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

by Patrick Iber

  Above all, CCF campaigns were directed against what the CCF took to be examples of Communist cultural hegemony: against Neruda in Chile and the muralists Rivera and Siqueiros in Mexico. The anti-Neruda work had a long pedigree and both Chilean and international dimensions. After Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 detailing his predecessor’s crimes, the Chilean Committee for Cultural Freedom issued a pamphlet, Así veían a Stalin, that contained examples of prominent Chilean Marxists, including Neruda and Salvador Allende, offering fawning praise of Stalin’s character and accomplishments rendered absurd by Khrushchev’s indictment. For years the CCF tried to advance the career of its own politically centrist poet, Julio Barrenechea, at the expense of Neruda’s; indeed, in 1959 its efforts helped get him elected over Neruda to the presidency of the Sociedad de Escritores de Chile. One of Neruda’s friends said that the results were the work of “reactionary” agents of the CCF, and although the “reactionary” designation had more to do with entrenched habits of name-calling, the assigning of responsibility was fair. Baráibar had been promoting Barrenechea as an anti-Neruda for some time and planned—without evident success—to use the CCF to raise his profile after his election. In other publications and in Cuadernos, the CCF followed the line of the Spanish Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez that Neruda was a “great poet, [but] a great bad poet.” One frequent provider of anti-Neruda materials for the CCF, the ex-leftist Uruguayan poet Ricardo Paseyro, so irritated Neruda that he referred to him as the “revolting little Uruguayan” in private correspondence. The CCF’s campaign against Neruda reached a peak in the 1960s when it tried to undermine his candidacy for the Nobel Prize.51

  The CCF’s other major artistic project was directed against the hegemony of the Marxist painters in Mexico. The Mexican government under Miguel Alemán, even as he moved away from the social commitments of Cárdenas, was the first to give consistent state support to the fine arts, finally creating a kind of official muralism. This led to the apparent paradox of a modernizing state looking to the past and a president who repressed the Left domestically supporting Marxist painters to craft its official story, showing heroic revolutionary masses overcoming the revolution’s familiar cast of villains. The ironies were not lost on painters coming of age in the 1950s, who had no memories of the Mexican Revolution and few meaningful ones of Cardenismo. They saw a landscape clogged with official reverence for the Big Three (Rivera, Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco) but little support for experimentation and a chill on practices that could be construed as critical of the ruling PRI, such as the depiction of contemporary poverty.52

  The ongoing debate about politically committed art and the Mexican school stretched back years before the creation of the CCF, at least to the 1944 publication of Siqueiros’s orthodox manifesto “No hay más ruta que la nuestra” (There is no other path but ours). By the early 1950s it was evident that a new generation of painters, known in Spanish as “La Ruptura” and often translated as the “Breakaway” generation, was defying Siqueiros’s pronouncement by modifying both the form and content of their painting. The painters of the Breakaway generation were challenging many of the muralists’ assumptions: the importance of depictions of mass actors in history, the interweaving of leftist politics and Mexican nationalism, the disfavor shown to easel painting, and the rejection of abstraction for realism—indeed, the very identification of painting as a form of political action. Some of the artists who embraced different forms of less realist painting identified their works with a specifically anti-Communist project, rejecting the compulsory moralizing of the great living muralists.53

  Rufino Tamayo, for example, who inspired many of the Breakaway painters, was of the same generation as Rivera and Siqueiros and had been exhibited alongside them in the 1920s and 1930s. But his color-soaked canvases, sometimes featuring oblique references to pre-Columbian art, bore little relationship to the work of Rivera or Siqueiros. Rivera, questioned about Tamayo in 1954, said that his work had some merit, but that “some great artists” avoided revolutionary and anti-imperialist content in their works, preferring not to be combative, engaged artists. That, said Rivera, was “selling silence,” and it would be better just to take money to defend imperialism openly, so that everyone could see the relationship for what it was.54

