16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Latin America after the Cuban Revolution had transformed that country's land reform into its most important redistribudve target. In 1961, at the Punta del Este Conference, the US was charged with ensuring its legality. While violently condemning the expropriation process which was taking pi ice in Cuba, affecting big sugar plantations wliich belonged to American firms, the US, in that Conference., offered the Latin American states considerable amounts of capital through the Alliance for Progress, provided that every one of them would approe the necessary laws to ensure that in a ten-year term land reforms would be enacted that would contribute to solving the problem of at least half of the landless peasants of the continent. The main argument of the American delegation's document supporting this radical measure was that the persistence and worsening of the existing structure of landownership would only lead to social explosions similar to those which had developed in Cuba. As an almost incredible consequence, land reform laws were approved by many Latin American Parliaments after being initiated and supported by extremely conservative governments. This could never have happened had not the Cuban Re volution occurred. The('Strategy and its Failure Another response on the part of the former colonial powers was the publication in 1951 of the report of the Committee on Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries, This was the starting point for a wave of publications related to the problems of development of the Third World in which the rural sector had a decisive and basic importance. Everything seemed so clear and obvious. But the poor countries were bound to suffer from the effects of another illusion which would aggravate the main consequences of their backwardness. The development strategy which prevailed during the two decades which followed the publication of the UN report was based on a model in which the problem of poverty could be solved through high rates of growth. The main target in the first stage of development was the creation of conditions necessary to achieve these high rates of growth; when these targets had been achieved, a redistribution of income could take place. This understanding was based on the principle that only when a country is able to produce a higher quantity of material goods and services is it possible to redistribute them so as to improve the conditions for the majority.1 A global appraisal of the defects of the widespread application of this strategy brings out its failure. Many papers and books have been published which establish that despite aid for development, the developing countries have now reached a critical point that is perhaps worse than that at which they started. Population control has not diminished poverty even in those countries where it has been applied ^corre-ctly', the green revolution has achieved technological miracles, but even