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

by Patrick Iber

  In Central America and the Caribbean, where the region’s most repressive dictatorships ruled, democratic movements supported one another to try to remove those governments from power, banding together into what was sometimes described as the “Caribbean Legion.” Juan José Arévalo, the reformist president of Guatemala from 1945 to 1951, gave military support to invasions of dictatorships that included Cuban and Dominican antidictatorial fighters. The legion aided in one military success, when José Figueres of Costa Rica led a successful armed uprising against a government that had included Communists after an election in which he alleged that fraud had taken place. Although evidence suggests Figueres may not have intervened on behalf of the defrauded candidate, his junta abolished Costa Rica’s armed forces, deepened Costa Rica’s welfare state, and yielded power to the candidate he thought had been cheated. Figueres was later returned to office democratically, and Costa Rica became Latin America’s most successful social democracy in the second half of the twentieth century.23

  The anti-Communist Left had a complicated set of views about the United States. Haya de la Torre’s original formulation for APRA was “democratic inter-Americanism without empire and without imperialism,” a vision of affairs that demanded respect for sovereignty but did not entail a complete rejection of the United States. (Haya argued, against Lenin’s formulation of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, that in Latin America imperialism was the first expression of capitalism.) Haya likened foreign investment from the United States to a river: it carried water that was necessary for growing healthy crops, but it had to be channeled and controlled appropriately so that it would not spill over its banks and flood the fields. Most members of the anti-Communist Left came to believe that reaching some kind of understanding with the United States was essential to being allowed to govern—a recognition of the hegemony of the Colossus of the North. Accepting this reality, they sought allies among socialists and liberals in the United States who could help them advance their interests.24

  However, although Latin America’s anti-Communist Left had a few sympathizers in the State Department and the CIA, it was generally too far to the left to be considered as a governing partner in the region by either the Truman or the Eisenhower administrations. The United States pressured the Organization of American States to stop Caribbean Legion activity in 1949 and 1950. There were some alliances to be had with the Democratic Left in the AFL, through people like Jay Lovestone and Serafino Romualdi. The AFL supported the creation of union alternatives to Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (CTAL) in the late 1940s and the incorporation of the formally anti-Communist federations aligned with the parties of the anti-Communist Left.25

  For the most part, however, the anti-Communist Left had to be responsible for organizing itself. As early as 1940 the Chilean Socialist Party hosted the Latin American Congress of Leftist Parties—excluding Communists but including socialists from Argentina and Ecuador, as well as Rómulo Betancourt, then living in exile in Chile and observing socialist operations there. A decade later they met again, this time in Havana, where Rómulo Betancourt was living, again in exile, with the financial support of a like-minded Cuban government. They called their 1950 meeting the Inter-American Conference for Democracy and Freedom, assembling about 150 people from many of the same groups of the non-Communist Left that had met in Santiago ten years earlier: Chilean socialists, members of Venezuela’s Acción Democrática and Peru’s APRA, Uruguay’s most important socialist leader, Emilio Frugoni, and social democratic groups from Costa Rica, Cuba, and other countries throughout the region.26

  Unlike earlier meetings, the Havana conference brought these individuals together with allies from the United States: activists for civil liberties and human rights like Roger Baldwin and Frances Grant; regular members of the anti-Communist Left, including Sidney Hook, Robert Alexander, Archibald MacLeish, Pearl Buck, Max Ascoli, Sol Levitas, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Bryn Hovde, and Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; officials from both the AFL and the Congress of Industrial Organizations; Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party of the United States; and liberal elected officials from both major parties. Discussion focused not on Latin America per se but on the idea of the Western Hemisphere in the maintenance of peace and the creation of a democratic front against all forms of totalitarianism. The meeting created a New York–based office called the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom (IADF), which became the lobbying arm of Latin America’s anti-Communist Left within the United States, with Frances Grant serving as its secretary general.27

  Grant, the motor force behind the IADF for its more than thirty years of subsequent operation, had been the head of the Latin American Committee of the International League for the Rights of Man and had helped establish the defense of human rights as part of an antitotalitarian agenda in the hemisphere. A pamphlet published shortly after its founding meeting explained that the IADF “was founded in 1950 … to stave off the inroads of communism and neo-fascism, both of which are exploiting the unrest of the peoples to their own ends, often in an unholy alliance. It was felt that unless a vital counter-force of democracy was developed to arrest this active and aggressive offensive, we might have a new ‘Korea’ on our doorstep.” Whether this was intended as a serious analysis or a sort of cri de coeur to a U.S. political environment that took the “inroads of communism” far more seriously than those of “neo-fascism” is probably impossible to say. But for better or worse, it was a sign that what constituted Latin American social democracy had, in the last instance, accepted the logic of the Cold War and would fight for its place within the constraints imposed by U.S. hegemony.28

