Os estudos sôbre o carácter brasileiro contam com urna tradigáo filosófica e literaria. Desde José Bonifacio, nos inicios de nossa independencia, até os ensaios mais recentes, um crescente interésse dos brasileiros pelo Brasil e pelos brasileiros criou ambiente próprio para o estudo disciplinado déste tema.

Não seria difícil somar as virtudes e os defeitos dos brasileiros ai apontados e apresentá-los num conjunto em que a presenga de certos qualificativos denunciasse, pela freqüéncia e o somatório, o quadro de nossos tragos psico-sociais. Mas, como já acentuaram varios estudiosos, a cultura de um povo nao é um somatório nem de grupos regionais nem de pessoas e sim a integragáo déstes numa síntese nova, em que o conteúdo espiritual se revela, na sociedade, em tragos permanentes ou variáveis, através de períodos históricos.

La ciudad de Caracas fué la primera en América que comenzó a gobernarse autonómicamente, por resolución de sus habitantes, cuando supo que las fuerzas de Napoleón Bonaparte habían conquistado España. Fué el día 19 de abril de 1810. Un mes y días más tarde, idénticas noticias produjeron iguales acontecimientos en Buenos Aires. Fué el día 22 de mayo de 1810. En Buenos Aires no se conocieron los sucesos de Caracas hasta largo tiempo después. En Caracas pasaron meses hasta tener nuevas de lo ocurrido en Buenos Aires. No obstante, en ambas ciudades se produjeron hechos no sólo comparables, sino perfectamente iguales. En otros tiempos, una crítica histórica, hoy por completo inaceptable, suponía que había habido entendimientos secretos entre los organizadores de las dos “revoluciones”.

La América Latina no sólo ha sido un laboratorio bullente en que se han producido los más complejos procesos de la sociedad humana en forma perceptible, sino que ha sido asimismo un “Continente con contenido” — como se ha dicho felizmente — en que la teoría sociológica se ha formulado, en un primer momento, en forma espontánea y tácita. En ella el estrato más profundo del alma se ha manifestado no por la razón abstracta sino a través de intuiciones, de sentimientos y de enunciación de realidades e ideales, expresados verbigracia en la novela sociológica o en el doctrinal político. A virtud de un dilatado proceso secular nuestra América ha llegado a su madurez, y el ingente drama que ha vivido y vivenciado ha contribuido a desarrollar su genio creador. El dolor es espuela de la razón.

En el capítulo vii de Letras y hombres de Venezuela escribe Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a propósito del poeta Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde:

En efecto, no fué la familia del magistral traductor de Heine y de Poe ni la primera ni la última en hallar santuario en nuestra tierra. Ya desde 1821, cuando personas principales pertenecientes a la aristocracia temieron al nuevo régimen que siguió a la guerra de la Independencia, alejáronse de Venezuela y se establecieron en Puerto Rico. Entre ellas estaba la que habría de ser madre del poeta, José Gualberto Padilla, El Caribe.

One hundred years ago Alexander von Humboldt died at the age of 90, loaded with honors earned by his breadth and brilliance as an explorer, a scientist, a writer, and a liberal thinker about certain aspects of human relations. But it was 55 years before, in 1804, that he returned from his famed five-year “Voyage to the Equinoxial Regions of the New Continent”. In the last 155 years many changes have taken place in Latin America as a whole and in those parts of it which he visited. This paper will mention a few of them which pose problems for presentday students of human affairs in the area, and will also offer a small selection of facts that seem to bear on these problems.

Humboldt represented an era of ambidextrous or multidextrous natural scientists who visited Latin America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and who were able to collect reliable data and to make more than casual travellers’ observations on a broad range of phenomena that are now divided among a series of more or less mutually-exclusive disciplines. Despite the breadth of his interests, however, Humboldt added little to the systematic store of knowledge concerning the ethnography or ethnology of the living native peoples of the regions through which he travelled.

British curiosity about Spanish possessions in the New World was manifested as early as 1516, when a certain Thomas Pert, in the company of Sebastian Cabot, is said to have penetrated the South American seas, and to have made a half-hearted attempt at a landing at the island of Hispaniola.

There were instances of English sailors in the service of Spain who accompanied some of the very earliest South American expeditions. One is said to have been with Pizarro, and three—John Rutter of London, Nicholas Coleman of Hampton, and Richard Limon of Plymouth—were members of Pedro Mendoza's crew in 1534, when he sailed to the mouth of the Río de la Plata.