  The debate between old and new styles manifested itself in part as a conversation about the meaning of “freedom of expression” for the contemporary artist. In 1954 Diego Rivera pointed specifically to the CCF’s defense of “freedom of expression” to argue that the idea was in fact a weapon of the U.S. Department of State and other conservative and foreign influences. Rivera was correct to argue that a deliberate attempt had been made to identify certain types of art with freedom. In the aftermath of the war, liberals in the United States sought to exhibit the work of abstract expressionists abroad in a bid to show that the United States was the center of innovative artistic production and freedom itself: this was art, after all, that neither Nazi Germany nor Stalinist Russia would allow. Seen as an identifiably “American” school, the complex and often nonlinear geometries of the abstract expressionists were exhibited around the world by New York’s Museum of Modern Art as representing the pinnacle of artistic freedom and a direct challenge to totalitarianism. Although many of the artists who practiced abstract expressionism rejected the label and fully intended their art to be a radical critique of postwar society in the United States, this did not prevent the enlistment of their works in a tug-of-war widely understood to be between liberalism and totalitarianism.55

  Rivera was also correct in arguing that the CCF was at the center of debates about freedom of expression in the arts in Mexico. In a way, that was proof enough that the embrace of apparently apolitical painting was in no way free of political content. The Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom formed a joint arrangement with the gallery space of the newspaper Excélsior to hold meetings, conferences, and showings of art. The Excélsior galleries exhibited the work of artists who did not conform to the tradition of socially committed art on a grand scale that had become identified as belonging to the “Mexican school.” The poet and art critic Octavio Paz, who had once been tutored by Victor Serge and Julián Gorkin in anti-Communist politics and now eclipsed them both in fame, appeared at the Excélsior galleries in his capacity as the great defender of abstract art in Mexico. The CCF took pride in what it saw as breaking the “dictatorship” of the Communist artists on the Mexican arts scene. At a group exhibition of young painters in 1958, some of whom painted in less realist forms, the Mexican Association celebrated them for fulfilling the “first and highest responsibility [of the artist]: the defense of culture, and, therefore, of liberty.”56

  In debates about the artist and society, “abstraction” had replaced “formalism” as a term of abuse in Communist cultural criticism. But a simple dichotomy between realism and abstraction did not capture the complexity of artistic practice in Mexico, where some abstract expressionists were on the left and few of the artists of the Breakaway generation actually painted purely abstract forms. The point was that for the artists of the Breakaway, art had meaning other than its social content. Tamayo, usually classified as a postimpressionist, explained in an interview that art fought to present new visions of reality, and that modern art strove to represent four dimensions on canvas just as the revolution in perspective hundreds of years earlier had introduced three dimensions. Juan Soriano, a painter and sculptor who worked in abstract forms, was younger than Tamayo and more militant in his break with the older traditions. Soriano, a favorite of the CCF, embraced the criticism directed at him by painters like Siqueiros: Soriano did not paint for Mexico, and so what? He did not care about being a “Mexican” painter and sought a worldwide audience. He did not paint to be enjoyed by the masses; the great muralists were bureaucratic, propagandistic, and bait for tourists. He thought that their supposed political rebellion was a form of publicity. The only revolution that interested him, said Soriano, was the re
volution in taste.57

  The CCF did its best to promote the works and views of such artists. In 1957 it arranged for an exposition titled “Art and Liberty” at the city government’s gallery that was explicitly conceived as a showcase of anti-Communist artists, featuring Rufino Tamayo most prominently. Rodrigo García Treviño intended to show that, in quality and quantity, the anti-Communists surpassed the Communist painters. But some of the painters in the exhibition quarreled publicly, and author Mauricio Magdaleno, a CCF associate in charge of the city gallery, encountered political pressure not to allow the exposition. The Excélsior galleries, though smaller and not officially connected to the government, had to substitute. Tamayo backed out of the project, and the exhibition made no great impression. The following year an exhibition of young painters at the same gallery organized by the Mexican Association of the CCF featured an enthusiastic denunciation of the “Mexican school” in its brochure. In the end, the CCF’s contributions to promoting the artists of the Breakaway were modest. José Gómez Sicre, for instance, the Cuban art critic and director of the Visual Arts Section of the Pan American Union, was another determined opponent of social realist art and much more successful in using international exhibitions to elevate artists of the Breakaway generation, such as José Luis Cuevas, to international fame.58