  On the other hand, the purpose of the IADF was to loosen those constraints and bring the United States around to a more sympathetic politics. Although the IADF was intended to function dually in Uruguay and New York, only the New York office ever operated properly. That office has been described as a kind of “Red Cross” for the Latin American Democratic Left, representing its interests to U.S. audiences, harboring exiles, holding press conferences, cultivating sympathetic journalists, and lobbying the United Nations and the U.S. government. The earliest funding of the IADF came from anti-Communist labor groups based in New York, including small contributions from the Free Trade Union Committee that might have been contaminated by CIA dollars. But its largest and most stable funding source became the Venezuelan governments of Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni of Acción Democrática, which regularly contributed $1,000 a month to the IADF throughout their terms in office, from early 1959 to 1969. The IADF was not, in other words, yet another CIA front.29

  Many of the same people who participated in the non-Communist Left conferences of 1940 and 1950 were championed by the CCF in the 1950s. Haya de la Torre and Betancourt, for instance, were published in Cuadernos. And the personnel of the CCF shared much with Latin America’s Democratic Left: an active rejection of Communist politics and an admiration for Western European democratic socialism. But there was a fissure on the issue of anti-imperialism. For Gorkin, for example, Latin American anti-imperialism was only a distraction from the world’s only true imperialism, that of the Soviet Union. But many of Latin America’s anti-Communist Left had spent decades in exile, working to restore democracy to countries ruled by U.S.-supported dictatorships. The anti-Communist Left knew that Gorkin’s position was weak: if the cause of the Democratic Left in the region was to be advanced, U.S. power would have to change. It would have to be imperialism placed on the side of democracy. The anti-Communist Left, through the CCF and in other more direct contacts with the CIA, would show itself willing to accept covert financial support from the United States, but it also wanted the United States to actually support its preferred policies, a point on which it would be repeatedly disappointed. Gorkin filled Cuadernos with anti-Soviet essays, trying to steer the Latin American department of the CCF toward a European kind of anti-Co
mmunism, in which the suffering of Eastern Europe under Soviet rule loomed as the central moral problem with which the world needed to grapple. Given such a perspective, Gorkin failed to recognize that the practice of antitotalitarianism might require a different kind of anti-Communism in Latin America than in Eastern Europe. Thus Gorkin, an important voice within the CCF, would end up arguing—in the name of cultural freedom—in defense of counterrevolutionary violence.

  The fissures between the management of the CCF and the anti-Communist Left it sought to influence were exposed most dramatically by events in Guatemala during the mid-1950s. The country’s reformist president, Juan José Arévalo, had been a central figure in the Caribbean Legion and, although he tolerated individual Communists, had opposed party organization and supported non-Communist internationalism. His successor, Jacobo Arbenz, who served from 1951 to 1954, took a somewhat different path. At the end of Arévalo’s term, Arbenz was elected democratically. But, unlike Arévalo, he cultivated close relationships with Communists, some of whom he appointed to subcabinet posts. They helped craft his signature initiatives, including the far-reaching land reform that angered the country’s largest landowner, the United Fruit Company. The reform did not aim to establish Stalinist collectives but rather to diminish the power of large landowners and create a free, property-holding peasantry—it was, one of its Communist coauthors later insisted, a “bourgeois law.” But the context frightened the Eisenhower administration. Arbenz sent anti-U.S. Cold War signals by deepening his government’s connections with Soviet-aligned groups, including the CTAL and the World Peace Council. (CIA monitoring found teachers passing out peace movement propaganda to students, for example, and said that they were disciplined for not signing peace petitions.) In the United States, Arbenz’s government came to be seen as an ally of the Kremlin and a potential danger to U.S. national security and economic interests; the United Fruit Company lobbied the U.S. government to take action to stop him.30

  Whether its efforts succeeded, or whether, in the words of Guatemala’s Communist leader José Manuel Fortuny, “they would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas,” remains a subject of debate. In spite of Arbenz’s close ties to Communist intellectuals, the Soviet Union was not eager to support Guatemalan Communism, which, apart from some participation in Soviet front activity, remained isolated. The United States took a shipment of Czechoslovakian arms as significant evidence of Communist connections, but it was no gift and had been purchased by Arbenz. Still, the CIA, assisted by Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, propped up the obscure Guatemalan colonel Carlos Castillo Armas as an alternative to Arbenz. The CIA orchestrated a series of propaganda and paramilitary campaigns that led Guatemala’s military to remove Arbenz from power in 1954. The coup sparked popular protests throughout Latin America and toppled not just Arbenz but also the teetering notion that something like the Good Neighbor Policy remained in effect. Vice President Nixon appeared on television with Castillo Armas and called his victory “the first time in the history of the world that the [sic] Communist government has been overthrown by the people.” In power, Castillo Armas undid nearly all of Arbenz’s land reforms. The coup in Guatemala was not the beginning of Latin America’s Cold War, but it announced a new phase, demonstrating the power of the CIA to undermine even a democratically elected government to pursue reactionary goals. A young Argentine doctor, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, witnessed the events and concluded that Latin America’s revolution could not compromise with the United States and would have to strike directly at the sources of its power.31

