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

by Patrick Iber

  If the cases of Neruda, Amado, and Rivera most clearly show the dilemmas of the artist engaged with the WPC, it is the Argentine writer María Rosa Oliver, one of the most prominent Latin American participants in the WPC, whose history best illustrates how the issue of peace strained the wartime Popular Front to its breaking point. Born in 1898 in Buenos Aires, Oliver was known as a writer, a diarist, and an advocate for the rights of women and the disabled (she used a wheelchair after contracting polio at age ten). In 1931 she joined the editorial board of Victoria Ocampo’s innovative and highbrow literary magazine Sur, which gathered a group of Southern Cone intellectuals interested in political and cultural interaction with the rest of the world. Ocampo, cosmopolitan in her interests and her education (she was always more comfortable writing in French than in Spanish), translated the works of writers such as Rabindranath Tagore and Graham Greene for a Spanish reading audience and published for the first time much of the recondite work of her Argentine contemporary Jorge Luis Borges. Sur found its voice as an antifascist magazine and is generally described as liberal because of its advocacy of political freedoms. In the Cold War its antifascism easily became antitotalitarianism: it published, for example, Octavio Paz’s 1951 essay about the trials of Rousset in France and concentration camps in the Soviet Union. Sur was an isolated isle of liberalism in Latin American continental intellectual circles; Paz said that he published his essay there because no one in Mexico would consider it.31

  But some of those who had worked with the magazine, including Oliver, did not share the anti-Communist politics of its director. Oliver had briefly joined the Argentine Communist Party in 1930 but struggled with bourgeois guilt. During the era of the Spanish Civil War, there had been little cause for conflict: both Ocampo and Oliver knew that the Republic must be supported. (Ocampo used the proceeds of the publication of a work of her friend, the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, to benefit child refugees from the conflict.) Nor did Oliver face a great dilemma about what to do during World War II. She traveled to Washington, D.C., to work in Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, where Rockefeller welcomed her as a valued and effective speaker to audiences in the United States and across Latin America. Although Oliver respected Rockefeller, she sometimes chafed at the commercial logic of his bureaucracy, such as the marketing-inflected notion of “sell[ing] this idea,” which she wrote reminded her of the “glass beads that the conquistadors bartered for gold and seemed as scandalous to me as In God We Trust written on dollar bills.” Returning to Argentina after the war, she observed with displeasure the increasing bellicosity of the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and became one of Latin America’s leading activists on behalf of the peace movement. “My dear Nelson,” she wrote to Rockefeller in 1952, “I went to Washington with the belief that once the war was over and Hitler defeated, the victorious countries, united in peace as they had been in war, would bequeath to humanity a better world … not in defense of any particular political or economic system … I am [now] in complete disagreement with the international policy of the U.S. State Department and for that matter if something has changed it is not my moral line nor conduct but the moral line and conduct of U.S. foreign policy.” In a way, she was absolutely correct: by 1952 “progressive” sympathies with Communism were beyond the pale in both the United States and abroad, and the U.S. government was playing a crucial role in frustrating the aims of the peace movement across Latin America.32

  But Oliver’s position strained her friendships with the Sur group and Ocampo, whose political ideology was a kind of antipopulist aristocratic liberalism inflected by an admiration for Gandhian nonviolent resistance. Ocampo had grown impatient with Oliver’s activities on behalf of the peace movement, writing in 1951: “[My hatred of totalitarianism] has cost me some very bitter arguments with María Rosa, who each day is more sold on Communism and, to my way of thinking, more blind, confused, and on her high horse in this mistake.” In addition to organizing, Oliver traveled frequently—“(Oh mystery!), with ease” sneered Ocampo—to Europe, Asia, and the Soviet Union to meet artists, politicians, and, in later years, cosmonauts. In 1954 Ocampo wrote, “I regret that I don’t have a sufficient amount of meekness and Christian charity to not get angry when [Oliver] brings up, with a religious tone, her preferred topic: the marvels of the Communist system and how maligned the party’s leaders are, since they’re really incapable of cruelty.” Oliver offered to resign from Sur’s editorial committee in 1958 after a note in the magazine, announcing Oliver’s receipt of the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace among Peoples—a kind of alternative Nobel awarded largely for work with the WPC—parenthetically mentioned that the award had until recently been known as the Stalin Prize. “I would have been honored to receive the prize even when it was called [the] Stalin [Prize],” wrote Oliver, arguing that it responded to a “foolish, desperate desire for peace by a people that have never launched a war of invasion … [and] now needs to see itself free of danger in order to dedicate the efforts and money that go to armaments to the moral and material welfare of the people.”33

