Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America

by Patrick Iber

  A careful examination of the documentary record, however, has blurred such sharply drawn images. Without question, the CIA would not have funded the CCF without the intention to advance the interests of the United States. But participation in front organizations did not mean that affiliated intellectuals were reduced to puppets on a string. The CIA did not always get the responses that it sought, even from the organizations it supposedly controlled. Multiple agendas were in play, and anti-Communists, including those on the political Left, had many reasons for their actions and their strategic alliances with the U.S. government.11

  To be sure, anti-Communists could have seen themselves as independent and uninterested in furthering U.S. hegemony and still have done so through their actions. But the Cultural Cold War needs to be understood on its own terms rather than simply as a history of state institutions and objectives. Although one should not lose sight of the ways in which both Communist and anti-Communist intellectuals could act as accessories of imperial state power, the Cultural Cold War was also a bottom-up phenomenon, not one directed solely from above. It was an integral part of the history of the Left in the twentieth century, and its protagonists included not only spy agencies but also artists, scholars, union leaders, and politicians, who tried to use the conflict as a way of advancing their agendas and visions. Their successes and failures—mostly the latter—in trying to find a path toward a humane socialism helped define and set the limits of the meaning democracy itself would have during the Cold War.12

  Making democracy meaningful was a particularly acute problem in Latin America, where the challenges of building socially just societies were enormous. In major countries like Brazil and Mexico, only about one in four was considered literate at the beginning of the twentieth century. Caste and race limited opportunities for people of indigenous and African descent, and in some places, labor relations resembling slavery persisted. Sovereignty was constrained by the incursions of foreign empires, especially the rising United States. Electoral democracy was not always part of the Left’s agenda. The struggle against injustice sometimes took the form of campaigns to end dictatorship and inaugurate electoral democracy; at other times, movements were democratic in the much wider sense of seeking a more equitable distribution of land, resources, or power in a way that would mollify oppression and undermine established hierarchies. Building politically inclusive and just societies—constructing democracies in more than name alone—proved to be the region’s central problem of the twentieth century.13

  Therefore, if the Cultural Cold War was a universal condition for engaged intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century, two major factors gave its expression in Latin America unique characteristics. One was the unbalanced and overwhelming power of the United States in the region. The other was the specter of possible social revolution—and the presence of postrevolutionary governments that also made claims on intellectuals’ work and authority. Three countries—Mexico in 1920, Cuba in 1959, and Nicaragua in 1979—experienced social revolutions that triumphed in part through force of arms, while Chile elected a Marxist in 1970. Beyond them, imminent revolution seemed a real possibility to many across the region, both those who hoped for it and those who feared it.

  The problem that intellectuals from the region would face in their relationships with revolutionary states was therefore an intimate rather than an abstract one. Artists and intellectuals had the capacity to inspire, to strategize, to portray the injustices of the present, and, perhaps above all, to symbolize the struggle for justice. “I arrived at the revolution by way of poetry,” wrote the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton to a friend; “You can arrive … at poetry by way of revolution.” Many committed important parts of their lives to bring it about. Gabriel García Márquez was undoubtedly exaggerating when he quipped that “in the history of power in Latin America, there are only military dictatorships or intellectuals.” But the point that followed was important: “No wonder then … that there was so much coddling of the intellectuals by the State. Under these circumstances, one cannot always be completely independent.”14

  Complete independence from the state was not really the norm for intellectual life anywhere, but different social and economic arrangements tied up with state power did lead to different possibilities for sustaining intellectual work in Latin America. The category “Latin America” itself is not especially coherent historically, and the category “Latin American intellectual” is even less so. But the most influential interpretation of secular intellectual life in Latin America has drawn attention to the literate minorities that implemented bureaucracy and law in the colonial empires, creating what Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama described as “lettered cities,” islands of symbolic expertise surrounded by seas of illiteracy. Intellectuals had plentiful opportunities for contact with political power; since there were relatively few universities that could give steady employment to them, they were sometimes sustained by diplomatic posts, valued by their governments at home for the aura of cultural achievement that they could convey. At the end of the nineteenth century, the intellectuals who were closest to state power were interested in economic modernization, influenced by local and global trends from positivism and socialism to liberalism and nationalism, and by no means opposed to authoritarian political methods.15 But when the word “intellectual” came into use in fin de siècle France, describing a person of formal learning who stepped into the public sphere to act as a voice of moral conscience against injustice and as a champion of the oppressed, it was a concept that was immediately intelligible across the Atlantic. The term was in use in Latin America within two years.16

  In the twentieth century, revolution and the possibility of revolutions carved out new roles for intellectuals to play. Creating meaningful democracy and social inclusion would require making it possible for more people to participate in governing their own lives, and that meant expanding access to education and literacy. Exposure to art—from poetry to cinema—was considered not a luxury but a sign of a more inclusive and just social order. Mexico’s postrevolutionary state, for example, sponsored the production of murals on public buildings, and one of the first acts of Cuba’s revolutionary government was to establish an institute for cinema that both produced new movies and sent mobile trucks around the country to show films to the poor. Expanding adult literacy came to be seen as an essential precondition of greater social equality, and the enjoyment of culture as a sign of the flourishing of human life freed from oppression.

