by Patrick Iber
Diego Rivera, Pesadilla de guerra, sueño de paz, 1952. Reproduced by permission. © 2015 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Yet it did not remain unthinkable forever. Amado’s WPC-supported trilogy also marked his exhaustion with such writing. Settling in Salvador in northern Brazil, Amado distanced himself from Communist political militancy in 1955 and began to write lightly comic works that still engaged issues of social inequality and won him wider audiences. He recovered an ironic sensibility that would have been impermissible during his socialist realist phase. Neruda remained in the Communist Party until his death but toned down the epic scale of his poetry in the second half of the 1950s and dropped the references to Stalin. His most Stalinophile work, Las uvas y el viento, is the only one of his works that is almost never anthologized in volumes of his collected poetry.58
One artist, however, carried unmodified convictions to the grave. Diego Rivera had been a Communist, a Trotskyist, and a hapless “spy” for the United States. By the late 1940s he was petitioning to rejoin Mexico’s Communist Party and was being consistently rebuffed. He broke with Lombardo Toledano’s Partido Popular over its accommodations to the PRI in 1949 and tried to use peace movement militancy to earn his way back into the Mexican Communist Party. In 1952 he made an artistic bid for readmittance that nearly succeeded.
Part of Anahuacalli, a building designed by Diego Rivera and Juan O’Gorman to house Rivera’s extensive collection of pre-Columbian art. Original mosaics, implemented by O’Gorman on the basis of sketches by Rivera, decorate the interior hallways and display Mesoamerican imagery mixed with symbols of the Communist and peace movements. Photo by author; reproduced by permission. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAPP, Mexico City © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In some ways, Rivera had to do little to adapt his painting to the precepts of socialist realism. Some Marxist art critics considered Rivera’s sprawling murals the epitome of visual socialist realism, even if his rounded human figures lacked the muscled forearms and rosy faces of the era’s Soviet painting. Nor was Rivera known for his subtlety. Still, he had rarely put to canvas a political message quite as directly as the one he painted in 1952’s Pesadilla de guerra, sueño de paz. The quickly executed mural, considered by almost all critics one of his worst, shows the benevolent figures of Stalin and Mao standing with a peace petition, offering a pen to figures representing the United Kingdom, France, and a gun-and-Bible-toting Uncle Sam. The mural, which was intended for an exhibition in Paris, was rejected by the Mexican government as a provocation to its allies but was celebrated in a showing by the Communist Party and the Mexican Peace Committee.59
Rivera, although he never again painted anything as didactic as Pesadilla de guerra, sueño de paz, did not stop painting pro-peace messages. In spite of this, he was not readmitted to the party until 1954, when he draped his partner Frida Kahlo’s funeral coffin with a red flag displaying the hammer and sickle. Sick with cancer in 1956, he was treated in Moscow, where he believed that atomic technology of the benevolent Soviet cobalt bomb would cure him, and where he painted an elegant and colorful scene of a pro-peace march. The treatments, however, failed, and Rivera passed away the following year. The mausoleum-gallery Anahuacalli, constructed during the last years of his life, is a lasting monument to his obsessions both with the civilizations of pre-Columbian “Mexico” and with the campaign for peace. It is perhaps a fitting object to be the largest physical embodiment of the cultural dimensions of peace campaigns in the Americas: a tomb of occasional beauty but one that, at its core, admits little light. To be a Communist intellectual in Latin America’s early 1950s was to be the victim of repression, not its perpetrator. It was to incarnate the very real injustices of capitalism and imperialism while silencing the problems of one’s own distant empire and trying to spin horror into virtue.60
CHAPTER THREE
The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Imperialism of Liberty
Valentín “El Campesino” González made his name as a Communist general in the Spanish Civil War, famous both for his innovative use of guerrilla tactics and for his brutality. But in the early 1950s the FBI was looking for him—not for his crimes, but so that he might testify before a congressional subcommittee investigating international Communism. When the Spanish Civil War had been lost, El Campesino had escaped to the Soviet Union, had grown disillusioned, had been made to do forced labor digging tunnels for the Moscow subway, and eventually had escaped a Soviet prison camp by traveling on foot to Iran. A valuable convert, he drew the attention of the anti-Communist networks of the early Cold War: anti-Communist unions, social democratic politicians, and U.S. government agencies, including the fledgling CIA. But El Campesino (The peasant) was nearly illiterate and needed a handler. Julián Gorkin became his unlikely partner.