  The divisions between Oliver and Ocampo illustrate the broader alignment of the intellectual community into progressive and antitotalitarian camps. Each had changed. The antitotalitarians had gone from a persecuted minority to the center of mainstream opinion, with access to powerful allies. The progressive group, modeled on the Popular Fronts of the 1930s, was much reduced in both number and diversity, relying more on Communist support and on the party’s narratives than it had a decade and a half earlier. For a few activists like Oliver, the issue of peace and its relationship to Communism became a life’s work.

  It was difficult to find a middle ground between Cold War positions. “I’m for peace,” one of Oliver’s friends told her, “but I don’t say so, so that I’m not taken for a Communist.” Chile’s Gabriela Mistral—at the time Latin America’s only Nobel laureate in literature—wrote in 1950 of peace as the “accursed word” (la palabra maldita), likening it to the “accursed law” that forbade Communist participation in politics in Chile. Writing in favor of peace carried its own dangers, even if it was done from the point of view of an independent pacifism, as in Mistral’s case, where her lifelong attraction to a kind of folk Catholicism, among other things, prevented great sympathy for Communism. Nevertheless, she argued, Latin America was paying a cost in intimidation and self-censorship. But she complained when, a couple of years later, Communists took to printing and distributing thousands of copies of her essay on the “accursed word” as if it had been written specifically in support of the Soviet-aligned peace movement rather than as an argument against its suppression.34

  As Oliver wrote in her 1952 letter to Nelson Rockefeller, “Persecution [of the peace movement] … respond[s] to the same thing: the determination of a minority to maintain a status quo that favors only itself.” She described the poor residents of Rio de Janeiro, without basic services or hygiene, living cheek by jowl with its luxurious beaches and wondered how long such a situation could last. “Will [the residents of the favelas] go to die for ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’?” she asked. “The cold war that in the name of those two words is making already precarious conditions of life get worse day by day, makes of democracy a tyranny and leaves freedoms only [as promises] on paper.”35 There were, then, two kinds of repression associated with peace campaigning. On the one hand, its supporters repressed any critical views, and sometimes even their critical faculties, in thinking about the Soviet Union. The defense of peace also implied that fraternal allies must be defended in propagandistic art and language. Any perceived deficiencies within the movement were shared only with other members so as not to succor the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, peace activism was deemed by anti-Communist governments (as well as many labor leaders and intellectuals) to be subversion. Many governments treated political opinion such as Oliver’s as a problem of security and subjected it to a broad ran
ge of hostile policies: the second face of repression associated with peace campaigns.

  Anti-Communist governments moved to block peace organizing as soon as it appeared in Latin America, and the first that did so was Brazil. Leaders of Brazil’s Communist Party (Partido Comunista do Brasil, PCB) were released from jail in 1945, having spent the better part of a decade imprisoned for their participation in an ill-fated revolutionary uprising in 1935 against the government of Getúlio Vargas, which they considered fascist. In subsequent elections the PCB achieved a peak of 9 percent national support, sending deputies to Congress and making gains in the labor movement. But Brazil’s Superior Electoral Tribunal soon canceled the party’s registration, and the government again undertook a campaign of anti-Communist repression and also moved to restrict the actions of leftist labor unions, whether or not they included Communists. Hundreds of labor leaders were removed, and in September 1947 Brazil’s Congress voted to rescind the mandates of elected Communists, removing them from office.36

