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

by Patrick Iber

  The Casa de las Américas building in 2013 had not changed much since 1959, nor had the cars in front of it. Before 1959 the same building housed the Asociación de Escritores y Artistas Americanos, and the Cuban Association of the Congress for Cultural Freedom held meetings there. Reproduced by Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0; © 2013 by Sandra Cohen-Rose and Colin Rose.

  Cuba’s new kind of democracy would be participatory, calling the people out to huge assemblies. It would, Castro announced definitively in mid-1960, not hold elections. And its new institutions began to clash almost immediately with the complex of organizations associated with the anti-Communist Left. Its most illiberal organizations were affected first. Eusebio Mujal, whose unions of the CTC had aided Batista, was working with such an obviously impoverished definition of democracy that he had done much to discredit the concept in Cuba. He was granted asylum by the Argentine embassy; an attempt to fly him out of the country was initially blocked on the runway by an angry crowd of thousands. But with Mujal out, ORIT tried to maintain a good relationship with Castro. Luis Alberto Monge, ORIT’s secretary general, had befriended Castro in Mexico and made a trip to Cuba to try and smooth over any differences. For most of 1959 ORIT remained generally enthusiastic about Castro’s revolutionary plan, thinking that it would benefit working people and do away with the immorality that had marked the previous governments. But anti-Communist leaders were removed from office in mid-1959 and replaced by members of the Communist PSP; during its Tenth Congress in November 1959, Castro arranged to have the CTC withdraw from ORIT and pledge to lead a new international. Over the following months many prominent anti-Communist labor leaders were imprisoned, and the Communist Lázaro Peña was placed in charge of the CTC again at the beginning of 1961. Anti-Communist labor would go on to complain bitterly about involuntary labor in Cuba and the withering away of an independent labor movement under Castro.32

  The pattern was similar in other areas. Although Castro had needed the anti-Communist Left in order to win the battle against Batista, he needed more radical allies in order to govern. As relations with the United States deteriorated, the institutions of liberal society that had existed (for some) during the Auténtico years and in opposition under Batista were replaced by those of a one-party state. In April 1959 Castro traveled to the United States. While he was there, he had a secret meeting with CIA officials in which he convinced them that he was a genuine anti-Communist and agreed to receive CIA information on international Communism. But Castro never responded to the first message sent, and in general, his meetings with U.S. officials ended without any pledge of mutual understanding. By summer the Eisenhower administration had decided that it would be impossible to carry on friendly relations with Castro’s government and began to fund the internal opposition and seek ways to remove him from office. Although in May Castro was still talking of an “entirely democratic” revolution, the recently reopened University of Havana was purged of those hostile to the regime. When the liberals of Castro’s first cabinet resigned because of mounting concern over the course of social change, he replaced them with more radical allies. After President Manuel Urrutia made a public criticism of Communism in late June, Castro publicly upbraided him, saying that attacking Communism interfered with Cuba’s pledge to remain neutral in the Cold War. Castro replaced Urrutia with Osvaldo Dorticós, who had been a member of the Communist PSP, an early indication of many to follow that the Cuban Revolution, while not yet a Communist one, intended to be an anti-anti-Communist one.33

  International relations with the anti-Communist Left soured. Rómulo Betancourt had been elected president of Venezuela in late 1958, and he and Castro made a pact to continue Caribbean Legion–like activities, cosponsoring a failed invasion of the Dominican Republic to overthrow the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. But Betancourt wanted his interventionism to be antidictatorial, not anti-U.S., and became a hated enemy; eventually, Cuba would support some of the many leftist insurgent groups that sprang up in Venezuela. For his part, José Figueres, who had been president of Costa Rica until 1958, traveled in March 1959 to Cuba and made a speech advising Castro not to confront the United States; Castro in turn described Figueres as a “bad friend, a bad democrat, and a bad revolutionist.”34