  Arbenz’s government had long been controversial within the CCF. While the first international meeting of the CCF was taking place in Santiago in 1954, Arbenz had imposed censorship, rounded up government opponents, and attempted to silence opposition media in Guatemala in a failed effort to deal with the threat of a coup. The CCF headquarters in Paris wanted all the delegates to sign a resolution of protest that stated that “even temporary suspension of constitutional guarantees [leads] inevitably to a totalitarian state.” When Gorkin tried to gather support for the measure, he encountered substantial resistance. The Mexican delegates did not want to sign anything that did not protest the exploitation of the Guatemalan masses by foreign companies, and others were worried that the passage of a resolution would upset public opinion in their countries. Eventually all agreed on a compromise resolution that condemned Latin American dictators who deprived their peoples of liberty, as well as the suppression of cultural freedom in Guatemala.32

  Gorkin’s hatred of the government of Arbenz surpassed anything that he could muster from the rest of the delegates. Gorkin believed himself to be in possession of a letter between Arbenz’s predecessor Arévalo and the Soviet Union’s head of trade relations in Mexico, which convinced him of Arévalo’s and (a fortiori) Arbenz’s subordination to Moscow. The letter promised greater harmonization between the Guatemalan and Soviet governments and credited Soviet spiritual and economic aid with permitting the unification of the Guatemalan masses under Arevalist auspices. Although the letter convinced Gorkin of the presence of the Soviet hand in Guatemalan Communism, it was an obvious forgery, and even cursory knowledge of Arévalo’s behavior in office would have sufficed to cure Gorkin of his illusions.33

  Yet in Cuadernos Gorkin wrote that Guatemala’s democratic revolution, which should have served popular interests, had instead been twisted by Communists to serve Kremlin strategy. He conceded that Guatemalan Communists had worked for just ends, such as agrarian reform. “But that,” he wrote,

  corresponds to the general tactic of Communism in its march toward power … Talk of democracy serves as a springboard … For them, it has nothing to do with serving people, but in using people for distant ends contrary to their own interests. In general, whether they impose their own dictatorship or provoke the establishment of a reactionary one, the people are sacrificed … If the triumph of anti-Communism leads to new caudillista dictatorship, to the semifeudal system that existed before [Arévalo], to the predominance of foreign capital and the maintenance of the masses in their condition of misery and ignorance, Communism will be the winner.

  Gorkin’s labored logic assigned the blame to Communism whether the ill that befell Guatemala was revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. He also argued that reforms carried out by a democrat were progressive, but that the same actions taken by a Communist served the Kremlin. How then to work for justice? He seems to have thought that the sort of work that he was doing was the only way out of that cycle of revolution and counterrevolution. “[So that Communism does not triumph,] it is necessary to develop and apply an authentic politics of liberty in the Latin American setting,” he wrote. “Its intellectual ‘elites,’ its democratic political groups, and its free trade unions should take charge of developing and applying it … with the collaboration and the help of whatever democratic and progressive elements exist in the United States, Europe, and Asia. We have a world to defend. But for it to be worth defending, it has to be habitable and decent.” Gorkin had decided that Guatemala in 1954 was neither, and he tried to set CCF policy accordingly.34

  But the fall of Arbenz would not disappear as a source of controversy; instead, it would fester as the global CCF’s interest turned more toward Latin America. The CCF held a major international gathering in Milan in 1955 called “The Future of Freedom.” Many of the delegates there seemed to think that their European work was largely complete: some synthesis of the European liberal and socialist projects had diminished the intellectual appeal of Communism, showing that there was no inherent contradiction between its understandings of individual freedoms and state participation in the economy to ensure common prosperity. When the Milan conference came to an end, University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils wrote of “the end of ideology”: his sense that Communist ideological extremism had been defeated by the more pragmatic postwar politics of Western Europe and the United States.35

  Shils was quick to note, howev
er, that whatever liberal-socialist consensus did exist at the Milan conference did not extend to the delegates from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.36 According to Shils’s generalizations, the Third World delegates defended the importance of nationalism against the European delegates, who generally dismissed it as a dangerous relic of the nineteenth century, and they put greater emphasis than some of the Europeans on the necessity of economic development as a prerequisite to freedom. Ideology may have ended in Europe and the United States, Shils thought, but “we must no longer think only for European or American society. Our theories of liberty, of the relation between religion and progress, tradition and intellectual independence, must be thought out and formulated in such a way that they will do justice to the situations of the new countries of Asia and Africa and South America.” The Milan conference marked the CCF’s turn toward increasing engagement with the non-European world, and at a private meeting between the U.S. and Latin American delegates, the urgent need for a Western Hemisphere version of the Milan conference was agreed on.37