  The basic ingredients of Gorkin’s brand of “liberal universalism”—the fusion of liberalism and socialism, anti-anti-Americanism, universalism in literature, and anti–socialist realism in the arts—were capacious enough to attract a wide variety of writers and thinkers to align themselves with the CCF in the 1950s. They included both those hostile and those sympathetic to indigenism, Catholicism, figurativism, or whatever current might be identified as the primary form of thought within the movement. There was no style that was be the equivalent of socialist realism for anti-Communists, and antitotalitarian action in the arts was largely reduced to the promotion of artists who explicitly identified their work with political antitotalitarianism. Although it could claim a wider array of allies, the CCF’s method of selecting works and artists that were to be celebrated or abhorred was little more sophisticated than that of the Communist artists; the politics come first. Both groups worked backward from the political content of the art and the political engagement of the artist to approval or disapproval of the work.

  If the CCF’s contributions to the arts in Latin America were modest during the 1950s, its very presence inflamed debate. It helped weaponize the idea of freedom because critics on the left cited it as powerful evidence that liberal notions of freedom were a form of imperialist propaganda. “Liberty” was the mantra of the CCF during the 1950s, and it was pronounced to be synonymous with anti-Communism. But although its members were right that liberty, as they understood it, required anti-Communism, they did not all see clearly that anti-Communism was perhaps a necessary but not a sufficient condition for it. Gorkin’s endorsement of Castillo Armas in Guatemala, for example, showed that he identified liberty with the forceful suppression of a popular political movement. When the CCF was accused of being right-wing or of acting in the interests of U.S. empire, Gorkin’s behavior would be the sort of thing that would justify the charges, bringing to mind the Chilean “antipoet” Nicanor Parra’s quip: “And that was how they converted him from a useful idiot of the Left to a useless idiot of the Right.” Gorkin’s was the logic of the “imperialism of liberty,” and it made the term hollow both for those who thought “liberty” an important value and for those who saw in it only the interests of empire. Mario Monteforte Toledo, whose presses were destroyed by Castillo Armas, was fully aware that liberty required more than anti-Communism. The end of the 1950s soon brought a new opportunity to aid in a country’s political transformation along the lines sought by the anti-Communist Left. The country was Cuba. It would prove to be the CCF’s greatest success, as well as its greatest failure.59

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Anti-Communist Left and the Cuban Revolution

  The language of humanism suffused the early months of the Cuban Revolution, a social transformation not in the name of any particular ideology, its supporters insisted, but simply for the benefit of people. “Freedom with bread, bread without terror: that is humanism,” Fidel Castro declared while visiting the United States. In 1959 outgoing mail from Cuba to the United States bore a special stamp that read, “In Cuba, we are living happy now with humanism, not Communism.” The mark refuted those in the United States who identified independent nationalism with Communism, but in using the word “humanism” to place the Cuban Revolution apart from Communism, Fidel Castro was making an able run to gain the affection of multiple audiences. These included the anti-Communist Left, which had often used “humanism” to indicate a commitment to a balanced course between the Scylla and Charybdis of capitalism and Communism.1