Gorkin too had once been imprisoned: a leader of the quasi-Trotskyist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), he was accused of treason by Communist authorities during the Spanish Civil War. He served eighteen months in prison and was as lucky to escape Spain as El Campesino would be to escape the Soviet Union, eventually making his way to Mexico via New York with the help of Jay Lovestone’s anti-Communist labor network. When Gorkin arrived in Mexico in 1940, Lovestone helped him establish a tiny anti-Communist “international,” alongside his small number of friends and allies, like Victor Serge and Marceau Pivert. When Trotsky was murdered, Gorkin used his connections with the Mexican police to expose the responsibility of Stalin’s agents. He lived with Serge until Serge’s death in 1947; in 1948 Gorkin returned to Paris.1
“What a stupendous brute! In the time of the conquistadors he would have been a Pizarro,” wrote Gorkin after his first pair of days with El Campesino. During the Spanish Civil War the Communist El Campesino might have jailed, or even killed, the POUMista Gorkin if he had had the chance. But by 1949 they were both convinced anti-Communists and needed each other. Gorkin shepherded El Campesino through Western Europe. At David Rousset’s trial in France, El Campesino testified that the USSR represented nothing more than “fascism with a red flag.” Throughout their travels around the world, Gorkin acted as El Campesino’s ghostwriter. “Read your article for today in case somebody questions you about it,” Gorkin told El Campesino during their trip to Cuba. Eventually they came to Mexico, where they were set up at a CIA safe house in Cuernavaca, kept hidden even from the FBI. There, Gorkin formed El Campesino’s life story into an “autobiography” that was quickly published and widely distributed in multiple languages.2
“A rumor has been spread by word of mouth that [El Campesino] and I are American agents,” Gorkin wrote to a friend around the time when the two were working together in the CIA safe house. “American agents! We who have never received help from the United States for the work we are doing, and who would surely be denied a visa to enter the United States!” As someone who had belonged to the Communist Party, Gorkin had indeed been denied a visa to the United States when he had sought to testify before the Dies Committee in the early 1940s. But the rumor was true enough, and it would not be the last time that Gorkin’s path crossed with U.S. intelligence operations.3
If Gorkin disliked the thought of being designated as an American agent, perhaps it was because he saw his anti-Communist commitments as prior to those of the U.S. government. Whatever his reasons, he fits the profile of an emerging type of the early Cold War: the “anti-Communist entrepreneur” who sought opportunities, financial and otherwise, to further his anti-Communist career. Like Jay Lovestone, who had helped Gorkin get to Mexico, he may have believed that he was capable of using the CIA as much as it was using him. Lovestone resented it, but his rickety networks, assembled within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to fight Communist unions internationally, were being fortified with the more solid frames of U.S. government support. Gorkin’s fr
iend Victor Serge died penniless in 1947, just a bit too early; Gorkin would not lack for work. U.S. government participation transformed the Cultural Cold War because anti-Communist political priorities now coincided with those of a powerful state. It was not anti-Communism itself that was new, nor were anti-Communist entrepreneurs like Gorkin an invention of the United States. What was different was that, whether they wanted to or not, anti-Communist entrepreneurs could hardly put their ideas into action without becoming entangled with the plans of the U.S. government.4
The centerpiece of the U.S. government’s Cultural Cold War was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), secretly supported financially and staffed at the highest levels by the CIA from its creation in 1950. (Many of the initial covert contributions were routed through Lovestone’s Free Trade Union Committee before shell foundations were set up to serve as a more permanent and reliable disguise.) The CCF began as a response to the specific provocations of the Soviet-aligned peace movement; to some wits, it was a “Democratic Information Bureau” to stand against the Cominform. Like the World Peace Council that it opposed, it was initially based in Europe and was most concerned with the European scene. The establishing conference was held in West Berlin in 1950, and a permanent headquarters was then created in Paris. At the highest levels, administrative positions were filled by CIA employees or by those who at least knew of the relationship.