  But if bringing culture to the poor seemed an essential step, basic literacy could not be taught in a vacuum. Citizens had to be shaped into revolutionary subjects; they needed not only education but training, and for that, propaganda was necessary. This propaganda would have to be created or commissioned not by some abstract revolution but by agencies of the governments that claimed to represent the history, the heroes, the legacy, and the future of the nation. Postrevolutionary situations inevitably provoked debates about the responsibility of intellectuals to harmonize with the messages of the state in its efforts to create new forms of consciousness among the people. Training was not just for the poor: both Mexico and Cuba established publishing houses to subsidize the production of books for elite as well as mass audiences. But what could be done if the state grew repressive in the people’s name? The true importance of debates about the responsibility of intellectuals did not lie in what they had to say regarding a small group of generally privileged artists and writers. These debates mattered because they were also contests over the rights all people should have in revolutionary times, and in particular, whether they should have the right to object and dissent to the course of political change. When people lost that right, banished, jailed, and silenced intellectuals were some of the most powerful symbols of its absence. Latin America’s Cultural Cold War overlapped with and was part of global currents, but it had a special urgency because it involved not just abstract questions of revolutionary solidarity but day-to-day problems of affiliati
on, support, and dissent.17

  In the years after its military victory in 1959, the Cuban Revolution thoroughly changed the landscape of Latin America’s Cultural Cold War. Many who hoped for revolutionary change found the Soviet Union eclipsed in their minds by the more proximate star of a Latin American country that had defied the United States. Through its international cultural institution known as Casa de las Américas, the Cuban Revolution promoted a more militarized and hard-edged version of Communism than even the Soviet Union had offered. Unlike the rest of the world, Latin America’s Cultural Cold War had three international players: the Soviet Union, the United States, and Cuba, which was a small country with the foreign policy ambitions of a much larger one. Many of those who took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s to spread the revolution on the model of the one in Cuba were students and professors who were inspired by the life and death of Che Guevara. “The most sacred thing in the world [is] the title of writer,” wrote Che. Trained as a doctor, Guevara disavowed the status of an intellectual for himself but made journeys, even up to his death, with a rucksack full of books and ammunition. To his many admirers, he represented the unity of thought and action, but even among those skeptical of his methods it was a widely shared assumption of Latin America’s 1960s that studying society could contribute to changing it.18

  The other major difference between the Cultural Cold War of the North Atlantic and that of Latin America was the overwhelming power of the United States in the region. Western Europe, which was understood as the first battleground of the Cultural Cold War, also lived under U.S. hegemony in the era after World War II. But if Western Europe was part of a U.S. empire, U.S. imperialism there took a milder form that preserved a good measure of national sovereignty and allowed European states to construct stronger welfare institutions even than those of the United States. Latin America, by contract, contended with a harsher form of U.S. empire. Latin America, it has been argued, has frequently served as a kind of laboratory for the United States to experiment with forms of power that it later deployed elsewhere. When the United States defeated Spain in 1898, taking possession of Puerto Rico and the Philippines and de facto control of Cuba, it was a rising power but not yet a world empire. But it was in Latin America that various imperial strategies would be tried. Especially in the Caribbean (as well as the Philippines), the United States used military intervention and occupation to ensure that debts were paid and that its political and security interests were met. Often these interventions were carried out in the name of democracy and with the logic of a developmentalist liberalism, undergirded by the assumption that the path to modernity for all nations would resemble that of the United States: a market economy and a capitalist democracy. Yet however committed to democracy U.S. occupations were in the abstract, they generally left dictatorships friendly to U.S. business interests in their wake. After he retired, the marine major general who oversaw or participated in many of the occupations of the first decades of the twentieth century confessed, “I was a racketeer for capitalism.”19

  Among the techniques that the United States pioneered in Latin America was cultural diplomacy. As early as the 1920s, the United States began the long process of institutionalizing the work of missionaries and foundations that operated in the region. Rhetorically, the United States employed the idea of Pan-Americanism: the idea that the nations of the Western Hemisphere had a common history and rejected “foreign” doctrines. But the imperial role that the United States played in the region was the very fact that Nazi propaganda came to emphasize as Germany sought to extend its influence in Latin America in the 1930s. Thus, as in many imperial ventures, a light commitment by the United States was pushed ever deeper by the encroachment of a rival. In response to the growing threat of Nazi propaganda, the United States created increasingly formal peacetime programs of cultural diplomacy. The “diplomacy of ideas” coincided with the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and his Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America that promised an end to military occupations; in that context, increased efforts at cultural diplomacy were part of a strategy for pursuing mutually beneficial exchange without incurring the costs of formal empire.20

