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

by Patrick Iber

  On the operational side, the CCF placed its headquarters in Paris, organized cultural and political symposia, and began to publish its flagship magazines of politics and culture, including the London-based Encounter in English and Preuves in French. National committees were operated semi-independently, and eventually some subject committees were set up around special themes, such as science. In the first half of the 1950s the CCF worked to consolidate intellectual, artistic, and political ties between Europe and the United States. Two CIA officials, Michael Josselson and, when Josselson began to suffer health problems under the strain of management, John Hunt, directed its basic operations. Josselson and Hunt, CIA employees though they were, both impressed their colleagues with their intellectual credentials. Born in Estonia, Josselson spoke several languages and, after retirement, wrote a significant biography of the commander who defended Russia against the armies of Napoleon. Hunt was the author of many novels and had a long history in the political Left. With Josselson and Hunt as the mainstays, other CIA case officers moved in and out of management positions: in the words of one CIA historian, the CCF became the “junior year abroad of American intelligence” for the CIA’s liberal-arts-major recruits. Money from the CIA was passed through dummy foundations so as to obscure the CCF’s U.S. government connections and deceive even its members; it also received some nongovernment support for its activities, especially from the Ford Foundation, whose personnel shared values and outlooks with the significant liberal contingent within the CIA. In spite of the subterfuge, anyone who worked with the CCF for any period of time at least heard rumors of U.S. government involvement. Although many believed Hunt and Josselson when they denied any such connection, others gained either direct or fragmentary knowledge of the dependence on the CIA.9

  The only person from Latin America to attend the West Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950 was Germán Arciniegas, a Colombian intellectual from his country’s Liberal Party who at that time was teaching at Columbia University in New York. The year before, he had witnessed both the closing ceremony of the Waldorf-Astoria peace conference and Hook’s counterdemonstration, and it was the latter that impressed him. The peace conference, he wrote to a friend, was “reduced to an attack against the United States … without the slightest criticism of the Russian system, which seems to me neither more open nor more free.” After attending the meeting in Berlin, Arciniegas hoped to see the activities of the CCF extended to Latin America. “We have responsibilities as writers,” wrote Arciniegas to James Burnham, “and we must recall to our companions in all the intellectual, artistical and scientific activities that our main goal now is to survive as free men in a free world. We have to put the word freedom before the word peace.”10

  Burnham had been one of the co-organizers of the Berlin congress, along with Sidney Hook. Although he too had once been close to Trotsky, he had grown increasingly conservative and by 1950 was working as a consultant to the CIA. Burnham tried to involve Arciniegas in planning a CCF-style meeting in the Western Hemisphere, coordinating with a CIA officer in Mexico City, none other than the future Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. But they had a problem. They could find no suitable host country that combined ease of travel with exhibiting the values of “cultural freedom” that they hoped to defend. Early efforts foundered. Burnham and Arciniegas reached out to Mexico’s Alfonso Reyes, a classicist, poet, essayist, and humanist intellectual who agreed that it would be a good idea to make a show of free thought against fascist and Communist threats, but who said that it would be impossible to mount a conference close to a Mexican presidential election.11

  A year and a half later, with the CCF well established in Europe, things remained in the planning stages in Latin America. Gorkin was sent on a continental tour in mid-1952, which convinced him that anti-imperialist rhetoric in the region served as a pretext for Stalinist propaganda. “Nevertheless,” he wrote, “the general sentiment of intellectual elements in Latin America is anti-totalitarian, anti-reactionary and profoundly liberal and democratic.” Gorkin advised that “the Congress should be based on the liberty and universality of Culture—‘Culture has no boundaries’—that it is necessary to defend against all totalitarianisms that threaten it and against all ambition to the management of thought or the submission of it to a political party.” He recommended the creation of a magazine in the style of Preuves and national committees in Mexico and Chile, as well as taking advantage of the many Spanish refugees working in universities and publishing houses across Latin America to promote the idea of universal culture through writing on Europe.12