  The most troubling case for liberal supporters of the Cuban Revolution was that of Huber Matos. Matos, who admired the social democratic anti-Communism of Figueres, had been a military commander during the revolution and had helped oversee the confiscation of large estates during the agrarian reform. But he became alarmed at the appearance of Marxist propaganda in the military magazine controlled by Fidel’s brother, Raúl. By October 1959, however, it had become impossible to criticize Communist influence within the revolution publicly, since, in the face of U.S. hostility, doing so could be interpreted as an invitation to foreign intervention. Matos tried to be discreet. On 19 October he insisted that he be allowed to resign; two days later he was accused of treason and threatened with execution. Those within the government who sided with him were dismissed. He was convicted in a demonstration trial in December and served a prison sentence that included torture until he was released in 1979. The arrest of Matos sent yet another signal that internal opposition would be sharply constrained.35

  If the Batista years had been full of censorship and repression, the Auténtico years had, in spite of their other democratic failings, featured a free and freewheeling press. At first, it seemed that the revolution would resemble the latter, with additional revolutionary voices joining the scene. The 26th of July Movement’s newspaper, called Revolución, was edited by Carlos Franqui, who had been, with Llerena, part of the 26th of July Committee in Exile. Revolución’s weekly cultural supplement, Lunes de Revolución, which began publishing on 23 March 1959, was directed by the satirist and novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante. But anti-Communist groups of both the Left and the Right struggled to adapt to the new circumstances. Popular publications, like the pro-Ortodoxo and anti-Batista periodical Bohemia and the newspaper Prensa Libre, where Mario Llerena was then writing, were sympathetic to the revolution but hostile to Communist participation in it. (The oldest and most conservative paper, Diario de la Marina, inveterately hostile to the new order, was widely detested by the new revolutionaries.) During 1959 and early 1960, in spite of worrying signs, many anti-Communists (including Mañach, for example) believed that Castro was using Communists to his advantage without sympathy for their programs, and that his remained a safe path forward. But conflicts emerged between the management of some publications and their workers. By the end of 1959 workers at one paper refused to print articles from international wire services that compared Che Guevara to Hitler. Workers at many papers began to add coletillas, little postscripts to the end of articles, that argued against content that they found defamatory or insulting. To some, this seemed a form of censorship; to others, it was the eruption of the voice of the workers into a space formerly controlled by the bourgeoisie. In January 1960 Castro sided with the workers, declaring that news cables should have statements of clarification added at the bottom by the printers’ union.36

  Around the time of the new requirements, Llerena wrote an article for Prensa Libre in which he implicitly compared what was taking place in Cuba to what had happened during the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. First, he wrote, conservative newspapers were closed on account of having “served the fascists.” This was followed by psychological terror, in which a special committee of journalists was formed to “defend the integrity of Czech journalism.” Although censorship never took on any explicit form, criticism of Communism or the Soviet Union carried the risk of arrest. Llerena intended to suggest that similar processes were at work in Cuba. He called Czechoslovakia “a gloomy picture that reflects uneasily in the mirror of our times.”

  The coletilla appended to Llerena’s article responded: “CLARIFICATION—This article is published voluntarily by this printing house using the freedom of the press that exists in Cuba, by th
e Union of Journalists and Graphical Workers of this work center … Although the author of this article maliciously tries to make it appear so, the situation of the press in Cuba bears no resemblance to what happened in [Czechoslovakia]. Neither the Cuban workers nor the journalists have tried, and therefore the Revolution has not tried, to control the organs of expression or to serve the interests of any particular political party.” Llerena responded in print. He wrote that he was proud to have received his first coletilla and said that he would be ashamed to have written during this period and not to have been issued one. He then addressed the institution of the coletilla itself, declaring that he knew many journalists who disapproved of the content and the process of the clarifications. He hated the anonymous character of the coletilla and thought that all those who agreed with it should sign their names. Above all, he believed that a newspaper had to have its own personality, a soul that created the reasons that the public sought it out to buy it. The coletillas, as a form of internal censorship, interfered with the editorial process that gave a newspaper its character. Llerena concluded what he called his “pointless” response with an invocation of José Martí: “Words are not for hiding the truth, but for saying it.”37

