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

by Patrick Iber

  Outside the Soviet bloc, supporters of the WPC found in it a vehicle for expressing discontent with imperialism, the growing influence of the United States, and the fear of renewed war. “Independence” was not a virtue within the Communist movement, and they did not seek it, choosing instead to conceal uncomfortable truths about the Soviet Union. But they were also on their own in important ways (including financially), trying to inject creativity into a bureaucratic ideology. To its detractors, however, the WPC movement also became understood as part of the threatening logic of Soviet treachery, masking aggression behind noble rhetoric. Politics in places aligned with the United States, including Western Europe but especially Latin America, were increasingly redefined to exclude Communism from legitimate participation in the democratic process. Thus meetings associated with the WPC were shut down, conferees were denied visas to travel, and anti-Communist organizing sought to unmask the pro-Soviet nature of WPC events. The anti-Communist side’s major theme of the Cold War would be the defense of cultural freedom, but anti-Communists sought to deny it to Soviet-aligned WPC activists. Within the Soviet bloc, the WPC was an accessory to repression; in the zones allied with the United States, it became an excuse for the same. For Latin America, its suppression was a signal of the new Cold War order, in which “democracy” was reconstructed to include the rejection of Communism, even at the price of curtailing political and cultural liberties. In Latin America, Communist-inspired art acquired a dual character: it was simultaneously an unconscionable apology for terror and a symbol of resistance to injustice.

  The polarization of culture and politics in the Cold War era rent a shared idea of social democracy developed over the course of World War II. As the war drew to a close, international political organizations remade themselves with an unprecedented degree of unity. Since the war had pushed Communism within the boundaries of acceptable partners, many organizations that had been divided on ideological lines re-formed themselves with Communist participation but without Communist dominance. The Women’s International Democratic Federation, for example, met in Paris in late 1945 to establish a progressive women’s organization with significant Communist involvement; the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) did the same to create, for the first time, a global labor federation that included both Communist and non-Communist centrals, like the Congress of Industrial Organizations of the United States and the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM) of Mexico, as well as major British, French, and Soviet centrals. One worker who saw its creation described it as “the supreme achievement of all trade-union history.”7

  For the countries of Latin America, the end of the war brought new force to movements for democratic change. A “Latin American spring” saw the fall of entrenched leaders and the loosening of repression of the Left. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas, in power since 1930, was forced to step down to allow elections in 1945. In Guatemala in 1944, protests led to the fall of a brutal fourteen-year dictatorship and the eventual election of a teacher, Juan José Arévalo, to the presidency. Arévalo talked about democracy and social justice and began to expand civil, political, and economic rights to a broader swath of Guatemalans. Latin America’s new leaders were not Communists; indeed, Arévalo thought that Communism was “contrary to human nature,” but there was a real sense that dictatorships that protected the interests of the privileged had to fall and would be substituted by a “social” democracy of expanded rights and justice. Chile continued to elect the Popular Front government it had had since the 1930s, including members of the Socialist, Communist, and Radical Parties. A military coup in Venezuela in 1945 put in place a progressive junta led by Rómulo Betancourt, who made suffrage universal and increased the share of oil revenue that foreign companies had to keep in Venezuela. Two years later, in 1947, Betancourt’s former teacher, the novelist Rómulo Gallegos, was elected president in a free and fair election. Even some states that organized power in authoritarian ways, like Juan Perón’s Argentina, offered the poor new avenues for political participation through mobilized labor movements and an expanded welfare state. Most of the countries in the region were making tangible progress toward more politically inclusive societies; internationally, too, diplomats and lawyers from Latin America helped craft the new multilateral institutions that intended to safeguard the peace. The Chilean socialist Hernán Santa Cruz, for example, played a major role in writing the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.8

  Hopes for the extension of wartime unity into the postwar period animated much of the effort to remake the world’s institutions, but they did not last. There were signs of mistrust: changes in tone from Communists and anti-Communists as early as 1944 suggested that they would revert to old patterns of hostility when the opportunity arose. In late 1945 George Orwell wrote of the possibility of a permanent state of atomic “cold war.” Although neither the United States nor the Soviet Union sought new conflict with the other power, they did not trust each other and had incompatible interests in Europe. Stalin hoped to avoid provoking his former allies, urging caution on his subordinate partners in the Communist world. But he also believed that he needed sympathetic Eastern European buffer states to ensure Soviet safety. Policy makers in the Truman administration, by contrast, thought that they needed a non-Communist Western Europe in order to maintain traditional American freedoms, including access to markets on which those freedoms were thought to depend. Thus the pas de deux that produced the Cold War began in earnest: each speech, memorandum, and decision seemed only to increase tensions. In 1947 Truman and Secretary of State George C. Marshall formulated plans to contain Communist expansion in Western Europe, Greece, and Turkey through economic and military aid. Stalin viewed these actions as an American attempt to control Western Europe and revive the German economy, and intensified the USSR’s consolidation of its control over Eastern Europe. In September the USSR reanimated the defunct Comintern, now calling it the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). In the minds of the leaders of the two great powers, the world was now divided into two blocs. The Soviets saw themselves as socialist and their opponents as imperialist; the Americans saw themselves as democratic and their opponents as totalitarian.9