It is not easy to distinguish between cultural, economic and political causes of the War of Independence in Spanish America and separate them into three closed compartments. Then there are psychological obstacles. There is a feeling among many Latin Americanists that this topic is exhausted and further research will add nothing new. Others want a complete revision of the usual causes cited and demand more documentary study. They believe that the standard causes are based on too scanty research, mostly done in the last century from incomplete sources. Furthermore, there are the rising nationalists and indigenistas of our century, most of them poor historians, who insist that the role of the Indians and mestizos was much more important than historians have accepted. They consider past historians racially and economically prejudiced. Such a trend is especially strong in Mexico, Bolivia, and Cuba, the three countries that have faced a real social revolution. And, unfortunately, history often follows the flag.

A partir del siglo XIX han sido frecuentemente citados los nombres de viajeros franceses, ingleses o alemanes, muy característicos, muy sugestivos, llenos de encanto y de versación las más veces, imaginativos algunos, simplones otros, avisados o ingenuos, pulcros o descuidados, en una vasta gama que va desde las calidades superiores del investigador científico o el trazo ágil del escritor de estirpe hasta la pluma inexperta de aventurero o del profano en los menesteres espirituales. Pero poco se había reparado en la existencia de un importante y numeroso conjunto de viajeros norteamericanos que escribieron también impresiones jugosas o aportaron un caudal valioso en el conocimiento de la naturaleza o el hombre de la América Meridional o para el mejor entendimiento o intercambio entre los pueblos del norte y el sur del Continente.

La cuestión colonial fué comprendida por muy pocos políticos españoles del siglo XIX. Pi y Margall fué uno de ellos, si bien cuando llegó al poder no hizo nada. Prim fué otro. Según uno de sus biógrafos, “pensó en conceder la autonomía para después llegar a la independencia, y, cuando pensaba ya en triunfar, librado a nuestro país del cáncer que le consumía … aconteció el vil asesinato de que fué víctima.”1 El tercero fué Rafael María de Labra (1840-1918), a quien nadie excedió en señalar los vicios y pecados de la colonización española.

Verdaderamente sorprende hoy el olvido en que se tiene a un hombre que dedicó lo mejor de su vida a la defensa de los intereses antillanos. Porque América — hay que decirlo — fué su obsesión, no sólo durante los días de la colonia sino después, cuando ya perdidos los últimos restos del imperio español se dedicó a cultivar la intimidad americana y a fomentar la unión espiritual de España con las repúblicas hispanoamericanas.

I was invited to prepare an interpretative essay on this subject. That, and nothing more, is what this paper aspires to be. It is not a monograph and any resemblance it may bear to historiography or bibliography is purely coincidental.

Any essay on economic factors in the Latin American independence movement labors under a heavy heuristic handicap. The difficulty begins with the paucity of basic economic studies of the period. This deficiency was noted by Charles Griffin ten years ago in a related paper; little progress towards filling the gap has been made since.

In so far as it is possible to identify and evaluate the economic factors in the independence movement, they appear less important than the political and perhaps other factors. This is almost certainly so if the question is one of conscious motivation, and probably so whatever the terms of the question.

This is an era of explorations into space. Of Sputniks and Explorers. Of photographic cameras behind the Moon.

Other explorers of space, perhaps more dauntless though less spectacular, have developed the theory of perpetual creation of matter, through the continuous emergence of hydrogen atoms out of nothing, and have described the flight of the galaxies, horrified of each other, away into space.

Several other spaces are being explored. One of them, of more immediate concern, is the economy — the real nature of the economy in a contemporary society. The nature of the economy is usually covered, like the ground in autumn by dead leaves, by the dead words that were fresh and adequate at a previous season.

A striking feature of Spanish-American colonial rule is the contrasting loyalty of cabildos to Hapsburg rulers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their restiveness and finally their role in fomenting the emancipation movements against Bourbon kings. The following article will attempt to explain the shift in cabildo attitudes.

Difficulties are at the outset encountered by the fact that, on the surface, there were at least two factors which might have been expected to lessen, rather than to nourish, the loyalty of local chambers to Hapsburg rulers. First, there was the indifference and apathy of council members in attending to the official business with which cabildos were theoretically concerned. This attitude suggests that councilmen realized they were, in spite of certain guarantees and legal prescriptions, a relatively impotent agency on the actual level of day-by-day administration.

Juan Donoso Cortés, the Marqués de Valdegamas, died in Paris on May 3, 1853. For four and a half years he had been recognized as one of the most controversial and best-known critics of the European revolutionary movement, as a defender of the Catholic Church against Liberal and revolutionary criticism, and as one of the most able parliamentary orators and diplomats of the time. A few years after his death his name was all but forgotten. A hundred years later, in 1953, there was an extensive revival of interest in his work in Western Europe, and the lectures given about him and the books and articles published in Spain, especially, form an impressive bibliography. Though in his day he was regarded by many as a Cassandra, Europeans immersed in crisis in the twentieth century have not been so certain that he was no prophet.