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

by Patrick Iber

  As he prepared to launch the review, Rodríguez Monegal was attempting to engineer a kind of thaw in the Cold War in Latin American letters. In June 1966 International PEN met in New York City for its first major gathering since the 1965 meeting in Yugoslavia where CCF efforts had helped elect Arthur Miller to head the organization. Like Rodríguez Monegal, Miller also wanted to establish a calming tone, ratcheting back the rhetoric of writers’ responsibility to political commitment. Preconference work ensured that Communist writers, like Pablo Neruda and even some Soviet authors, had no visa troubles in applying to come to the United States and were able to attend and participate in a generally cordial exchange of views. Miller insisted that none of the writers need be an apologist for the culture or political system in which he or she worked; the point, he said when conversation got heated, was to restore “diversity” within PEN.52

  Rodríguez Monegal did analogous work with the Latin American writers, chairing a panel at the meeting to discuss the specific problems of the writer in that region. The intellectual diversity of the panel was more important than anything that was said: it included Pablo Neruda, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Nicanor Parra, and Victoria Ocampo. Miller and Rodríguez Monegal both saw the conference as a means of combating “literary McCarthyism” and hoped that it would lead to the end of the Cold War in culture. Fuentes, writing about the event, called Rodríguez Monegal a “cultural U Thant,” referring to the secretary general of the United Nations, for his diplomatic efforts. It proved to be a moment of visibility and solidarity for the Latin American writers who attended, establishing important networks that defined the emerging boom in Latin American literature.53

  Inge Morath, Arthur Miller, and Pablo Neruda at a bookstore in New York City during Neruda’s visit to the PEN Conference in 1966. Miller and Emir Rodríguez Monegal sought to engineer a thaw in the Cold War in Latin American letters at the conference, but Cuban writers criticized Neruda for his participation. Photo courtesy Fundación Pablo Neruda.

  But if Rodríguez Monegal wanted a magazine of dialogue, he had the past and present of his sponsoring organization to contend with. In mid-1966 the CIA-CCF relationship was not yet widely known, but the CCF’s dependence on the U.S. government was widely suspected. Other episodes that had nothing to do with the CCF, like Project Camelot, signaled that interests of state had dangerously compromised intellectual efforts. For radical critics, Mundo Nuevo was simply another part of a broader “Yankee cultural offensive.”

  The group that had the most to lose from the potential success of Mundo Nuevo was Casa de las Américas. In 1964 Haydée Santamaría, the head of Casa de las Américas, was hearing complaints about the relatively apolitical nature of the editors of the literary review that bore its name. Casa, which everyone understood operated proudly with a subsidy from the Cuban government, had on two occasions published politically inopportune content and had been punished for it. The last offense came in 1965, when the review invited beat poet Allen Ginsberg to be part of its prize jury and published a homoerotic poem that seemed to challenge the government’s official persecution of homosexuality during that period. (Ginsberg, who had been a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the United States, was forced to leave Cuba after describing over the radio an erotic dream he had about Che Guevara.) Casa’s old editors were dismissed and were replaced by Roberto Fernández Retamar, a poet who transformed Casa into a vibrant brief for the unity of Cuban nationalism, intellectual responsibility, and the world revolution. In the new era, the five-pointed star of the Cuban flag became a recurring graphic motif. Representing revolutionary thought and practice was the goal of the new Casa de las Américas, and the proper metaphor for understanding culture, in Fernández Retamar’s mind, was that of revolutionary struggle.54