  For the United States, preventing Communist gains among friendly states was considered a priority of national security. The CIA, also created in 1947, began working to influence the outcomes of elections throughout the world. Money was sent to Italy’s Christian Democrats during the elections of 1948, which the United States feared would be won by Communists. In 1949 the CIA partnered with established anti-Communists in the U.S. labor movement like Jay Lovestone, who had been the leader of the Communist Party of the United States in the 1920s but had grown into a dedicated anti-Communist. Lovestone, who had operated the anti-Communist Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) since 1936, saw it incorporated into the official foreign policy establishment of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1944. Lovestone and his compatriot, the bruising Europe-based organizer Irving Brown, ran the FTUC as a kind of anti-Communist labor international. In early 1949 money began to flow from the CIA through the FTUC to anti-Communist labor unions in Europe. Although Lovestone and Brown resented the CIA’s influence—they described the CIA as “Fizzland” and its employees as jejune and insubstantial “Fizz Kids,” the money was useful. In their correspondence they described the funds as stereotypical national products: the Italians received “spaghetti”—so much spaghetti that Lovestone once noted that “our Italian friends have been overfed … If they keep on with their present high caloric diet they will get acute indigestion.” The French received “perfume,” the Finns “lumber,” the Germans “sausages,” and the Turks “halavah.”10

  Hardly more than half a decade after the end of World War II, the Cold War was firmly established, and the terrain had become nearly unrecognizable. Social democratic but anti-Communist unions across Europe and Latin America split from their Communist counterparts. They joined together in 1949 to form the International Confeder
ation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), in which the AFL participated. The WFTU was left with the Communist rump and became the Soviet-supported and Communist-dominated organization that it had not been at its creation.

  These transformations took place all across the world, not simply in Western Europe. Indeed, Latin America was, as it often would be, a kind of laboratory for the creation of institutional arrangements dominated by the influence of the United States. The United States saw an anti-Communist Latin America as essential to its security, just as an antifascist one had been a few years earlier. Within U.S. diplomatic circles there were different views about how to achieve those ends: some liberals favored supporting like-minded democracies, others any kind of strong anti-Communist government, regardless of its democratic credentials. Most often, both strategies were pursued simultaneously. In any case, mutual security agreements in 1947 and 1948 placed Latin America securely within the United States’ geopolitical backyard. The Soviet Union was distant and uninterested in challenging the United States on such unfavorable ground. The CIA formed relationships with security apparatuses to share information about Communist activities throughout the hemisphere, making the United States strategically dependent on what were frequently among the most repressive elements of national governments. The postwar democratic spring in the region soon withered under conditions of the Cold War. In Colombia a popular, antioligarchic leader was assassinated in 1948, an act that led to riots and intensified civil violence that would last for years. In Venezuela the novelist Gallegos was overthrown in 1948, beginning a decade of dictatorship. Even among states that did not suffer military coups, like Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, there were moves to curtail the civil and political rights of Communists specifically and the Left more broadly.11

  The unions split apart just as surely as they had elsewhere. The anti-Communist unions, with some support from the AFL and the United States, formed their own federation in 1948. “Above all,” wrote Serafino Romualdi, the AFL’s primary organizer for Latin America, “[I fought] to assist in the development of a new type of Latin American labor leader who would reject the stale concept of class struggle in favor of constructive labor-management relations in a democratic, pluralistic society.” The organization he helped foster took Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT) as its permanent name and became the Latin American affiliate of the global ICFTU. Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s CTAL became the WFTU’s Latin American affiliate, to rival ORIT there as the ICFTU rivaled the WFTU around the world. Because the CTAL’s support from the then-conservative government of Mexico had been curtailed, it was funded largely through the WFTU and, through it, by the Soviet Union. Lombardo Toledano was expelled from the CTM, the Mexican union federation, in 1948, and the central was dominated by the anti-Communist leadership known as the “five little wolves.” Mexico’s CTM left the CTAL and joined the ICFTU in 1953. Over the next decades the CTM would be suffused with corruption and support the most authoritarian aspects of Mexico’s government; it had indeed abandoned the idea of class struggle, but not in favor of democracy or pluralism. The dominant idea of democracy in Latin America was, by 1948, less capacious and had less social content than the one so many had hoped for just a few years earlier.12

  The euphoria of victory over the Axis powers had been replaced in a few short years by the uneasy quasi-peace of the Cold War. But that the idea of “peace” became associated with the politics of the Soviet Union in the West was a logical outcome of its position at the end of the war. The United States had the world’s only atomic weapons and had used them against civilians in Japan. Pro-Soviet groups in the West immediately took up the cause of peace, understanding that if a new conflict were to occur, it would pit against each other the countries that emerged from World War II as the strongest states in the world. For the Soviet Union, the peace cause was a way to transfer the moral authority of antifascism into the postwar period, in which it stood at a military disadvantage against the United States. As in the 1930s, the campaign brought together outreach to progressive intellectuals in the West and ferocious repression at home.