  The coletilla appended to Llenera’s critique demonstrates how differently its authors thought of the freedom of the press:

  CLARIFICATION: This article is published voluntarily by this printing house using the freedom of the press that exists in Cuba. The journalists and graphical workers of this work center express, in the legitimate use of that right, that the clarifying postscript is not mere pageantry. Rather, it is a legal institution that revolutionary-minded workers (intellectual and manual) apply simply in order to speed up the right to reply in defense of the Revolution against the barrage of the opposition, without having to wait out the long process of a tribunal. Its purpose is not to hurt or decorate anyone, nor is it to earn merits for those who might sign it (it is not anonymous, it is “solidarinous”). With respect to the idea that in this work center there are journalists who don’t share the views of the coletilla, that is obviously not the case. This one has not been refuted by any comrade.

  As conflicts with the press escalated, the conservative Diario de la Marina began publishing a count of the new coletillas that appeared in each independent newspaper. In April the Executive Board of the Provincial College of Journalists in Havana defended the coletilla, saying: “There is freedom of the press in Cuba. This freedom is no longer simply for the owner or seller of information, but for the journalist, for the manual worker and intellectual to make known his position regarding false, antipatriotic, and tendentious information by means of postscript or annotation, a procedure that … is one of the finest achievements of journalism and freedom of expression.” Cuba’s revolutionaries saw themselves as overcoming the institutions and limited freedoms of bourgeois society, and the developments in the press merely as one manifestation of that process. The idea of a bourgeois press in the most literal sense—one that was owned by and reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie—was widely seen as discredited. This left open the problem of who would decide what constituted antipatriotic discourse or tendentious information, or, indeed, what political incentives those making the decisions might have to act in ways that suppressed dissent or criticism.38

  What was clear was that the emerging Cuban state—centralized, revolutionary, and with popular, mass participation—chafed against liberal ideas of social institutions that placed explicit value on pluralistic public space. Llerena’s predictions were not far off the mark. In April the offices of the newspapers El Mundo and Avance were seized. On occasions when newspaper workers refused to insert coletillas, they were humiliated by their union bosses and fired. In May Diario de la Marina was stormed, and the paper shut down. President Dorticós declared that journalists were “rank-and-file soldiers in this great struggle to diffuse our great revolutionary truth before the world” and said that press freedom meant “the right of journalists to defend the integral interests of the Cuban Revolution.” Another Prensa Libre columnist warned of the “solid and impenetrable totalitarian unanimity” that would come when the government eliminated all opposition press. Three days later Prensa Libre itself was shut down. Avance and other papers did in fact become assets of U.S. policy, as they had been accused of being, when the CIA gave them money to publish Miami-based versions in advance of the Bay of Pigs invasion.39

  By mid-1960 it was clear that there would be no reconcilation between the anti-Communist Left and Castro. In Venezuela, Rómulo Betancourt met resistance from the youth wing of his own party, which was inspired by Castro and disliked Betancourt’s attacks on Communism. In April 1960 his government hosted the second international meeting of the IADF, ten years after the first had met in Prío’s Cuba, bringing together groups representing his idea of the Democratic Left. The Cubans who attended were mostly Betancourt’s friends from the Auténtico party, such as Aureliano Sánchez Arango, who were already plotting to try to remove Castro from power. Although the IADF was not a CIA front, the U.S. intelligence agency used the occasion of the conference to meet with anti-Castro Cubans and to begin to mount a program of covert action to remove Castro from power. The Frente Revolucionario Democrático (FRD), which would be the political front group for the Bay of Pigs invasion, was formed in May 1960 around five politically centrist figures who had formerly supported Castro.40

