There were two Latin American 60s. The first started in Cuba in 1959; for ten years Cuba became the pacemaker of both revolutionary literature and politics on the continent. In Words for the North Americans, in 1963, Carlos Fuentes wrote, South of your border, my North American friends, lies a continent in revolutionary ferment-a continent that possesses immense wealth and nevertheless lives in a misery and a desolation that you have never known and barely imagine. For Sartre, the Cuban revolution was la revolution qui n'enmerde pas, a revolution to a samba rhythm. Susan Sontag wrote an introduction to a book on Cuban posters, Che Guevara spoke of a society powered by non-material incentives in his Profile of Man and Socialism in Cuba; Regis Debray raised the experience of the Cuban guerrilla movement that toppled Batista to the level of a generally applicable theory-' 'foquismo, that depended on a militant vanguard sparking of the latent revolutionary potential of the peasantry. In the first rural guerrilla movements in the early 60s, poets like Otto Rene Castillo of Guatemala and Javier Herrero of Peru were martyrs. Cuba became a cultural center which attracted the best young writers of the continent. Novels like The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, The Time of the Heroes by Mario Vargas Llosa, Hopscotch by Julio C6rtazar spoke directly to an iconoclastic youth for whom social change was a matter of urgency and for whom the violence of the past, dramatically described in Eduardo Galeano's The Open Veins of Latin America, was an evil that only immediate action could overcome. All the while, however, another revolution was going on-the silent revolution of multinational corporations and their allies-the conservative and the miitary. The death of Che Guevara in 1967, the imprisonment of Regis Debray, the military coup in Brazil which brought the first news of tortured priests to the notice of the world came like a cold shock. 1968 was the crisis point for both revolutions. The Cuban-inspired rural guerrilla movements faded out after the death of Che Guevara and gave way to the spectacular urban guerrilla movements of Marighela in Brazil, the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the Montoneros in Argentina. Against these, a war to the death would be unleashed. Meanwhile the U.S. (and the CIA in particular) had launched their own effort to influence the cultural allegiances of Latin American writers. There was direct subsidizing of books favorable to the North American image; and revelations of CIA involvement in literary publications such as Mundo