  In the years after World War II, Stalin realized that his authority within the Soviet Union could not be based indefinitely on war mobilization. Ironically, that realization called for a repressive turn, including one in the world of culture. Even before the Soviet Union sought political control of the Communist world through the Cominform, Stalin had sought to increase state power over cultural production. He empowered Andrei Zhdanov to enact a cultural program that celebrated Russian nationalism and eschewed experimental, “formalist” art. The war had been a time of relative freedom for artists—once-forbidden darker themes, for example, although not as optimistic as socialist realism would normally demand, could be engaged since their inspiration could at least be blamed on Nazis. But after the war Stalin and Zhdanov again decreed that works of art must display only the “best aspirations of Soviet man.” Socialist realism returned, printers and libraries were brought to heel, and artists who failed to conform to the new consensus invited both artistic and physical punishment.13

  At almost the same time, Stalin and Zhdanov launched a campaign against what they called “cosmopolitanism” to deal with the potential danger of those whose experiences in wartime had given them the opportunity to see parts of the world outside Soviet control. The critique of cosmopolitanism excoriated those who had been contaminated by “Western” values and the contagion of capitalist greed, including even soldiers returning from the front and those who had been imprisoned by the Nazis. It condemned rootless, anational capitalism and fell especially hard on Soviet Jews, viewed in anti-Semitic frames as lacking connection to Soviet soil. When the Jewish name of a prominent figure was placed in brackets next to his Russian pseudonym in the press, he was marked for replacement; Jewish cultural organizations that had been mobilized during the war were repressed. Anti-Semitism, traditionally widespread among the Russian peasantry and alternately criticized and exploited by the Soviet leadership, was stoked by state action until the time of Stalin’s death in 1953.14

  But although anticosmopolitanism in the Soviet Union targeted Jews, the term was adaptable. Internationally it was taken up by European Communists to express opposition to the growing influence of American material culture that accompanied the reconstruction of Western Europe. In their words, cosmopolitanism became the “predatory weapon of U.S. imperialism,” embedded in an American culture dominated by violent comics, films, and pornography. Americans, obsessed with standardization, accepted cultural barbarism in material life, for example, clothes, cars, and refrigerators that undermined traditional ways of living, and in mental cultures, for example, “best sellers” and “idiotic” films that failed in a multitude of ways to uplift the masses. As the writer Ilya Ehrenburg put it, America was not a society; it was a “herd of milling millions.” Inverting the traditional critique of totalitarianism, Ehrenburg argued that although Americans complained that Communism destroyed the individual, it was the United States that dazzled its citizens out of their individuality, including their ability to produce works of art.15

  The second aspect of the European Communists’ critique of “cosmopolitanism” indicted it for attempting to spread its bourgeois, American values to other countries. The ideology of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, it was argued, denied the very existence of national sovereignty, including in the field of culture. “The ideology of cosmopolitanism,” wrote one French Communist in the official Cominform newspaper, “declares the concept of national sovereignty to be obsolete, preaches complete indifference to the tale of one’s own homeland, national nihilism, and declares the very concept of nation and State independence to be a fiction. Cosmopolitanism denies the patriotism of the masses of the people, patriotism which is a bar to the realization of the predatory plans of the imperialists.” By contrast, ran the argument, those who opposed this barbarous cosmopolitanism affirmed the values of patriotism, cultural sovereignty, and defense of the nat
ion against imperialism. In this manner, fears of domestic unrest, internal subversion, and the possible outbreak of another war brought into existence Soviet campaigns for peace and anticosmopolitanism at nearly the same time.16

  The first major postwar congress of international intellectuals, where both trends converged, was held in Wrocław, Poland, from 25 to 28 August 1948 and is usually seen as the opening salvo of the Cominform’s Cultural Cold War. Public organizational responsibility for the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace was held by Polish and French Communists, and, in a bid for wide influence, they sought not just Communist participation but a broadly representative section of the world’s left-wing intellectuals. Nevertheless, out of deference to the Soviet delegation, the Russian writer Alexander Fadeyev was allowed to speak early, and his heated rhetoric evaporated any hope for consensus or cooperation. Fadeyev began by paying homage to the city of Wrocław as a symbol of reconstruction after the catastrophic war with fascism but then pivoted to the United States, the head, in his words, of the “anti-democratic, reactionary, imperialist camp” of nations. From the United States issued only new warlike propaganda, in “cosmopolitan” garb, which he faulted for championing racism and failing to produce any progressive literature. “Numerous American writers belong to this variegated literary agency of imperialistic reaction,” he said, “[Eugene] O’Neill, the playwright; [Henry] Miller, author of pornographic novels; [John] Dos Passos, the renegade. The inspiration to this spiritual demoralization comes from a ‘newly revealed’ philosophy of the Sartre type, that makes an animal out of man … If jackals knew how to typewrite, and hyenas could write with fountain pens, their work would surely be the same as those of Miller, Eliot, Malraux and Sartre.” The culture of imperialism, Fadeyev continued, smelled of decay, like a corpse.17