  Indeed, one of the magazines in which the Democratic Left worked out its agenda was called Humanismo. Founded by an intellectual from Peru’s Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana in 1952 and edited by the Cuban academic Raúl Roa beginning in 1954, Humanismo was a noncommercial publication supported by advertising from the Mexican government and based in Mexico City. It was especially important to the members of the anti-Communist Left who made the Mexican capital their home during periods of exile, like the Venezuelans of Acción Democrática during the years of dictatorship between 1948 and 1958. Humanismo published many of the same writers and thinkers as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and Cuadernos, although there was no affiliation between the two, and Humanismo focused more consistently on Latin American affairs, in contrast to the European orientation of Cuadernos.2

  Opposed to both Communism and dictatorship, the magazine supported the struggle against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. A special issue published in early 1958 was dedicated to the people of Cuba and included published correspondence from Fidel Castro and several essays expressing hope in a democratic future for Cuba. A year later, the revolution victorious, Humanismo aligned itself with Cuba’s new government and began to publish summaries of its new laws. But its tone began to change. Over the course of 1959, Humanismo published more Marxist authors, criticism of non-Marxist leftists, and unadorned compendia of the actions of Cuba’s revolutionary government. The Mexican advertising disappeared, and by the end of the year the magazine’s operation had been transferred to Cuba, where it was supported by the National Bank. It began to publish a large amount of material about and by Che Guevara. His account of killing a howling, potentially disruptive puppy in the Sierra Maestra appeared there as an allegory of necessary sacrifice, even of the innocent. Then, in mid-1960, the self-proclaimed magazine of “democratic orientation” suddenly vanished. Its disappearance could have stood in for the feelings of many of the Cuban Revolution’s non-Marxist supporters: like the magazine, the hopes of Latin America’s democratic revolution had seemed to move briefly to Cuba, only to be co-opted and then destroyed.3

  The Cuban Revolution changed everything for the region’s Left, lifting spirits and expectations but also creating new axes of division. The revolution began with roots planted firmly in the island’s anti-Communist center-left political parties, while the orthodox Communist Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), one of the region’s most established, sneered at Castro’s military adventuring. The PSP joined Castro’s 26th of July Movement only in the final months before victory. As he became the leader of a heterogeneous mixture of antidictatorial groups, Castro took steps to assure that both the moderate anti-Communist wing of his movement and the radical wing, which included the Communists, remained content. But after victory PSP members were given positions of privilege in the armed forces and influence in crafting early revolutionary legislation. As conflict with the United States escalated, Castro turned to the Soviet Union and suppressed expressions of anti-Communism among his supporters. In April 1961, just before the invasion of a CIA-trained exile army at the Bay of Pigs, Castro declared the Cuban Revolution socialist; by the end of
the year he was calling it Marxist-Leninist. Cuba’s example created a new generation of revolutionaries across the continent and forever changed the parameters of Latin American Communism. Debates about Communism in the 1950s had relied on analyzing the distant European experience; Cuba made that conversation passé. The Cold War in the Americas from that point onward would be less about East-West conflict than about rejection or acceptance of Cuba and its intellectual, political, and military influence.4

  For the CCF, too, Cuba changed everything. It changed the future of the organization, prompting it to push aside the European focus of the 1950s and displace an entire generation of crusty anti-Communist activists in favor of skeptical socialists who would be able to speak more directly to the appeal of revolutionary Cuba. But the revolution did not simply change the future; it also changed the past. The important role that the explicitly anti-Communist Left had played in supporting the revolution, especially in public relations work that helped Castro gain legitimacy, was erased both by the Cuban government, which saw that group as traitorous, and by the anti-Communists, who felt the same way about Castro. When, in advance of the attack on the Bay of Pigs, Encounter and Cuadernos published articles by Theodore Draper arguing that Castro had betrayed the revolution and had become a totalitarian ruler, it marked a breach that obscured how much Castro and the anti-Communist Left had once had in common. The Cuban Revolution was the CCF’s most important political triumph. For once, CCF personnel played a part in an antidictatorial campaign and had a reasonably important role in bringing a new government to power. Yet its victory proved one from which the CCF would never really recover.