The Lesson of Guatemala

...Schneider s book, unfortunately, does r.ot extract the lessons to any extensive degree...

...So far...

...Here he misses an excellent chance to provide a catalog of political "do's and don'ts" for American business abroad...

...Again, Schneider points out the unpopularity that the United Fruit Company and other American business interests brought down, not only on themselves, but on the U.S...

...to its real or potential friends abroad...

...The farmer puzzled for a while and at last advised...

...The Communists had Russia behind them...

...It is equally true that there exists in all underdeveloped countries, just because they are underdeveloped, a certain degree of open or latent susceptibility to Communism...

...I wouldn't start from here...

...The injection of a little U.S...

...finally, shabby defeat...

...so good—and so familiar...

...Schneider provides brief biographical sketches of the leading Guatemalan Communists, but they are as non-committal as entries in Who's Who...

...Could not the author, in interviews in Guatemala, have sketched psychological portraits of these people that would give us insights about other underdeveloped countries...

...policy can be learned from this small country...

...Ambassador John Peurifoy, the ragtag Army of Castillo Armas with its few archaic planes brought the Communists and Arbenz down...

...In addition to finding in Communism a key for understanding the perplexities of society and a blueprint for social change, these young intellectuals found some degree of security and recognition in the party...

...What can we learn from individual Guatemalan Communist case histories of the particular indignities to the minds and consciences of "young lower-middle-class intellectuals" anywhere that turn the volatile ones toward the East...

...Even granting the overcautious premise that one must be careful in generalizing from the Guatemalan experience, many practical lessons with present and future application to U.S...

...True, Schneider, when he does analyze and generalize, points out that "the first progress made by the Communists in Guatemala was among the young lower-middle-class intellectuals, perhaps the sector of society most frustrated by the traditional social order...

...No study of Communism in Guatemala is complete without an examination of the frequent indifference of the U.S...

...Or again, Schneider notes that in Guatemala "organized anti-Communism was essentially negative, too closely linked to retrograde forces to be effective, and often self-defeating...

...Would such a study possibly help the U. S. hold foreign military men in its political camp...

...The figure of the wellborn Signora Arbenz, who apparently preceded the president into Communism, remains shadowy and we are left with a cherchez la femme suspicion...

...This too is a fact that impedes the defeat of Communism in many countries besides Guatemala...

...In the end, in 1954, it was all terribly easy...

...In the main, his work is simply reportorial in a rather wearisomely detailed manner...

...All the names of the Red front organizations, all the quotations from the major Communist pronouncements, all the schisms in the party and the healings of schisms, all the trips behind the Iron Curtain—in short, the news records—are there...

...It is a fact almost too obvious to bear repetition that Moscow is working very hard to subvert and capture the underdeveloped countries...

...Take sallow, bespectacled Jose Manuel Fortuny, the former Secretary-General of the Guatemalan Communist party and also a former clerk of the Sterling Drug Products Company—what motive forces, what impulses, what reactions set him apart from his fellow clerks...

...Well, if I were going there...

...Once Guatemalan anti-Communism had U.S...

...Guatemala offers a ten-year record in an underdeveloped nation of slow Communist emergence, eventual capture of power and...

...Yet Schneider himself points out that these and other key Communists were related by blood and at least personally well-known to non-Communists in that minute and rather inbred Guatemalan ruling clique, of whatever political stripe...

...This might have included some tips on timing, for the United Fruit Company made very commendable changes in its methods of doing business in Guatemala but it made them too late to escape local censure...

...moral support, largely through the efforts of the late and unconventional U.S...

...But what were their specific personal and intellectual hurts that turned them into foreign-run rebels...

...determination sustained Castillo Armas and the local anti-Communist forces longer than ideological firmness served the Communists...

...The Lesson of Guatemala Communism in Guatemala, 1944-1954...

...The problem of checking Communism under the specific circumstances of national backwardness is a major challenge to United States policy and to that part of the U. S. citizenry that cares...

...generally, and how some aspects of American business operations played into Communist hands...

...One cycle of Communism in Guatemala is over and eminently ex-aminable...

...But most of the interesting, crucial operational questions about the progress and fall of Guatemalan Communism are left unanswered...

...This too is a Guatemalan lesson that might be taught over and over...

...Anyone else attempting a useful study of Communism in Guatemala shouldn't start from Schneider's point of departure...

...Take the taciturn army officer and president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who slipped into increasing and finally complete dependence on the Communists—this enigma is recorded by Schneider, but he attempts no unraveling...

...Is not the case of Arbenz particularly worth minute scrutiny in view of the alliances of the nominally conservative military with the Communists in many backward countries...

...diplomacy...

...In the brief and unbloody civil war, the question was not really who would win, but rather who would give up first...

...The anti-Communists had little American counsel, and where they wanted to act they were met by pious American protestations about "nonintervention...

...Latin American correspondent, "Time-Life" THIS BOOK reminds me of the old New England story of the tourist who asked a farmer for directions to a middling-distant town...

...But he is silent on the relationship of Guatemalan Communism and U.S...

...It suggests that Red menaces can be laid to rest in many cases, if we stop staring at Communist progress with the terrified fascination of a rabbit looking at a snake and exert some serpentine skills ourselves...

...What must local, national and U. S. foreign policies avoid and practice to make this critical social segment a constructive force...

...It is a plain fact that monumental incompetence, or alternatively, narrow concentration on reporting to Washington, took the place of active influence on the Guatemalan scene by American diplomats during the period 1944-54, and this contributed handsomely to Communist progress...

...Schneider thoroughly documents the Guatemalan Communist links with worldwide Communist and Communist-front organizations...