  At the end of World War II, the terms of the conflict changed. With atomic weapons, the destructive potential of open conflict proved too great for either the United States or the USSR to bear. Instead, the Cold War would be a conflict suffered most directly by people living outside the nations of its superpower antagonists as Cold War politics grew like strangling vines through the world’s existing political vegetation. Covert action, including that of the CIA, created in 1947, often tried to substitute for open conflict, but that did not make it peaceful. And wartime propaganda was transformed by covert action into “psychological warfare,” never again to be dismantled simply because the United States was not technically at war. Through participation in foreign exhibitions, the public efforts of the United States Information Agency, and covert CIA funding of unions, presses, newspapers, radio, films, and intellectuals, the United States tried to present a vision of itself as the global leader in the defense of freedom and democracy.21

  Although Latin America had been a testing ground for U.S. government cultural diplomacy, it was not an area of high priority in the early years of the Cold War. The region had served its purpose as a supplier of vital materials to the U.S. war machine during World War II, and the United States expected it to remain firmly in its Cold War column. The Soviet Union lacked detailed information about the region, but it could certainly read a map, and it expected the same. Instead of the economic aid from the United States that Latin American nations had hoped would follow the end of the war, they got security agreements and a treaty of hemispheric mutual defense. The United States began relying on frequently repressive secret police forces throughout the region to provide it with information about Communist threats. The nonintervention promise of the Good Neighbor Policy, for what it had been worth, fell away; intervention became the norm, most dramatically in the CIA’s simultaneously bumbling and sinister effort to oust the left-wing nationalist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. There were some “cultural” efforts as well: the United States Information Agency ran a semisecret book-publishing program and tried to produce newsreels slanted favorably to the United States. The CIA did parallel work, supporting favored newspapers and organizations like the CCF with a growing presence in the region.22

  U.S. policy toward Latin America during the Cold War aimed to stamp out Communism in the region and to maintain the prerogatives of empire. Multiple policy strands coexisted and overlapped: some sought more liberal allies to develop the region, while others thought that dictatorships would make the best partners. As formulated by President Kennedy, the dictum was “There are three possibilities in descending order of preference: a decent democratic regime, a continuation of [dictatorship] or a [leftist] Castro regime. We ought to aim at the first, but we really can’t renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid the third.” But even when U.S. policies were nominally committed to producing liberal outcomes and political democracy, their outcomes could still be illiberal. For that reason, the history of Latin America has often played an important role as a corrective to more triumphal accounts of U.S. victory in the Cold War, where it can serve either as a reminder of the mournfully high cost of a just victory or as evidence to support the argument that, as dreadful as the politics of the Soviet Union were, justice was not the point of the struggle at all. The historian John Coatsworth has calculated that between 1960 and 1990 anti-Communist Latin America was more repressive than the Soviet bloc when measured by the numbers of political prisoners, victims of torture, and executions of political dissenters. Although U.S. policies were not always the proximate cause of this violence, and the Latin American Right had its own reasons for the actions it took to suppress political opponents, the United States both aided dictatorships and helped bring them about, and the climate of paranoid anti-Communism that the United States en
couraged was a significant factor in the darkness of Latin America’s Cold War years.23

  And so the struggle for national sovereignty and anti-imperialism would almost always be a struggle with the United States, with significant consequences for the Cultural Cold War. It was not that the United States was universally disliked or unwelcome; there were many who admired its industry, its democracy, or its level of development. But among intellectuals on the left, for whom anti-imperialism was a major concern, it made anti-Communism an unpopular heritage, sometimes disavowed even by those who seemed to belong.24 It was not especially surprising that the CCF found its first allies in Latin America among the communities of Spanish exiles, for whom anti-Communism did not seem quite so tainted with imperial interests. Latin America’s Cold War was unusual because, with the United States as the imperial power, liberation and anti-Communism were often in tension, if not total conflict.

  With that background, the general shape of the Cultural Cold War in Latin America can come into relief. Like its European counterpart, it was based on the debates and practices of the political Left. At the intersection of world and regional history, Mexico City became a key node in the global debate. The combination of the Mexican Revolution, the experiences of the European Popular Front of the 1930s, and the Spanish Civil War provided the foundational experiences that produced the conditions of the Cultural Cold War, with the participation of figures ranging from the Mexican painters Diego Rivera and David Álfaro Siqueiros to European exiles like Victor Serge, Julián Gorkin, and Leon Trotsky. In the 1930s and early 1940s these figures and the groups associated with them debated the relationship of the intellectual to revolution, and especially to Communism, in ways that established the fundamental cleavage of the Cultural Cold War: the identification of anti-Communism with artistic independence from state and party.