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

by Patrick Iber

  If Lázaro Cárdenas had hoped that the existence of the MLN would pressure the PRI to put forward left-wing candidates, Díaz Ordaz would prove what a failure it had been. Díaz Ordaz clashed with students throughout his term in office and held paranoid views of leftists and the young. The 1968 massacre of students at Tlatelolco by government troops made the MLN’s critique of the lack of democratic legitimacy of the PRI all the more powerful, but it was no longer around to make it (although some of the same people were, unsurprisingly, also involved in the student movement that was being repressed). The cells of the Palacio de Lecumberri once again filled with political prisoners. Díaz Ordaz’s successor, Luis Echeverría, president from 1970 to 1976, had been his minister of the interior and surely shared much of the blame for the massacre at Tlatelolco, but he took a different approach, adopting much of the Third Worldist language of the MLN and securing the cooperation of many of the cultural figures associated with it, such as Carlos Fuentes. Echeverría’s style aside, the changes to Mexico’s political system that did occur during his administration proved more cosmetic than substantial. Mexico’s Left was still trapped in the Cardenista paradox: dependent on centralized power to enact democratization.

  If the MLN left a limited domestic legacy within Mexico, it contributed to one major action outside its borders. Few saw Latin America as part of the Third World at the end of the 1950s. Decolonization that was fresh and ongoing in Asia and Africa was nearly a century and a half old in the region, and the nonaligned stance between the two superpowers that characterized much of Third World politics could hardly be applied to most of Latin America, which clearly belonged to the U.S. side of the global ledger. But the potential was there to build an idea of the “Third World” on the basis of a common history of imperial exploitation and subsequent underdevelopment. One expression of that idea was the Tricontinental Conference, held in 1966 with the intention of uniting the representatives of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

  Although Che Guevara had imagined Cuba as an inspiration to Asia and Africa as early as 1959, the idea to hold the Tricontinental Conference was not originally Cuban. Rather, it was broached at the Conferencia Latinoamericana in Mexico in 1961, and Latin American delegates continued to discuss it among themselves while attending WPC events in the early 1960s. Lázaro Cárdenas wanted it to be convoked by the national liberation movements—such as the MLN—of different countries. In late 1962 Brazilian delegate Valério Konder and Argentine delegate Alberto T. Casella convinced the WPC to sponsor the Tricontinental Conference along lines that had been drawn up in a memorandum by Lázaro Cárdenas. Cuba was especially interested and offered to host the conference. But a major international meeting in Brazil, similar to the Conferencia Latinoamericana and billed as the Continental Congress of Solidarity with Cuba, encountered trouble in 1963 when visas were denied to foreign delegations and the justice minister raided the building where planning was taking place. Lázaro Cárdenas remained the most forceful advocate for the Tricontinental Conference from 1961 through 1963.47

  Within the WPC the Soviet delegation had become the moderate one, far outstripped in its belief in the possibility of rapid social change by the Chinese and the Cubans. The Chinese saw Khrushchev’s efforts to sign agreements that decreased tensions with the United States as “collaboration with U.S. imperialism” and a violation of the principles of national liberation. In 1962 the Chinese peace committee issued a decree that the Soviet delegation’s 1956 decision to replace the Stalin Peace Prize with the Lenin Prize had been taken unilaterally and without consultation within the international peace movement, thus besmirching the great name of Stalin. The Chinese committee retaliated by issuing its own International Stalin Peace Prizes. For his part, Lázaro Cárdenas saw Sino-Soviet differences as debilitating to the unity of peoples in the fight against imperialism and tried to gather information to understand the tensions between the two countries. But there was nothing he could do, and he became progressively less involved with the WPC as a result of his frustration with its divisions.48

  When the Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian, and Latin American Peoples finally did meet in January 1966, it did so under Cuban auspices and against the backdrop of continued Sino-Soviet tension. The WPC was the most important participating organization and had hosted the discussion that had led to its convocation. The Mexican delegation came from the MLN. But the most significant figure of the Tricontinental Conference was the absent Che Guevara, whom Castro invoked as a symbol of the fight against imperialism. Castro denounced China at the event and made the worst villains of his closing speech “Trotskyists,” a signal of cooperation with the Soviet Union. But it was the Chinese position of anti-imperialist insurgency that was reflected in the solidarity organizations that were created there. The Cubans used the conference to recruit guerrilla fighters, unnerving Moscow. That April, at a smaller tricontinental meeting held in Cuba, the delegates heard a message from Guevara from the Bolivian jungle, looking for the bright future that the world could enjoy with the creation of “two, three, or many Vietnams.” National liberation, to be achieved by armed revolution, had supplanted the cause of peace. Both Mexico’s Conferencia Latinoamericana of 1961 and Cuba’s Tricontinental Conference of 1966 had their origins in discussions and planning supported by the WPC, but under very different leadership they created very different movements that in neither case acted precisely in the interests of Moscow. In spite of the vertical nature of power within global Communism, the MLN showed that connections to a Communist front organization did not necessarily imply the abandonment either of independence or democracy.49