But in addition to the CIA, the CCF depended on two other groups to fill out its ranks, and their importance shows why the congress was both an instrument of U.S. hegemony and something more than that. The first group consisted of the anti-Communist entrepreneurs. Around the globe, individuals who had first been working independently to foil peace campaigns sought to extend the CCF’s reach, including to Latin America. Soon after his work with El Campesino concluded, for example, Gorkin was tapped to head its Latin American division. (Gorkin also edited the CCF’s Spanish-language magazine, Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura, which was usually known simply as Cuadernos.) As the CCF established national headquarters in countries around the world, they were staffed by anti-Communist entrepreneurs who had been involved with antipeace campaigns. These activists were, of course, not confused about the political purpose of the organization to which they belonged—they worked to expand the reach of the CCF precisely because they understood it to be an anti-Communist organization. But they often did not know of the organization’s connection to the CIA and brought their own agendas to their work.
The CCF’s rank and file, its third group, consisted of intellectuals and politicians who participated in programs but not its day-to-day administration. In Latin America, as elsewhere, this was a diverse group that spanned much of the political spectrum, from Marxists to conservatives. But the dominant ethos of the organization was that of social democratic reformism. Its Latin American members admired the center-left parties of Western Europe and sometimes Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but typically not the domestic politics of the Cold War United States. Their participation raised the central problem that the CCF faced in Latin America during the 1950s. “Antitotalitarianism” in politics and the arts was the CCF’s logical justification; “anti-Communism” was the priority of the U.S. government that ensured its funding and its existence. But as the repression of the WPC throughout Latin America showed, in the 1950s Communism in Latin America was in no position to challenge the hegemony of the United States in the region. The CCF’s political allies struggled against dictatorships that generally had friendly relationships with the Eisenhower administration. But the management of the CCF in Latin America, including Spaniards like Gorkin, looked at Latin America with European eyes and continued to see Communism as the greatest threat to cultural freedom. Its Latin American allies, anti-Communist though they were, understood things differently. In their view, the defense of cultural freedom in Latin America was not primarily a matter of disabling the Communist threat; it was a matter of removing dictators from power and establishing political democracy.
In 1954, when the CCF held its first international meeting in Latin America, Uruguayan poet Roberto Ibáñez offered a toast: “To the only form of imperialism that I recognize: liberty.” He was surely aware of the inversion of assumptions—did imperialism not negate liberty?—that was the source of what wit there was in his remark. But he was almost certainly not aware that the CCF to which he belonged was covertly financed by the U.S. government as a weapon of the Cold War, heightening the contradictions at the heart of the toast. “The imperialism of liberty” would prove a pithy description of the politics of the organization to which he belonged.5
In Western Europe in the 1950s, where the CCF’s campaigns to shift intellectual opinion away from Communism and toward an Atlanticist position have been viewed as relatively successful, U.S. hegemony proved compatible with the consolidation of social democratic governance. In Latin America, where Gorkin and the leadership of the CCF wanted to bend Latin American social democratic nationalism in the direction of pro-Americanism, the geopolitical background was different. Unlike Europe, the mainstream of U.S. diplomacy was not committed to democracy in Latin America, much less to “socialism.” Latin America’s social democrats wanted the United States to share their antidictatorial agenda, not merely their anti-Communist one. But the leadership of the CCF prioritized a Latin American Left that would help it undermine Communism’s appeal throughout the region. These goals were neither totally incompatible nor completely identical. The conflict between a local politics born of antidictatorial, anti-imperial movements and the CCF leadership’s desire to emphasize antitotalitarianism, construed as anti-Communism, meant that multiple agendas coexisted within the CCF. If the Latin American operation of the CCF was unsuccessful in the 1950s, as was the general view of its CIA administrators, it was because of the tensions between the slightly different missions of the three groups that made it up—and, at base, between its anti-Communist priorities and its antidictatorial ones, when anti-Communism was so often a tool of dictatorship in Latin America.6
The local leadership of the CCF in Latin America was drawn from the ranks of antipeace campaigners of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Each time the Partisans of Peace had tried to gain a foothold in Latin America, two groups had emerged and ultimately cooperated to try to contain its appeal. U.S. embassies published anonymous material to link peace initiatives with Soviet diplomacy and used their friendships with generally conservative media to ensure that their messages would reach wide audiences. At the same time, local anti-Communist entrepreneurs, generally describing themselves as socialists or ex-Communists, also quietly approached the U.S. government in search of concealed aid.
