UTOPIA UNARMED

The Latin American Left after the Cold War

Jorge G. Castaneda

Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50, 498 pp.

The three decades following Fidel Castro's triumphal entry into Havana on January 8, 1959, produced great hope and equally great frustration on the part of the Left in Latin America, with Salvador Allende's election as president of Chile and the coming to power of Nicaragua's Sandinistas as peaks, and the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia and the bloodbaths ...