  But if the MLN left relatively few signposts to mark its work, it trailed little ironies like so many breadcrumbs. In domestic politics, Cardenismo in the 1960s confronted the legacy of the 1930s, especially in the form of union centralization and PIPSA, and lost. The MLN looked to Cuba as its democratic model at the very moment when that country was building similarly repressive institutions. At the level of the global Cold War, it made a Stalinist like Siquerios a symbol of free expression and advocated a more democratic Mexico in precisely the “civil society” terms that were usually the province of anti-Communism. In the midst of the Cultural Cold War, it showed both how a prodemocracy movement could result from involvement with a Soviet front group and that it was difficult but possible to construct a financially and programmatically independent national political movement even amid such connections.

  But there remains one further irony, having to do not with the MLN’s failures but with its success in pressuring the Mexican government to maintain relations with Cuba. In the end, that proved to be a decision that benefited everyone. The Mexican government could cling to a tatter of revolutionary solidarity while giving Cuba a reason to direct its support for insurgency elsewhere; Mexican presidents were placed on the CIA payroll at the same time at which the head of the Mexican intelligence service was a personal friend of Fidel Castro. The United States, meanwhile, came to rely on Mexico’s continued relationship with Cuba to gather intelligence about developments there and in the rest of the Caribbean and Central America. As with the CCF, some of the most powerful effects of the MLN’s actions were those that it did not intend.50

  CHAPTER SIX

  Modernizing Cultural Freedom

  Twin transformations were under way in the structure of intellectual life during the 1960s in Latin America. One was the rise of the internationally famous writer-intellectual who would achieve a global audience and platform as a result of the boom in Latin American letters. At the same time, there was a shift toward the value of specific expertise, especially in the social sciences, where “experts” who studied human affairs would to some degree displace the generalist “intellectual.” The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) simultaneously tried to play a part in establishing both trends and to take advantage of them as it remade itself in response to the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution, for just as the Cuban Revolution had reinvigorate
d and reoriented the peace movement in Latin America, it did the same to the CCF. Within the CCF the 1950s had belonged to the right-wing socialists, many from Europe. One of the Spanish affiliates of the CCF, Carlos Carranza, who lived in Argentina and worked to distribute Cuadernos, returned from a trip to other countries of Latin America in 1961 disgusted and alarmed by the “infection of Castro-ite demagoguery.” “Intelligent and brave action is needed urgently,” Carranza warned, “if we do not wish to be consumed by totalitarianism … We are going to have to mobilize to defend democratic positions.” But the mobilization that was undertaken did not resemble the one that Carranza expected, and the CCF soon forced him into retirement.

  Responding to a new, more fashionable and local form of Communism, in the early 1960s the CCF began a shift toward openness to the Left. Instead of anti-Soviet essays, it moved to try to offer something new that it considered “productive.” It engaged more directly with “Latin American” issues and with writers and thinkers who identified with the Left. It sought to become more scholarly so as to assist in an analysis of the situation in Latin America and how conditions there might be improved. “We have begun a new type of work,” one of the architects of the change announced in 1963. “It has less to do with defending cultural freedom and more with practicing it.”1

  Anti-Communism, of course, still remained central to the self-conception of the organization, and it shared that priority with the U.S. government. The trajectory of the CCF in the region was in some ways parallel to U.S. policy toward the region. When John F. Kennedy assumed the U.S. presidency in 1961, he announced the Alliance for Progress, promising to use the power of the United States to push for social reform and economic development in Latin America. The new approach was supposed to differ from previous policies that had used allies of convenience and had left most U.S. involvement in Latin American development to private corporations. The ideas of the Alliance for Progress were not exactly new; at its end, even the Eisenhower administration had begun to rework its inter-American diplomacy toward a more statist approach. But many of the ideas of the Alliance for Progress resembled requests for assistance made by democratic allies in the region, including those associated with the CCF. Kennedy’s closest ally in Latin America, for example, was Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela. The anti-Communist Democratic Left had always promised the United States that it was its best partner in the fight against Communism on the grounds that only it, and not conservative administrations, could remove the conditions of poverty and inequality that supposedly made Communist ideas thrive.2

  Indeed, many of those who had long been active in the CCF were part of the Kennedy administration. The framework that both the CCF and the Kennedy administration used to look at Latin America was principally that of modernization theory. At its core, modernization theory expressed the idea that societies passed through linear stages of growth that would end in a modernity that resembled the United States: a political democracy and a capitalist market economy. Although some saw it as an anti-ideological, neutral form of scholarship, modernization theory was explicitly conceived as a kind of Marxist antivenom. Walt Rostow, the economic historian who served as a policy adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, made the connection between antirevolutionary politics and modernization explicit when he subtitled his book on stages of economic growth A Non-Communist Manifesto. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy aide who was also a participant in many CCF events, called modernization theory “a very American effort to persuade the developing countries to base their revolutions on Locke rather than Marx.”3