  At the moment at which one iteration of Casa de las Américas ended, to be replaced by a more hermetically sealed one, the CCF was closing down its limited Cuadernos and launching the more expansive Mundo Nuevo. Rodríguez Monegal was well to the left of any of the editors of Cuadernos; he was critical of Cuban Communism but not rabidly anti-Castro. His view of the responsibility of the intellectual, however, leaned not toward the political commitment of Sartre but rather toward the perpetual rebellion of Camus. “A writer’s actions are words,” Fuentes and Rodríguez Monegal agreed in the interview that established Mundo Nuevo’s tone. “The essential function of the writer,” Rodríguez Monegal argued, “is to call into question the world [as it exists] through the use of words … For that reason McCarthyists of the Right and Left want to stop us from talking.” For Rodríguez Monegal and Fuentes, the writer’s commitment was revolutionary because it called into question existing relations of power, not because it submitted to revolutionary discipline. The writer’s freedom consisted, in Fuentes’s words, in “maintaining some room for heresy.”55

  The problem raised by that position was, inevitably, that of the writer’s relationship to the government in Cuba: given its punitive treatment of hostile intellectuals and political opponents, did it count among the “McCarthyists of the Left”? Since the victory of the Cuban Revolution, a friendly attitude toward it had practically defined the responsibility of the left-wing Latin American writer-intellectual. But within Cuba, cultural policy shaded into anti-intellectualism as intellectuals were seen as potentially counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, and producers of unnecessary luxuries. If Cuba’s government were cast as McCarthyist, Rodríguez Monegal would have successfully redefined what it meant to be a left-wing writer. But Fuentes, in his observation, did not yet mean to signal any break with revolutionary commitment to the Cuban cause. His permanent insurrection was still conceived as directed primarily against bourgeois society.56

  Mundo Nuevo strove to present fashionable and contemporary art and writing, portraying its artists as thoughtful, independent dissenters. Its first issue included sketches by the internationally known Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas, of the Breakaway generation. His grotesque figures were understood both as a critique of the PRI and of the socially committed painting of Mexico’s Marxist muralists. The sketches were clipped from letters Cuevas sent to Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Carlos Fuentes. Reproduced by permission. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

  But the potential for the idea of the McCarthyism of the Left to be used against Cuba was latent (and indeed, Fuentes would distance himself from the Cuban government in 1971 on essentially those grounds). Cuban officials understood that any definition of the intellectual that pointed away from revolutionary commitment could undermine an important form of international support for them, and they tried to mete out discipline that would keep the Left in line. Cuban writers had refused to participate in the 1966 PEN meeting and had condemned Pablo Neruda for his visit to the heart of the empire. Before the appearance of Mundo Nuevo, Roberto Fernández Retamar announced that Cuban writers from his circle would “boycott” the magazine. Soon the exchange of letters between the two rival editors was given wide circulation in left-wing political magazines across the continent. In his letter to Rodríguez Monegal, Fernández Retamar argued that “because it is financed by the United States, [the CCF]’s only mission is the defense of U.S. imperial interests, not the defense of ‘cultural freedom.’ To achieve those ends, it gets collaboration from intellectuals of different shades, some of which are not necessarily hostile to our [Cuba’s] causes.” Cuadernos, Fernández Retamar asserted, had been a crudely executed work of propaganda. Other CCF magazines, such as Encounter, were superior in quality but aspired to the same ends. Since the orientation of CCF-affiliated magazines was clearly opposed to Cuban interests, he declared, Cuban intellectuals would neither contribute to Mundo Nuevo nor collaborate with it. Although this might appear to deny Cuban writers the chance to defend their perspectives in the short term, he thought it the right policy for the long term:

  It is possible (it is almost certain) that in the first numbers, with the goal of attracting high-quality c
ollaborators, you will achieve the “freedom of choice and orientation” that you write to me about … but it is equally certain that ultimately, the orientation will escape from your hands, following the example of Cuadernos. And the magazine will end up adopting (no doubt more skillfully and less negatively) positions contrary to the interests of our peoples. Or should we believe that U.S. imperialism … had suddenly entered into disinterested patronage of the purest work of the mind … and that they will send you to Paris to give to Latin America the magazine that its literature requires? No one could seriously propose that these fantasies be taken for reality.

