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

by Patrick Iber

  Roa’s son, “Raulito” Roa Kourí, was one of the group that Llerena had helped bring into the 26th of July Movement in 1956 via participation in the CCF; he was eventually named Cuban representative to the United Nations. Llerena, who came to despise the dedication that many of these mostly educated and affluent Cubans showed to Castro, later wrote: “I used to think that my personal influence had played no small part in bringing them into the fold of the 26 of July Movement. I no longer believe that. Those young people had within themselves the habits of leisure, the undigested knowledge, and the spiritual vacuum that ultimately determined their ideological conversion [to Castroism].” That line of reasoning reflected Llerena’s subsequent bitterness more than any reality; others whom he had recruited independently made their own breaks with Castro.45

  To most Cubans, the fate of the CCF would have passed entirely without notice, and the problems of intellectuals and the press would have seemed like minor disturbances compared with the actions that affected them all: the agrarian reform, suspension of relations with the United States and the signing of trade deals with the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the literacy campaigns. By 1961 Cuba’s liberals had mostly returned to exile. But concentration of power in state hands provided an opportunity for a second wave of disillusionment, this time among more committed socialist revolutionaries. This disenchantment with Cuban socialism—not the liberal disappointment that it had become socialism in the first place—was the one that would reorient the Cultural Cold War in the region.

  Lunes de Revolución, edited by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, began publishing in March 1959 as the cultural supplement of the 26th of July newspaper, Revolución. Its third issue, on 3 April, in a still very open atmosphere, was dedicated to different ideas of revolution from history and published selections from the writings of Thomas Paine, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaak Babel, John Reed, André Breton, and Leon Trotsky. Throughout its first year it published new and established currents in Cuban writing, including works by José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, Heberto Padilla, Severo Sarduy, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and Roberto Fernández Retamar. When Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited Cuba and declared that the new society was a direct democracy resulting from a spontaneous and nonideological revolution, they did so after conversations in the offices of Lunes. On its first anniversary Lunes queried major leaders for their opinions of what they did and did not like about Lunes: Fidel Castro called it “a good effort in the need to express three similar things: Revolution, people, and culture,” and Che Guevara replied that Lunes was sometimes very good, sometimes suffered from “intellectualisms” divorced from Cuban reality, but in the end was one of the major contributors to Cuban cultural reality.46

  But in the next few months Lunes encountered trouble. Perhaps it was Cabrera Infante’s publication of Trotsky’s writings as the Cuban government drew increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union. Or perhaps it was Cabrera Infante’s enthusiasm for a cinema verité film titled P.M., filmed outside official channels, that showed Havana’s nightlife, complete with debauchery that the revolution had not eliminated. The revolution saw itself as increasingly under threat as confirmed reports about an exile army, trained mostly in Guatemala by the CIA for an invasion, reached Cuban shores. On 16 April 1961 Castro formally declared the Cuban Revolution to be “socialist.” The very next day some 1,400 Cuban exiles, trained and supported by the CIA, landed at the Bay of Pigs. Within three days they had been completely defeated.47

  The CCF had long since turned against Castro’s Cuban Revolution and had sought to undermine Castro’s standing among European social democrats by soliciting a piece from Theodore Draper for the March issue of Encounter, printed just before the Bay of Pigs invasion. Influenced by Mario Llerena’s writings for the 26th of July Movement, Draper warned that “Castro promised one kind of revolution and made another. The revolution Castro promised was unquestionably betrayed.” Draper warned of terror ahead and said that Castro had delivered “not a national revolution but an international civil war.” (Arthur Schlesinger passed Draper’s article on to President Kennedy in advance of his decision to approve the attack, calling it the “best that I have seen on the Cuban Revolution.”) After the attack failed, Encounter, and then Cuadernos, published Draper’s oft-repeated critical assessment of the Bay of Pigs: “The ill-fated invasion of Cuba … was one of those rare politico-military events—a perfect failure.” From the liberal perspective, the invasion had not only left Castro in power but also had provided a developing Cuban Communism with the prestige of having defeated an attack by the United States and the rhetorical ammunition to rally anti-imperialists to its cause. It also made Castro, even more than he had already been, revolutionary royalty: the man who had defeated the Colossus of the North. Che Guevara, on this point at least, agreed with Draper. In a meeting with a U.S. official later in 1961, he thanked him for the invasion that had transformed Cuba from an aggrieved little country into an equal.48

  Heightened international tensions were not for the ideologically suspect. With the case of the troubled P.M. on the minds of many, Castro convened the Conference of Intellectuals for June 1961. On June 30 Castro pledged to clarify his position and assuage the anxieties that some felt. Socioeconomic revolution produced a cultural revolution, Castro stated, but while revolutionary art naturally followed, not all artists had to be committed revolutionaries. Artists should be free to practice as they chose, with the only exception being art that went against the revolution’s own “right to exist.” Therefore, artists should not be concerned about the absence of freedom, for the revolution would defend freedom; artists could produce unpopular and useless works of art if they chose. They should only be concerned not to be against the revolution, fearing not the executioner of culture but the judgment of posterity. Castro’s pithy formulation “Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, no rights” summarized the position clearly. On the one hand, it was a clear statement that there would be no Cuban equivalent to socialist realism—no officially sanctioned form or artistic content. On the other hand, it created a category of “antirevolutionary” art and made it impossible for an artist to know in advance whether his or her work would be judged to be in that category.49

