The Cambridge History of Latin America is nearing completion. With this volume, editor Leslie Bethell (and associate editor James Dunkerley for this volume) brings the story of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean up to the 1980s. With the remaining three volumes on the rest of Latin America since 1930 (Economy, Society and Politics; Spanish South America; and Brazil: Ideas, Culture and Society), the history will be complete. It is an impressive enterprise. We now have at our fingertips an authoritative survey by leading scholars based on the latest research, complemented with highly valuable bibliographical essays. Like the previous volume, this installment sets a high standard and stakes a further claim to the maturity of the field of Latin American history.
The editor has chosen to omit the Dutch and English Caribbean and the Guianas but includes Haiti and Puerto Rico, as well as separate chapters on the Panama Canal Zone and Panama. The criterion is reasonable, even if it does not conform to the latest membership list of the OAS. The focus is on “the evolution of internal structures” (xi), although the international context is ever present. Three external events overshadow every country: the Great Depression, World War II, and the cold war. Running through the half century is the overwhelming presence of the United States. Chapter after chapter relates the legacy of direct or indirect intervention, ranging from the training of national military to the often relentless diplomatic pressure to protect U.S. investors.
The premier chapters are those on Mexico. Both Alan Knight (Mexico c. 1930-46) and Peter H. Smith (Mexico since 1946) have written superb syntheses based on a profound knowledge of the best scholarship. Knight offers brisk prose, surveying with a sure hand the demise of Plutarco Calles and the consolidation of what was to become the PRI, twentieth-century Latin America’s most impressive example of adaptable one-party rule. Knight gives a balanced view of the central role of Lázaro Cárdenas, picturing his goal of a “workers’ democracy” as a response to genuine and widespread mobilization from below. He sees Miguel Alemán’s “counterrevolution” as “more subtle and moderate” (p. 81) than its Latin American counterparts. Peter Smith skillfully mixes political with economic and social history in his elegantly written portrait of this “paragon of political stability.” He shows how the resourceful elite solved its problem of “renewal and executive succession,” while combining charrismo and repression to keep labor, once encouraged by Cárdenas, in line. The decline of nationalism and the deepening crisis of PRI legitimacy are equally well shown.
Limitations of space prevent adequate discussion of the other richly detailed country chapters. Louis A. Pérez’s masterful picture of Cuba from 1930 to 1959 portrays the potent mixture of political radicalism and economic subordination that later exploded in Fidelismo. Jorge Domínguez’s bland account of Cuba’s saga under the Revolution downplays Fidel Castro’s dominance and pays too little attention to the highly mixed economic record. The Caribbean scene is completed with Frank Moya Pons’s primarily political account (with some effective detail on economics) of the Dominican Republic, David Nicholls’s heavily cultural account of Haiti’s anguished history, and Robert Anderson’s picture of a Puerto Rico with its “contradiction of a class-riven society moored to the treadmill of colonial dependency” (p. 587).
The unhappy history of Panama (that “rachitic nation,” in one native’s phrase) gets a colorful portrait from Michael Conniff, who emphasizes the racial tensions and uncertain sense of nationhood. John Major recounts the bizarre history of the “Zonians” and their longtime manipulation of U.S. domestic political opinion for personal gain. Readers who prefer only one chapter on Central America can profit greatly from Edelberto Torres Rivas’s overview, which effectively weaves together economic and political history. James Dunkerley contributes able chapters on the dark histories of Guatemala and El Salvador. The indefatigable Victor Bulmer-Thomas chronicles the contrasting histories of Honduras and Nicaragua, with the latter having suffered “all the costs of superpower attention without any of the benefits” (p. 265). One comes with a sense of relief to Rodolfo Cerdas Cruz on Costa Rica. Here the political elite met the challenge of the Caribbean’s second most influential Communist party (after Cuba) with reformist creativity.
Given a purchase price little short of three digits, even bibliomaniacs wishing to buy this essential reference work may choose to await the paperback edition of selected chapters.
