adequate coverage for each of the six topics. The listener cannot absorb much hard-core data, and the authors mercifully left out statistical items, relegating them to tables which were added to the papers without enough textual explanation of their significance. As would be expected, most authors gave up the idea of covering every nation in the Caribbean and concentrated on those of Hispanic origin. The few authors who covered the non-Hispanic nations added invaluable information, indicating that generalizations about the pernicious effects of Spanish domination are also applicable to countries under the aegis of other powers.
This is not to say that the volume is worthless. The editor’s introduction and the three essays in the section on political capacity are thought-provoking. Matio Mory’s paper on education and development planning, Margarita Macaya’s on the role of women, Robert Wool’s assessment of the artistic climate in Latin America, and sections of other papers give value to this volume. Although John N. Plank calls for a bold and imaginative approach to United States
foreign policy, he himself comes up with only a warmed-over and expanded version of the Roosevelt Corollary. Still his essay is important because it points out the premises on which neoimperialism might be built.
The biographical list of contributors is helpful. There is no index, and the section on bibliography and references should have included an essay which contained more than stitches of direct quotations. Two typographical errors should be pointed out: the Catholic Church (about which little is said throughout) did not lose its wealth in 1784, but in 1874; and Venezuelan civil marriage was legalized in 1873, not in 1783 (p. 117).