  Gorkin’s preference for a European orientation for the CCF may have been partially attributable to his Spanish roots, but it was also strategic. For most of the Latin American intellectuals whom the CCF hoped to attract, Europe, especially France, possessed more cultural prestige than did the United States. And it was Europe, not the United States, that represented, to Gorkin, Latin America’s potential modernity. “It is my sincere belief,” Gorkin wrote to the CCF after another tour of the region in 1953, “that the intelligentsia and the people of Latin America will understand the problems and realities of North America not through its services of information and education, but through the experience, the necessities, and the language of Europe.” Furthermore, in Latin America, U.S. hegemony was too raw. As the CCF leadership was considering expanding to Latin America, a friendly warning came from Serafino Romualdi, the AFL’s labor ambassador to Latin America, that “the intellectual elements of Latin America, even those clearly opposed to Communism (and there is still a great deal of confusion on that) are at present outspokenly opposed to the foreign policy of the U.S. Government. Some of them might therefore be reluctant to sponsor a conference in which U.S. elements were prominently interested.”13 An avowedly pro-U.S. organization would have had such limited appeal that the CCF added a step of remove and acted as a pro–Western European one instead.

  After years of planning and delays, what finally prodded the CCF to extend its operations to Latin America was Neruda’s 1953 Continental Cultural Congress (CCC) in Chile. Not everyone was an unwilling partner of the United States. As it had in Mexico in 1949, the anti-Communist side relied on volunteers to perform key tasks. Before the conference, the composer Juan Orrego-Salas, a non-Communist who had been invited to serve on the planning committee of the CCC, appeared at the office of the U.S. Information Service (USIS) in Santiago to ask what he might do. He was advised to serve as a double agent: to attempt to steer the CCC away from Communist domination, and if he could not, to resign in protest. He eventually followed exactly that course; in the meantime he gave committee proceedings to the USIS, which routed them to sympathetic sources. One of these was Carlos de Baráibar, a Spaniard living in exile in Chile, who was, in the words of the USIS, “a steady and willing ‘customer’ for [our] materials.” During the Spanish Civil War, Baráibar had been coeditor of the newspaper Claridad, associated with the left wing of Spanish socialism, but at the time of the CCC he had a powerful perch at El Mercurio, Chile’s conservative paper of record and a bastion of right-wing anti-Communism. (One editorial cartoon in Chile’s Communist paper lampooned El Mercurio’s upper-class readership by showing a girl looking up at her father and asking, “Hey, Dad, where can you read something about feudal society?” The father replies, “I suppose in the society pages of El Mercurio.”) The USIS sent Baráibar’s clips to other U.S. government propaganda operations, where they were republished as independent reporting in other newspapers around the continent and on Voice of America stations. The illusion of an independent investigation confirming the Communistic nature of the CCC succeeded in getting delegates from other countries, including Alfonso Reyes and the writer Érico Veríssimo of Brazil, to withdraw their support. Both would later participate in the activities of the CCF.14

  As Neruda’s CCC approached, many non-Communists found evidence of Communist involvement in a cultural gathering unsettling. A group of politically center-left figur
es, many associated with the Maritain-inspired “social Christian” tradition within Chile’s future Christian Democratic Party, publicly sought an accommodation with the CCC while still making known their reservations regarding Communist control. Putting together a short position paper, they argued that because Communism placed politics above all other spheres of life, it would be naïve to participate in a “cultural” congress sponsored or organized by Communists. They asked that the CCC be transformed into a debate on the merits of “directed culture.” Affirming the importance of the “liberty of man’s creative spirit,” they asked for a forum to discuss these important issues and the role of culture in a conflicted world. The young writer Jorge Edwards thought the manifesto honest and signed it in spite of his growing friendship with Neruda. But Neruda called him naïve and snapped, “That manifesto was only a scheme to destroy our congress.” Edwards, Neruda implied, was too young to recognize that each little manifesto was a token in a much larger conflict.15