  Scarcely more than a year after its enthusiastic return, the Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom once again existed in name only. In February 1960 Castro had signed a trade deal with the Soviet Union and in May declared that his government would not hold elections. Llerena was by then fully convinced of Castro’s totalitarian ambitions. He wrote to Gorkin that “Cuba is now the first attempt at totalitarianism in Latin America, and … he [Llerena] and others used to believe that [Gorkin] exaggerated about the methods of Stalinism, but now we understand that [Gorkin] stopped short [of the full truth].” When the CCF held a major gathering in West Berlin to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its first meeting, it was decided to close down the Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom. The association’s program of conferences scheduled for 1960—including “Liberty and the Processes of Revolution,” “The Limits of Freedom,” “Freedom of the Press,” and “Freedom and Exercise of Professional Activity”—had to be cut short. The association’s members, including Llerena, Aja, and Mañach, once again felt the need to flee the country. Another member, the professor of sociology Rosario Rexach, left after a Communist student minder—there was one in every university class—denounced her as a counterrevolutionary because her lectures on the French Revolution credited it with having done much to develop systems of modern education. But she could have easily represented the ways in which intellectual freedom, for some ardent revolutionaries, seemed a proxy for counterrevolutionary privilege: Rexach said that she could have stayed if she had kept her mouth shut, with a good income of $6,000 a year, an air-conditioned house, and three servants.41

  Some, including Mañach and Aja, resettled in Puerto Rico. Given shelter by the University of Puerto Rico, whose leadership sympathized with the anti-Communist Left, Aja tried to reconvene the Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom in exile. Aja, described by one future representative of the CCF as “rather silly and vaguely ridiculous as an intellectual,” suffered from low personal prestige and debilitating mental health problems. His attempt to recreate the Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom made no impression. By the end of 1961 both Mañach and Aja had died, Aja by suicide. Not until after the fall of the Soviet Union decades later could Mañach’s writings be openly admired in Cuba.42

  Llerena, by contrast, joined the large group of mostly privileged Cubans who were making new homes in Miami, where he enjoyed a long career as a journalist among the anti-Castro exiles at the center of the whirlwind of activities, conspiracies, and publications, more often than not connected to the CIA through a spaghetti of absurd relationships. Othe
r members of Cuba’s anti-Communist Left who had not had any direct relationship with the CCF began new careers fronting for CIA efforts to damage and unseat Castro, especially through the FRD. The FRD was responsible for propaganda and sabotage operations and intended to display the future leadership of a post-Castro Cuba. (Before his suicide Pedro Vicente Aja had served as the head of the Puerto Rican delegation of the FRD.) Aureliano Sánchez Arango joined its leadership for a time, falsely claiming that his Triple-A commanded thousands of armed men in Cuba and, alongside Mujal, had support among labor. Sánchez Arango began to claim that the Soviet Union had completely taken over the island of Cuba after 1961. One CIA official remembered his Triple-A as just one of many anti-Castro rackets, trying to leverage phantom guerrillas and anti-Communist credentials to secure financial support from the U.S. government. Whatever the case, Sánchez Arango soon broke with the FRD, complicating CIA efforts to keep its favored exile assets together.43

  Raúl Roa and some of the younger members of the Cuban Association of the CCF, including Roa’s son, served the new government with distinction. In 1956, when Roa had refused to meet with Castro in Mexico, he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the CCF’s favorite campaigns: he denounced the “brutal methods of the Soviet army to repress the patriotic rising of the Hungarian people” and “the brain-washing and systematic engrossing of the sensibility [that occurs under] Marxist-Caesaro-papism.” His classical education was useful after he became foreign minster under Castro because he defended some of his government’s initiatives by pointing out that they could be derived from definitions of justice advanced by Aristotle, not Marx. In 1960 he returned from a visit to Yugoslavia very enthusiastic about a model of an “alternative Communism.” The U.S. government sometimes tried to craft campaigns using Roa’s anti-Communist words from a previous era against him, but to little effect. By the late 1960s Roa had as little sympathy for his former colleagues as he had once had for Communism; in 1968 he described Sánchez Arango as the greatest fraud of his generation and Carlos Prío as (in loose and inadequate translation) a “piece-of-shit thief.”44