  And so, while those on the center-left welcomed the Alliance for Progress, its left-wing critics saw it as a means to forestall the revolutionary change that would truly deliver justice in the region. Instead, much of Latin America’s radical Left worked in the 1960s from a framework of dependency theory, arguing that Latin American underdevelopment resulted from the structures of domination that the North Atlantic capitalist core imposed on developing countries. Latin America’s problems, they reasoned, lay not in an absence of capitalism but in its presence. The meaningful distinction, argued Cuban poet Roberto Fernández Retamar, was not between underdeveloped and developed countries, but between underdeveloped and “underdeveloper” countries, whose exploitative capitalism created poverty in the periphery. There were moderate dependency theorists who thought that the principal remedy was political reform—among them Raúl Prebisch, who was published by the CCF, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the sociologist who in the 1990s would enact a neoliberal program of privatization of state assets as president of Brazil. But in the 1970s even Cardoso was writing that capitalism could not solve the basic problems of the region’s poor, and that the task ahead was to “construct paths toward socialism.” The most radical dependency theorists saw the solution not in political reform but in armed insurrection followed by autarky—economic separation from the capitalist world—as the only possible means of breaking from dependency.4

  The dependency idea was an argument about the past and future of Latin America’s political economy, but it was also a worldview. Not only would Latin America have to cut itself off from capitalist markets to break its dependency, but it would also have to purge itself of the contagion of capitalist culture. The United States was the regional hegemon, the most powerful nation on earth in both military and economic terms, and its power was everywhere: in the CIA’s actions to overthrow governments of the Left and its attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, in U.S. military training of counterinsurgent forces, and even in the efforts of U.S. foundations and universities to study Latin America. In 1964, for example, the U.S. Department of Defense had sponsored Project Camelot, which aimed to study the conditions that would lead to revolution in Latin America, state actions that might prevent it, and the potential use of U.S. military force in response. The project had been in the planning stages when it was exposed by one of its participants and canceled. Those involved with the project had seen it as a scholarly way to contribute to the prevention of a catastrophic revolution and did not feel that they were in any way spying for the United States.5

  But to those who not only thought that revolution would not be catastrophic but also believed that it was absolutely necessary, the project became known as Plan Camelot and was seen as a means of preparing the ground for U.S. intervention. The social scientists contracted to carry it out were portrayed as spies and puppets of Yankee imperialism. Although it never began, the project created an atmosphere of doubt about U.S.-backed social scientific research and the ways in which it might be put in the service of U.S. imperialism. Major U.S.-based foundations and the CIA-sponsored research programs that supported the United States’ antirevolutionary empire were seen as part of a coordinated project to suppress the Latin American Left. The existence of the CCF was part of the evidence that supported this claim, and there was some truth in it.

  The CCF did not quite seek to destroy the Left, but it did seek to strengthen its moderates at the expense of its radicals. In the early 1960s it tried to reach out to the Left in ways in which it had not during the 1950s, hoping to convince leftists to break taboos on criticizing Cuba. It also sponsored scholarship, generally within the framework of modernization theory, which it saw as undermining the appeal of radical dependency theory. But insofar as it formed one piece of a massive U.S.-led reactionary campaign, it was a poorly coordinated and messy piece. There were even moments when the ideas and actions that the CCF undertook, including those of the CIA agents directing it, departed in important ways from mainstream U.S. policy. But whether the CCF’s participants wanted to defend U.S. interests or not, they could not escape the consequences of their affiliation. At the end of the period of reform within the CCF, in 1966 and 1967, it was publicly revealed that the organization had long been the recipient of CIA funding. The result of those revelations was that what the CCF had understood to be “open-minded” analysis and the moderate socialist politics that typically accompanied it, rather than
the explicit and direct anti-Communism of the 1950s, were most discredited.

  The CCF sought to professionalize its Latin American project beginning in 1961, as the Cuban Revolution became more radical. If its ethos, an anti-Communist and antidictatorial program, had been a kind of Alliance for Progress avant la lettre, its active personnel had long passed their sell-by dates. Whatever leftist credentials they may have once had, the CCF’s professional anti-Communists (like Julián Gorkin, who edited Cuadernos, and Rodrigo García Treviño, who led the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom) had spent the better part of a decade focused solely on attacking Communism without playing a role in a constructive program for the Left. Their agenda might have been greeted as liberatory in parts of Eastern Europe or in Spain, but because an anti-Communist agenda in the Americas was so frequently the province of the most illiberal and undemocratic elements of state and society, their preoccupation with this cause was hard to square even with the limited goal of “cultural freedom.” Gorkin and García Treviño may still have considered themselves men of the Left, but few others did so any longer. The Cuban Revolution had brought attention to the desires of a younger generation and its politics, and the top leadership of the CCF came to believe that its current coterie of aging liberals and bitter ex-Marxists could not hope to rouse any significant support in the 1960s.