  The wisdom in Neruda’s view became clear when Julián Gorkin arrived in Santiago a few days before the CCC. Gorkin immediately made a series of radio broadcasts denouncing Communist sponsorship of Neruda’s conference; Gorkin’s friend Baráibar helpfully “reported” on his activities in El Mercurio. But in addition to the goal of undermining the CCC, Gorkin had a constructive agenda as well: he planned to create the first national chapter of the CCF in a Latin American country. To appeal to the center-left group that had written the independent manifesto, Gorkin spoke repeatedly about the CCF as a forum in which issues of culture and politics could be explored honestly. Before leaving, he put Baráibar in charge of handpicking the members of the new Chilean committee of the CCF. Baráibar remained the éminence grise of the Chilean committee for years. In September the newly formed body celebrated the opening of a library and conference space at a cocktail party for 150 attendees, inaugurating the first national center of the CCF in Latin America. The committee included prominent Christian Democrats, like future president of Chile Eduardo Frei, the great intellectual of Chilean Christian Democracy Jaime Castillo Velasco, the country’s most important literary critic, Hernán Díaz Arrieta, and the humanitarian lawyer Hernán Santa Cruz, who, a few years earlier, had helped draft the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.16

  The next year, 1954, the Chilean committee hosted the first international gathering of the CCF in Latin America. For most of its attendees, it provided an introduction to the CCF and its perspectives and intentions. It also exhibited the organization’s essential schizophrenia. Members of its committee had only recently criticized Neruda’s CCC for hiding political content in the garb of culture, but they would soon do the same. In the second issue of the Chilean CCF’s local magazine, Jaime Castillo criticized the use of the theme “culture” to attract people to adhere to a congress that served Communist political ends. Writing in a CIA-sponsored journal, Castillo was—probably without realizing it—doing the same thing in the service of different politics.17

  Nevertheless, tactical questions remained. Some wanted the committee to take a hard line against Communism, while others recommended a softer approach, sticking to platitudes about “cultural freedom” and, reflecting the strength of Christian Democracy in Chile, the “liberty of man’s spirit.” Although the administrative secretaries of the national bodies—Baráibar in Chile and García Treviño in Mexico—were the liaisons to the CCF headquarters and held the most power within the national organizations, each was simultaneously too controversial and insufficiently famous to serve as their public face. In Chile, the learned figure chosen as president was Georg Nicolai, a German physician and physiologist best known for his pacifist stance during World War I. Driven out of Germany, Nicolai was an abrasive personality and a gruff humanitarian, but he was an academic celebrity in Chile and Argentina, where he had taught intermittently since leaving Europe and where his reputation was particularly enhanced by his association with Albert Einstein over their shared discontent with the politics of war. Distancing himself from pacifism at the outbreak of World War II, by the early 1950s Nicolai placed great stock in the role that the United States would play in the maintenance of a peaceful future. He wanted the Chilean committee of the CCF to be an avowedly political body and openly supportive of the U.S. government’s fight against Communism.18

  But Nicolai’s was the minority view. Even Michael Josselson, the CIA agent who headed the CCF, preferred the softer sell. The anti-imperialist near consensus among intellectuals from the countries of Latin America rendered an avowedly pro-U.S. stance impractical and tactically unsound. When Nicolai wrote to Josselson complaining that the Chilean committee had become “anti-Yankee” under the supposed influence of Baráibar, Josselson rebuffed him, saying that the United States, like all countries, had positive and negative features, and that the latter could be criticized. The task of the committee would be served, he wrote, if it succeeded in contrasting the relative liberty of the democracies with the total slavery of totalitarianism.19