  In the end, P.M. was banned permanently, and Lunes closed a few issues later. By the end of the year all newspapers and magazines were under state control. In August the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba was created, headed by the stalwart Communist poet Nicolás Guillén, and the state assigned control over literary production to the union. When Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited again, Guillén, a veteran of peace campaigns from the Stalin era, told them, in classic antiformalist style, that he judged “all research into technique and form counter-revolutionary.” He would later use an anecdote to explain Cuban cultural policy: “During [World War II], a Soviet author sent Stalin a romance that he had written in those dramatic days; an egoistic book of intimacies, hidden passion and unbridled devotion. Cannons thundered on all fronts: the Nazis tightened their bloody siege of Stalingrad; millions of men and women fell, never to get up again. Stalin was asked what he thought of the book and he responded: ‘Very interesting, even good. But only two copies should be printed: one for her and one for him.’ ” With Cuba under siege from enemies from without and from within, he meant to say, the intellectual process had to respect the needs of the people and be responsible for building revolutionary culture.50

  The situation was perhaps not as constrained as Guillén’s reference to Stalin would suggest. Debate was not brought to an end; it merely had to be carried out “within the revolution.” And so it was: there were lively print debates between those who favored a more Soviet cultural and political model and those who preferred a more independent and sui generis revolution that had done so much to inspire a radical “New Left” around the world. In its first years, many Cubans experienced the new institutions of the revol
ution as expansions of freedoms and democratic practice: assemblies and rallies that gave people ways of communicating their desires to their government. But dissent was curbed in ways that represented real loss. “Voluntary” labor for intellectuals in the cane fields turned, in the mid-1960s, into camps for those defined as deviant, such as homosexuals, intellectuals, and political dissidents. On the other hand, there was no ban on abstract art, as in the Soviet Union, and Cuban painters participated fully in international currents, making very effective use of the decade’s pop art, for example. Poets emerged from factories and fields, and far more books were printed and read in the new Cuba than in the prerevolutionary years. Casa de las Américas marched on, defending its members from the worst abuses of state interference and growing in prestige.51

  The most important Latin American writers associated themselves with the Cuban Revolution and—especially if they were not Cuban—wrote with considerable freedom. The urbane and urban Argentine writer Julio Cortázar—whose novel Rayuela (1963) is often identified as the beginning of the period of enormous productivity and expansion in the interest in and market for Latin American writers known as the “boom” in Latin American letters—traveled to Cuba from Paris to work with Casa de las Américas and observed: “Except for four or five writers … all of the intellectuals and the artists are up to their necks with Fidel Castro, working like crazies, teaching literacy, directing theater and going out to the countryside to learn its problems … It goes without saying that I feel old, dried up, French beside them. If I were twenty years younger … I’d stay … What incredible people.” Cortázar’s astonished admiration for what he saw taking place could stand in for the reaction of a generation. The absent liberals were quickly forgotten; Cuba seemed to offer a fresh set of symbols and ideas, a new set of subjects for artists and writers to confront. It helped disseminate the ideas and works of the cultural Left that supported it, and it helped make that work meaningful.52

  Cortázar’s Rayuela was set in Argentina and France, can be read in multiple orders, was aesthetically unconventional, and centered on psychological drama. In the wrong era in the Soviet Union, it might have been seen as decadent. Cuba was different. Rayuela was greeted with enthusiasm by Latin American leftists because its author was a friend, and revolutionaries embraced it because, in making the chapter order the choice of the reader, it could be understood as inviting the reader to become more active and self-conscious. International interest and enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution generally made Latin America seem a more interesting and attractive region to those in the United States or Europe who might have ignored it otherwise, and that unquestionably played a part in making the boom possible. So too, did the Casa de las Américas prizes, which helped signal potentially prestigious works to a wider world and would soon be imitated by Catalan literary agents whose work would eventually be most closely associated with the boom. That the boom, with its commercial and marketing overtones, was a phenomenon of the capitalist marketplace, inspired in part by the Cuban Revolution, would be just one of its many ironies. Another was that the cosmopolitan and universalist project that CCF organizers like Julián Gorkin had hoped to create through their works was now being implemented by a revolutionary government that they had helped bring to power, only to find that it created a new kind of future in which they had no part to play. Passing along the way through a dictatorship that offered neither democracy nor socialism and leaving the anti-Communist Left excluded and bitter, Cuba had gone from a flawed democracy without socialism to a flawed socialism without democracy.53

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Peace and National Liberation in the Mexican 1960s

  The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) understood itself to be a defender of democracy and a foe of totalitarianism, but its most consequential political action in Latin America before 1961 had been to help bring to power the government of Fidel Castro, which it soon came to view as representing precisely the kind of totalitarianism that it opposed. When Castro declared the content of the Cuban Revolution to be socialist in 1961, Cuban Communism became the nightmare that haunted the dreams of U.S. policy makers and the region’s political Right. The next year, the United States pressured Latin American governments to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States. The CCF spent the next several years trying to mobilize an anti-Castro center-left as it had once tried to mobilize an anti-Soviet center-left.

