Between the Pen and the Rifle

No period in Latin American history has been as thoroughly studied as the 1960s. Amid this proliferation of texts, Claudia Gilman's Between the Pen and the Rifle stands out as a singular work: comprehensive yet exhaustive, intelligent yet entertaining, and as accessible as it is sophisticated. The author dissects the "fourteen prodigious years" between the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the fall of Salvador Allende's government in 1973. Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, and Montevideo, the nerve centers of the period, are the axes around which the central debates revolve. Gilman analyzes the functioning of the cultural market, the connections between literary genres and social transformations, and, especially, the vicissitudes of magazines such as Marcha, Mundo Nuevo, Casa de las Américas, and Libre, which reflect different facets of literary and cultural life. It is the survival of the "critical ideal" (against the subordination of truth to politics) that allows the author to narrate history and unfold it before our eyes in order to construct a genealogy of the specificity of critical independence and the affirmation of intellectual autonomy in Latin America.