Four Views of Progress

...Such key questions are not even consideied here In contrast, The End of a Tiadi-tion is a delight to read Robert W Shirley's style is enlivened by a warm and humorous feeling lor human bemgs, free from chic sociological jawbreakers like "deprestigicizing," "feedback," "infrastructure" and "interest articulation ' He addresses himself to the facts, and his portrait of a folk culture giving way to an uglier but more dynamic agricultural community speaks foi itself Only a Levi-Strauss would be m a position to pass judgment on the value of Gerardo Reichel-Dolma-toffs Amazonian Cosmos ?and Levi-Strauss has already conferred his accolade on the Colombian archeologist-ethnologist The study is based almost exclusively on taped interviews with a single Tukano tribesman from Colombia's Vaupes territory who apparently "passed over" to sophisticated society without losing his love for the tribe or his capacity to remember and interpret the whole of its complex cosmogony If science ever accepts this Indian's revelation as applicable to all pritive societies, Freud's emphasis on sexuality will turn out to be timid indeed, and reli 210ns may revert to the use of hallucinogens on a scale that will make Tim Leary as antedeluvian as De Quincey Finally, G Cabrera Infante's disjointed panorama of Havana before the Revolution is, as he might pun, a flitterary mess Besides dropping references to all the "in" writers, Three Trapped Tigers never hesitates to be clever and strews its endless pages with wordplay—including a 50-page incantation on the death of Trotsky that would be indecipherable to a proletarian The book is filled with the naked bodies of showgirls, prostitutes and chan-teuses, cannibalistc dogs, a skeleton hanging behind a shower curtain, etc If you go for that sort of thing, packaged in richly enigmatic pseu-dopoetry, you'll love this book...

...Why was Bolivia's Leftist government overthrown this year without popular disapproval save a one-day student strike in the capital...

...Can it be shown that the Leftist regimes m those countries are more popular than the Rightist regimes in, say, Paraguay or Brazil...

...Do the Latin Americans themselves bear no responsibility for their failures to educate, modernize, form common maikets, tax the rich, and apply birth controls...

...Four Views of Progress Cultivating Revolution By James F Petr as and Robert LaPoite Jr Random House 470 pp $10 00 The End of a Tradition By Robert W Shirley Columbia 304 pp $10 00 Amazonian Cosmos By Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatofj Chicago 290 pp $12 50 Three Trapped Tigers By G Cabrer a Infante Harper & Row 487 pp $8 95 Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "South America of the Poets" IN WIDELY divergent ways, these tour books all deal with Latin Americans caught m the backlash of this century's technological revolution The first is a badly organized and atrociously written dissertation by two neo-Marxist professors on the recent social upheavals in Cuba, Peru and Chile The second is a low-keyed, scholarly and lucid study in depth of the transformation of Cun-ha, a Brazilian village on the perimeter of Sao Paulo, the biggest industrial complex in South America The third is an anthropological (and perhaps epoch-making) revelation of the wholly sex-oriented culture and religion of the Tukano Indians, one of the last primitive tribes still untouched by "civilization " The fourth is in the genre of those aggressively experimental novels—like Fmnegans Wake, Giles Goat-Boy, Hopscotch —that aim to illuminate an era via the symbolism of the subsconscious The thesis of Cultivating Revolution, extracted with great difficulty from the sociological jargon of James F Petras and Robert LaPorte Jr , is that the Hemisphere's obsolete landed oligarchies are trying to save their political hegemony by "production-lst" methods, that is, measures designed to increase agricultural and industrial production without altering the inequitable land tenure and control of industry The authors argue that these power elites have been strongly supported over the past decade by both the U S aid missions and the Alliance for Progress and that only where American guidelines have been rejected—Cuba, Peru and Chile—has there been any progress toward satisfying the "revolutionary," "democratic" and "legitimate" aspirations of the poor All this is true as far as it goes, and a good case can be made for the U S to adopt a hands-off policy toward Latin America, but Petras and LaPorte fail to make it Furthermore, their two central implications throughout?(1) that U S influence is responsible for the southern continent's plight and (2) that redistribution of the land is the answer to the masses' impoverishment—remain to be proved Is there any evidence that the poor are better off (except perhaps psychologically) in Cuba, Peru or Chile...