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but I don’t love them,” coincides literally with Verissimo’s observation—knew the work of that Brazilian thinker but it is certain that he was familiar with Groussac’s speech, essential portions of which were reproduced in La Razon of Montevideo on 6 May 1898. Developing and embellishing the idea outlined in it, Rod6 published in 1900, at the age of twenty-nine, one of the most famous works of Latin-American literature; Ariel. North American civilization is implicitly presented there as Caliban (scarcely mentioned in the work), while Ariel would come to incarnate—or should incarnate—the best of what Rod6 did not hesitate to call more than once “our civilization” (223, 226). In his words, just as in those of Groussac, this civilization was identified not only with “our Latin America” (239) but with ancient Romania, if not with the Old World as a whole. The identification of Caliban with the United States, proposed by Groussac and popularized by Rod6, was certainly a mistake. Attacking this error from one angle, Jose Vasconcelos commented that "if the Yankees were only Caliban, they would not represent any great danger.” 18 But this is doubtless of little importance next to the relevant fact that the danger in question had clearly been pointed out. As Benedetti rightly observed, “Perhaps Rod<5 erred in naming the danger, but he did not err in his recognition of where it lay.” 19
    Sometime afterward, the French writer Jean Gu6henno—who, although surely aware of the work by the colonial Rod6, knew of course Renan’s work from memory—restated the latter’s Caliban thesis in his own Caliban parle [Caliban speaks], published in Paris in 1929. This time, however, the Renan identification of Caliban with the people is accompanied by a positive evaluation of Caliban. One must be grateful to Gu^henno’s book—and it is about the only thing for which gratitude is due—for having offered for the first time an appealing version of the character. 20 But the theme would have required the hand or the rage of a Paul Nizan to be effectively realized. 21
    Much sharper are the observations of the Argentine Anibal Ponce, in his 1935 work Humanismo burgues y humanismo proletario. The book—which a student of Che’s thinking conjectures must have exercised influence on the latter 22 —devotes the third chapter to "Ariel; or. The Agony of an Obstinate Illusion.” In commenting on The Tempest, Ponce says that "those four beings embody an entire era: Prospero is the enlightened despot who loves the Renaissance; Miranda, his progeny; Caliban, the suffering masses [Ponce will then quote Renan, but not Guehenno]; and Ariel, the genius of the air without any ties to life.” 23 Ponce points up the equivocal nature of Caliban’s presentation, one that reveals "an enormous injustice on the part of a master.” In Ariel he sees the intellectual, tied to Prospero in “less burdensome and crude a way than Caliban, but also in his service.” His analysis of die conception of the intellectual (“mixture of slave and mercenary”) coined by Renaissance humanism, a concept that “taught as nothing else could an indifference to action and an acceptance of the established order” and that even today is for the intellectual in the bourgeois world “the educational ideal of the governing classes,” constitutes one of the most penetrating essays written on the theme in our America.
    But this examination, although made by a Latin American, still took only the European world into account. For a new reading of The Tempest—for a new consideration of the problem—it was necessary to await the emergence of the colonial countries, which begins around the time of the Second World War. That abrupt presence led the busy technicians of the United Nations to invent, between 1944 and 1945, the term economically underdeveloped area in order to dress in attractive (and profoundly confusing) verbal garb what had until then been called