  For Brazilian Communists, peace campaigning became a way of undertaking political action when electoral politics and labor organizing were highly constrained. From 3 to 5 April 1949 the São Paulo State Congress for Peace met with the goal of establishing the peace movement in Brazil and the intent to organize a larger conference in Rio de Janeiro. Delegates sounded nationalist and anti-imperialist themes. Marxist historian Caio Prado Júnior, one of the São Paulo politicians removed from office, spoke against the North Atlantic Treaty, arguing that the United Nations already existed to keep the peace and that the treaty would pull Brazil into a capitalist war. But future activities were blocked: a police investigation concluded that peace campaigns were Communist fronts, and authorities in Rio announced that they would prohibit any attempt to meet there. There were campaigns to pressure Brazil not to send troops to the war in Korea, and criticism of the inaugural São Paulo Fine Arts Biennial in 1951 for its abstract, formalist, bourgeois art. When Getúlio Vargas returned to the presidency in 1951 by winning a fair election, Brazilian peace groups scheduled a major conference in Rio for 1952. But after first giving the impression that it might be permitted, Vargas prohibited that conference as well.37

  A poster reading “Lute pela paz” (Fight for peace) stands outside the bookstore of the Editora Brasiliense in São Paulo, 1949, advertising the Congresso Paulista pela Paz. The Brasiliense publishing house was founded by the Marxist historian Caio Prado Júnior, one of the elected delegates from the Brazilian Communist Party who was removed from office by the Supreme Electoral Court in 1948. Source: National Archives and Records Administration, attachments to Record Group 59, Decimal File 1945–1949, 800.00B/4–1849.

  The struggle was repeated in other countries in the region with similar outcomes. Argentina’s Communist Party could count on less popular support than Brazil’s and had less prestigious leadership. It had also been less than enthusiastic about the directives from Zhdanov to draw from national cultural traditions because the majority of Argentina’s Communist intellectuals were oriented toward European culture and uninterested in the literature of the rural cowboy-like gauchos associated with the national folklore. Challenged by an essay in Sur to defend socialist realism and anticosmopolitanism, their publications initially let reprints from Europeans Communists do their arguing for them because they neither wanted to deviate from the imposed line nor defend in their own words that with which they did not necessarily agree. In 1951 the official Communist publication Cuadernos de Cultura Democrática y Popular featured essays by Zhdanov and others laying out the logic of formal socialist realism. The reprint of an essay by German Communist Alfred Oelssner laid out the general interpretation that the peace movement held in the early 1950s, arguing that cosmopolitanism was the principal enemy of the national culture of all people but that “growing national consciousness and national pride is today an extraordinary obstacle to the plans for world domination of imperialism—which is today the imperialism of the United States, the continuation of German fascism.” But the publication also printed a more ambiguous essay by Argentine folk singer Atahualpa Yupanqui, who wrote that while, of course, socially conscious artists “must be entirely with the people,” much popular music as it was actually practiced could be “nativist” and yet still serve reactionary ends.38

  An Argentine Pro-Peace Council was formed in March 1949, aiming to hold a National Congress for Peace in the city of La Plata that August. But the theater where it was supposed to be held was closed, and instead of being welcomed delegates were met by police with dogs. According to the Communist newspaper in Argentina, one police officer told them, “You cannot ask for peace!” and called for his dogs to be released. More than two hundred of the twelve hundred in attendance were detained. As in Brazil, harassment in Argentina was sustained and the organizing that followed had to be carried out mostly in private. Public meetings were shut down, propaganda was seized, and prominent pro-peace activists were arrested. Alfredo Varela, for example, a Communist writer whose 1943 novel describing the conditions of plantation workers in northeastern Argentina, El río oscuro, is considered the only socialist realist novel produced in the country, was detained in 1951 and imprisoned for nearly a year.39

