One of the topics most discussed in the essays by Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906–2001) is the significance and singularity of Latin America. In this written transcription of one of his lectures, he emphasizes the essentially mestizo nature of Latin American culture and how, despite the fact that it forms part of Western civilization, that culture has developed its own artistic, literary, and sociopolitical discourse due to specific spatial and temporal conditions. One of the ideas, although not new, that Uslar Pietri approaches in an original manner is that the origin of utopian European thought lies in one of the letters from Columbus to the Catholic Kings in which he asserts that the Indians lived in a state of happiness and knew no evil. That, Uslar Pietri argues, is just another of the Europeans’ mythical projections about a continent they failed to understand. Indeed, such thinking dates back to the ancient Greeks, who idealized Atlantis, to say nothing of other myths from the Golden Age. Another of Uslar Pietri’s polemic theses is the notion that caudillism is the region’s only original contribution to the world. He reaffirms the importance of the discovery of America for the development of Western civilization (it brought, among other things, the potato, precious metals, and Utopia). This text indisputably attests to the fact that Uslar Pietri was an intellectual with great mastery of public speaking, one capable of captivating the educated audience. It also demonstrates some of his ideological positions, which were highly contested by the left in the sixties and seventies, positions that have only come to be accepted owing to democratic tolerance. The author’s support of a neo-academic conception of mestizaje of the sort proposed by artist Pedro Centeno Vallenilla illustrates in no uncertain terms that this defense of such polar artistic ideals in no way contradicted his notion of a Latin America that, although rooted in the West, has characteristics of mestizaje due to the intersection of three cultures, instead of three races.