  Just as Cuba transformed the politics of anti-Communism in Latin America, it also remade the region’s radicals. Old-fashioned pro-Soviet Communists remained across Latin America, of course, and if they seemed moderate in comparison to the Cubans, it was because they were indeed moderate by comparison. The Soviet Union, for domestic political reasons, needed to avoid conflict with the United States; Cuba, also for domestic political reasons, but with less choice in the matter, needed to maintain a state of conflict with U.S. imperialism. Especially after the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in 1963, the Soviet Union became more cautious about sponsoring revolutionary activities abroad. Cuba did not. Prompted by the Cuban example, and sometimes with Cuban support, guerrilla warfare defined the global 1960s and 1970s as small groups sprang up around the world to liberate their countries from imperialism and capitalism by force of small arms. The model never worked. Che Guevara’s martyrdom was complete when he was killed in 1967 on a hopeless foray deep in the Bolivian jungle that had the support neither of the people of the country nor of the Bolivian Communist Party. But his image and his life continued to inspire. Guevara wrote that making revolution was largely a matter of will. One did not wait for the right historical circumstances, he argued: they could be created with a small band of guerrilla fighters. Although the notion was not even an accurate history of the Cuban example on which it appeared to be based, it remained a powerful one.1

  But if left-wing revolutionary insurgency seemed to define the decade, it was counterinsurgency and counterrevolution that would change the landscape of Latin American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Military regimes took command over much of Latin America’s population: coups put military governments in power in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia firmly by 1971, Chile and Uruguay in 1973, and Argentina in 1966 and again in 1976. Guerrilla movements were crushed there and in other places, like Guatemala, where repression was hardly novel. The regimes collaborated with one another in an era of torture, murder, and disappearances that went far beyond the destruction of the insurgent Left, targeting civilian politicians, journalists, and labor activists who were trying to restore democracy. These “dirty wars” of military governments against their own civilian populations made a new era of darkness for the region’s Left.2

  In at least one major country in the region, however, the story is commonly said to have been different. Mexico maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba even after other countries were pressured to break them, arguing that Cuba had the right to self-determination. Castro reciprocated by brushing off Mexican would-be guerrilla fighters who tried to train in his country. As a result, revolutionaries in Mexico lacked international support. There would also be no military government in Mexico, where the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) remained firmly in control. The quiescence of Mexico is more myth than reality—its version of the dirty war was also brutal and cruel—but it ruined perhaps many hundreds of lives rather than many thousands. This limited form of Mexican exceptionalism has traditionally been explained as the result of revolutionary solidarity with Cuba, a consequence of the distinctive tradition in Mexican diplomacy that calls for respecting the internal affairs of other nations. But it also had other sources: a secret deal with the United States to keep one Latin American embassy open to Cuba and also the fear of the domestic Left, organized in the 1960s into the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN, the Movement for National Liberation).3

  The MLN was established in 1961 and quickly mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters into a broad left-wing front, but it faded quickly. By 1964 it had broken o
n the familiar jagged rocks of sectarian division, onto which it had been enthusiastically thrown by a hostile Mexican government. Although it limped on until the end of the decade, it lost in its first few years many of its most prominent supporters, including Lázaro Cárdenas, who had emerged from political retirement to become its symbolic leader. Within Mexico the MLN called for a return to the democratic values of the Mexican Revolution, associated with the presidency of Cárdenas, and lamented that the present leadership of the PRI tolerated and abetted venality, corruption, and poverty.

  But the MLN was not simply a domestic political movement. It was also a product of the global Cultural Cold War. Its politics were aligned with and developed from an interaction with the Soviet-sponsored peace movement. The MLN’s foreign policy, which called for the defense of Cuba and of movements of national liberation, echoed the established rhetoric of the World Peace Council (WPC). This was no accident, for Lázaro Cárdenas and many of its other leaders had become active members of the WPC in the years before the establishment of the MLN. In 1962, when the MLN was at the peak of its strength, former president Emilio Portes Gil tried to cast it as illegitimate by calling it dependent on Moscow and directed by the Kremlin. Cárdenas responded by declaring that the MLN was dependent on no foreign power and was dedicated to the postulates of the Mexican Revolution. Cárdenas was correct, largely because he worked assiduously to keep out foreign funds. The germ of truth in Portes Gil’s charge lay in the organizational impetus that the WPC gave to the MLN.4