It is hard to take this collaborative volume seriously, for it is (in its eight chapters) so wildly uneven and ideologically rigid. The various authors deal with characteristics of the Rosas, Dr. Francia, García Moreno, Porfirio Díaz, Juan Vicente Gómez, and Vargas regimes, with two general chapters which fail to bond the individual dictatorships into a meaningful collage. Given the nature of the disparate regimes discussed, this is perhaps impossible in any case.
While a few of the chapters—especially Waldo Ansaldi’s on Rosas (pp. 27-90)—are serious historical inquiries, most are what one would expect from a beginning graduate seminar. The treatment of Paraguay’s Francia, for example, written by Sergio Guerra Vilaboy (head of the History Department, University of Havana), and introduced with a quote from (of all people) Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, is a travesty. The author, in his copious (meandering) footnotes, relies on the polemics of Paraguayan Communist party boss Oscar Creydt and Richard Alan White for crucial judgments.
What Guerra—and most of the other authors—conclude is that a dictatorship is “good” if it is (a) nationalist, and (b) involves the masses, or the lower classes. It is even better if it is anticapitalist.
Perhaps most revealing is the last chapter, “Dictaduras y democracias en América Latina,” by Pablo González Casanova, which treats various “types” of dictatorships, including one type which “is the professional dictator of imperialism that the State Department, the Pentagon, the embassy, the CIA, in league with managers and leaders of capital assign counterrevolutionary tasks …” (p. 233). He warns such dictators to beware, for Cuba has introduced a “new reality,” and that Latin Americans, faced with “military intervention by marines,” would fight “the just war,” which “could cause a genocide” if the United States pressed the issue with military force (pp. 236-239).
Amusing reading perhaps, but hardly professional history.