During preparations for the Mexico City Continental Congress for Peace of 1949, for example, U.S. embassy officials, in the course of regular meetings with journalists from major Mexican periodicals, offered information about the Soviet origins of the peace campaigns. Amplified by a bit of sensationalism, this intelligence was reproduced in the tabloid and mainstream press. But as the conference approached, a man named Rodrigo García Treviño, representing a small organization that he called the Grupos Socialistas de la República Mexicana, approached the embassy. García Treviño, a veteran of the Mexican Revolution and an ex-Communist, was one of the best-read Marxists in Mexico and had engaged in heated polemics with the Communist Party over doctrinal matters for years. He had been a close associate of Trotsky; at the end of the 1940s he worked as a bookseller, a journalist, and an anti-Communist activist. In advance of the peace congress, he asked the U.S. embassy to provide him with information about the Communist affiliations of the soon-to-arrive foreign delegates. Embassy officials were eager to have a left-wing voice join the expected chorus of condemnation from the Right. García Treviño succeeded in distributing his reports widely, farcically attributing the information he had acquired from the embassy to “socialist allies” in other Latin American countries. A few years later, García Treviño would become the head of the Me
xican Association for Cultural Freedom, the national affiliate of the CCF in that country.7
The 1949 peace conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York provided the most direct stimulus for the creation of the CCF. The idea of Sidney Hook’s Ad Hoc Committee for Intellectual Freedom, which had organized the counterdemonstration, was further developed, leading to the eponymous Congress for Cultural Freedom, a major meeting held in West Berlin in late June 1950. Although the CIA’s role was concealed, U.S. government involvement was widely suspected by those hostile to the congress and even some who participated—it seemed to have been too lavish an affair for anyone else to have footed the bill. CIA money was ubiquitous; it even paid for Hook’s substitute teacher at New York University while he was away in Berlin. In his opening address at that meeting, Hook expressed the hope that “the fundamental distinction of our time must be drawn not in terms of [economic or social] programs, about which we may legitimately differ, not in terms of a free market in goods or a closed market but only in terms of a free market in ideas.” The German philosopher Karl Jaspers contributed a paper that offered the most concise description of the congress’s self-justification: “Propaganda, at first an instrument of ruse used to spread untruths that were seemingly favorable, has now become also an indispensable means for enforcing truth. Just as not only wrong but also right needs a lawyer,… so is truth now in need of propaganda.” The congress associated itself with a wide swath of anti-Communist thinkers, including a few conservatives. But it sought, above all, to represent the best of anti-Communist thought from leftist and centrist intellectual traditions. Its honorary presidents were Jaspers, Hook’s teacher John Dewey, Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce, known in this period as a liberal antifascist, the mercurial libertarian Bertrand Russell, and France’s Jacques Maritain, the most important intellectual of European Christian Democracy. It was an eclectic group that suggested the capacious boundaries of antitotalitarian thought. For more than two decades the CCF tried to mitigate the appeal of Communism and to strengthen an antitotalitarian “vital center” of liberal political opinion among the intelligentsia of Europe and the rest of the world while simultaneously receiving the majority of its funding from the CIA.8
