The persistent desire to find the Northwest Passage and its resultant route to India and the Spice Islands soon led the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Central America to look to the north as the new field of their activity. Their achievements to the south had already convinced them that the realization of their great hope could not lie in that direction. Additional motives which attracted their attention northward, beyond their already enormous possessions, were their natural quest for imperial expansion, the acquisition of still more resources, and the spiritual salvation of the inhabitants of those unclaimed regions.

What have we in mind when we speak of “Latin America”? The designation is frequently employed but it seems to convey a variety of notions and the vagueness and inaccuracy with which it is associated have generated a confusion which if persisted in may prove dangerous. Many persons appear to believe that “Latin America” designates a region extending from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn in which all or nearly all the inhabitants are “Latins” (whatever that means) who speak Spanish and whose customs are substantially alike. Some persons have advanced beyond that grotesque misconception to the point of realizing that there are some differences among the “Latin Americans”, that not all of them speak Spanish, and that statements true of one part of the region are not true of other parts. But that is about as far as many of our citizens advance, and even those who have arrived at a realization that “Latin America” is not a single homogeneous place seem to retain the notion that nevertheless “Latin America” can be dealt with without regarding the differences, some of them profound, that distinguish, let us say, Ecuador from Argentina or Guatemala from Venezuela.

“We see generals of thirty, poet-swordsmen spending themselves equally on their battles and their verses,” the Peruvian García Calderón wrote of revolutionary, nineteenth-century Cuba, “indomitable guerrillas, orators brimming with tropical eloquence, passionate pilgrims roaming the Americas to proclaim the miseries of Spanish domination.” Those revolutionary years that burn like an ember in the long history of Cuba glow with equal brilliance in the Cuban literary chronicle. Juan J. Remos y Rubio, indeed, in the three-volume History of Cuban Literature under review, lays such stress upon these years as to make them dim all that came before and all that has come after.

At a time when Positivism and “the scientific method” are still—with some notable exceptions—the great shibboleths of North American education on all levels and in almost every department of the curriculum, including the “humanities,” it is particularly enlightening to learn of (if not by) the experiences of a neighboring nation where Positivism was for several decades the official political philosophy of a dictatorial régime and, by government decree, the universally taught philosophy of education.