This book provides a good example of the many strengths and equally numerous weaknesses of contemporary Soviet scholarship in the social sciences. Its subject, as the title indicates, is United States-Latin American relations, primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, and the book focuses on three main topics: “United States Monopoly Capital and the Struggle of the Countries of Latin America for Economic Independence,” “United States Political Relations with the Countries of Latin America,” and “Problems of the Anti-Imperialist Struggle in Latin America.” Quite clearly the book’s principal message ties in closely with Marxist-Leninist ideology, and the requisite number of quotations from Lenin and Brezhnev are included. This is to be expected in any Soviet book dealing with contemporary affairs. It frequently makes the study hackneyed, old-fashioned, and overly determinist in its method of examining the question of United States—Latin American relations and in its general interpretations.
Despite the book’s predictable drawbacks, it is based on sound, rigorous, and (in dialectical materialist terms) honest scholarship. Some of its most damning criticisms of American political and economic policy in Latin America come from official United States government documents and from the noncommunist United States and Latin American press. The authors of the book are eminently well informed and in most cases considerably more sophisticated than many of their scholarly predecessors, who most often relied solely on such sources as Granma and The Daily Worker for their information.
There is much in this study with which Western readers will disagree, and the book suffers from the disjointedness that is to be expected in a collaboration by twenty different authors. It is an important book, however, in that it provides the current official Soviet view of United States—Latin American relations during the last two decades. It will undoubtedly reach a larger audience in this Spanish edition than it did in its 1978 Russian edition. Its views will be influential in Latin America, and should be examined seriously by Western academics and policy-makers in the United States.