  In March 1952 peace activists tried to hold another international conference in neighboring Uruguay. Although Uruguay possessed a comparatively robust welfare-state democracy and laws favoring political tolerance, on the day before the start of the planned march, Montevideo’s chief of police similarly refused to allow the conference to convene. Since many of the delegates from neighboring countries had already arrived, they held an impromptu outdoor assembly on 15 March, bringing together about a thousand people in front of a makeshift stage. Although they placed a large banner bearing a white dove behind them, the speakers defensively argued that their gathering was but a simple street meeting to which no one could object. The nearly three hundred delegates felt that they had triumphed over censorship, at least in a small way, although they were ignored by all but the far-left press. But the prohibition on the conference sparked a debate in the Uruguayan government and in the media, questioning whether the cause of free speech could be served by prohibiting speech. Many in Uruguay argued that although they did not support the peace conference, they thought that prohibiting the gathering was a dangerous abridgement of democratic freedoms.40

  In Mexico, however, the peace movement did succeed in breaking out of elite circles and achieved a limited level of popular mobilization. Mexico was experiencing a trend toward conservative and authoritarian politics similar to that of most of the rest of the region, but its ruling party took a different approach toward managing its left flank, and that difference proved helpful to peace organizers. Although they were products of the same party, a great ideological distance had been traveled between the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) and that of Miguel Alemán (1946–1952), who was charting a path of capitalist growth marked by widespread official corruption. Alemán renamed the official party the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) while retaining the idea of the single party as the embodiment of the Mexican Revolution. In his time, Cárdenas had created organizations to ensure that his constituents, including laborers and peasants, shared in political power. But Cárdenas had placed those organizations within the framework of the state, and that made it relatively easy for Alemán to tame them while retaining the ability to use them to mobilize people on behalf of state priorities.

  Alemán incorporated anti-Communism into the official discourse of the PRI, and Communists with dual affiliations were expelled from the official party in 1950. With U.S. support, the Mexican government also created a new state security service that monitored and harassed the Left. But the Mexican government also relied to a great degree on co-optation to defang challenges to its rule. Vicente Lombardo Toledano, for example, the pro-Soviet labor leader who would be one of the principal peace activists in the country, sided with the government at key moments and was thus allowed
to continue organizing without significant obstacles. In 1948 he founded an independent socialist party known as the Partido Popular (PP). Unlike the traditional Mexican Communist Party, which had adopted a critical stance toward the PRI, the PP supported the Soviet Union internationally and the Mexican Revolution domestically. Lombardo Toledano’s approach was either pragmatic or opportunistic—or both. In either case, the PP’s role as the loyal opposition in a one-party democracy, free to say what it liked about Lenin or Stalin but leaving President Alemán well enough alone, seems to have been a satisfying arrangement for the PRI, which continued to provide Lombardo Toledano with subsidies that protected the president from serious criticism.41

  Therefore, when Lombardo Toledano announced his intention to hold a major international meeting of the peace movement in Mexico City, his action did not seem threatening. Where other governments prohibited peace gatherings entirely, Alemán telegraphed his displeasure by blocking the use of public buildings but allowed the meeting to go forward. Private theaters quoted the organizers excessive rental fees, virtually forcing them into the Arena México, a dilapidated sports arena that usually held boxing matches, basketball games, and labor rallies. Banners were created to cover the advertising, and papier-mâché doves hung from the ceiling, drooping a bit more with each day and looking, in the words of one hostile visitor from the U.S. embassy, “more like buzzards than doves.”42

  Nonetheless, the Continental Congress for Peace was held from 5 to 12 September 1949 and enjoyed the support of Mexican Marxists ranging from Diego Rivera and David Álfaro Siqueiros to Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Artists from the Taller de Gráfica Popular produced woodcuts on the theme of peace, including for posters and pamphlets that advertised WPC events. Lázaro Cárdenas, the former president (and not a Marxist) refrained from active participation but sent a message of approval, and honorary presidents included artists with whom the peace movement wanted to be associated, from Gabriela Mistral to Charlie Chaplain, and foreign leaders who had cooperated with Communists, including Chile’s Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista, and Henry Wallace of the United States.43