  During the international forum of 1954, the Communist newspaper El Siglo tried to establish the un-Chilean nature of the CCF by accusing it of taking money from a foreign power. El Siglo charged, wrongly in fact but perhaps less so in spirit, that the CCF received payments from the U.S. State Department and from the United Fruit Company, a U.S.-based corporation hated by the Latin American Left for its support of regional dictatorships. Even the CCF’s delegates wondered who had paid their travel expenses. The public story, which is likely what Gorkin told the group, was that the CCF received no U.S. government money but was funded by free trade-union organizations and private foundations, including the “Feshman” and the Rockefeller. In truth, the CCF did receive some clean money from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, but the delegates would not have known that both the “free trade-union organizations” and the “Feshman” (probably the Farfield Foundation, headed by Julius Fleischmann) were conduits for CIA dollars. Without this knowledge, the Chilean committee of the CCF tried to make its source of funding an asset: in a question-and-answer section of its new national magazine, Cultura y Libertad, it argued that receiving money from private U.S. foundations did not make it an instrument of U.S. imperialism. The very existence of private foundations, it held, proved the difference between the directed cultural world of the totalitarian states and one in which private organizations were allowed to operate without government control. But the difference was not as large as was imagined; the obvious irony was that many of those private foundations in the United States, which were supposed to demonstrate the difference between totalitarian and free ones, acted as concealed instruments of the U.S. government.20

  During the 1950s the CCF slowly expanded throughout Latin America. Friends of the congress formed formal national committees in Uruguay and Mexico in 1954, Argentina in December 1955, Peru in March 1957, and Brazil in April 1958, as well as in Cuba and Colombia. The CCF also operated in other countries on a reduced basis, distributing propaganda even in the absence of organized committees. It sponsored a variety of publications: books, magazines, pamphlets, and articles in newspapers, placed on behalf of the national committees, and the flagship publication in Spanish, the Gorkin-edited vehicle Cuadernos. It organized local events, including roundtables, lectures, and showings at art galleries. It sponsored travel to promote dialogue and to stitch together the anti-Communists it deemed respectable into a less patchwork and shabby international community. Whether participants knew of the CIA’s involvement with the CCF or not—and most did not—the apparatus of the CCF was filled with precisely the kind of anti-Communist entrepreneurs who saw the United States as an ally in their war against Communism. For them, the Cultural Cold War was a continuation of their anti-Communist war by other means. The remarkable thing was less that the United States was sponsoring their work than that they had managed to inscribe local versions of anti-Communism onto a Cultural Cold War led by the U.S. government.21

  The CCF was formally a cultura
l body, committed to the principles of antitotalitarianism and, consequently, cultural freedom. But there were clear and deliberate political implications of its position: it was against Communism, fascism, and dictatorship because they made cultural freedom impossible. It also acknowledged that poverty and illiteracy were incompatible with cultural flourishing, and so its political allies in the region were the reformist parties with social content in their platforms: Christian Democrats in places like Chile where they were strong, some of the region’s socialist parties, but most especially the secular nationalist parties that were programmatically committed to anti-Communism and were known by their sympathizers as the “Democratic Left.” Along with the CIA and the anti-Communist entrepreneurs like Gorkin, this anti-Communist Left formed the third leg of the CCF stool. But its members brought their own agenda to the enterprise, which sometimes conflicted with the priorities of the CCF’s management.

  Latin America, like the rest of the world, had non- and anti-Communist Left movements that predated the Cold War. But because Latin America, in comparison with Europe, lacked a substantial industrial proletariat, the parties with “socialist” tendencies were not generally parties of workers but instead drew on multiple sources of support, including the professional and middle classes, peasants, and unionized workers where possible. Peru’s Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), founded by the philosopher Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre in 1924, was an inspiration to many other parties for its anti-imperialism, its nationalism, its emphasis on social justice in the context of political democracy, and its polyclass approach to organizing. It was also highly centralized, opportunistic, and personalistic, and Haya seemed to have flirted with every possible political philosophy, from Communism to fascism, at some point in his career. APRA’s most important intellectual, Luis Alberto Sánchez, worked closely with the CCF in the 1950s. Venezuela’s Rómulo Betancourt, who had founded his country’s Acción Democrática party in 1941 and twice served as his country’s president, had a similar trajectory. During a Costa Rican exile in the 1930s he took a leadership position in that country’s Communist Party, but by the end of the 1930s he had abandoned Communism and opted for a social democratic agenda, again in the context of a vertically integrated mass party.22