  In the judgment of many, Rodríguez Monegal did wrangle the magazine that Latin American literature “required,” for a time, from the complex circumstances that gave him his opportunity. But as a description of what would happen to Mundo Nuevo, Fernández Retamar’s predictions proved almost perfectly prescient.57

  In his reply, Rodríguez Monegal foregrounded the details over which Fernández Retamar had blundered. The U.S. State Department did not finance the CCF, as Fernández Retamar had alleged, and in any case, Rodríguez Monegal argued, the lessons of Cuadernos had been learned. The crude anti-Communism found in its pages was no longer necessary. He insisted that those who had contributed to the CCF had always been independent of the politics of the United States. Recently, for example, CCF affiliates had criticized the military occupation of the Dominican Republic that had taken place that spring:

  When the [U.S. military] intervention in Santo Domingo occurred [in 1965], the Congress demonstrated publicly against the State Department. Don Salvador de Madariaga published an open letter in the New York Times in which he protested the intervention; Luis Mercier, who was then in charge of Latin American affairs, wrote an article against it; and even the departed Cuadernos published a pamphlet by Theodore Draper that contains some of the most virulent criticism of the intervention that I have ever read … I ask myself if this is how an organization that depends on the State Department would behave.

  This much was true—the U.S. invasion blocked the return to power of a member of the anti-Communist Left and was therefore deplored by the social democrats in the CCF and similar organizations. But Fernández Retamar maintained that writers like Madariaga and Draper were “against our revolution [in Cuba].” Rodríguez Monegal protested in turn that “I will not accept the role that is being eagerly designed for me as the enemy of Cuba and of Cuban writers. I will continue to believe in the virtues of dialogue.” Yet in the same issue as Rodríguez Monegal’s final letter, in late April 1966, Marcha published the translation of a New York Times investigation of the CIA that named Encounter and the CCF as “anti-Communist but liberal organizations of intellectuals” that the CIA had sponsored. Probably few Marcha readers would have concluded that Rodríguez Monegal understood the organization for which he worked better than Fernández Retamar did.58

  After the New York Times published its exposé, people associated with the CCF wrote in to protest that their organization had been intellectually independent, but no one disputed the charge that it had received funding sourced to the CIA. These nondenial denials prompted concern among some who had worked with the CCF in the past that there might be truth in what the Times had reported. Mercier Vega responded to such worries by declaring that neither he nor they had anything to hide. He realized, however, that the issue was not whether he felt himself to be independent, but whether he could convince others that the CCF was. Because the Times article was being widely translated and republished by Latin American newspapers and magazines, the scandal was unlikely to burn out quickly.

  At the end of May, Héctor Murena in Argentina wrote to Mercier that “all of the leftist individuals that I was getting have gone away as if by magic … I confess to you that I spent a few days very worried, because of the possibility that all of us, as innocents (including you and Hunt) had been serving the CIA, something that isn’t very pleasant in spite of all the rationales one can use to gild the pill. Now I’m inclined to think that everything has been one big joke. Nevertheless, a thorough clarification from the foundations whose funds we use would be welcome.” In the press, CCF representatives emphasized that no one was saying that the CIA had exercised any control over what anyone had said or done. If such responses did not satisfy ILARI’s critics, they seem at least to have satisfied its allies, and within a few months most of the affiliates noted no decline in participation in their activities.59

  Mundo Nuevo, too, survived the first round of revelations. Rodríguez Monegal had substantial personal credibility, and many of his friends and acquaintances found it difficult to decide whether to participate in the new magazine. This was especially true for the many Latin American writers then residing in Paris, where Mundo Nuevo was to be edited. Jean Franco has described the way in which Cuadernos differed from Mundo Nuevo as the difference between the ethos of “universality” of the former and the “cosmopolitanism” of the latter. Mundo Nuevo was, in its first era, a participant in a cultural vanguard in a way that Cuadernos never was. Affiliated writers like Borges, Cabrera Infante, and Fuentes all had aesthetic projects that were far more innovative than the writers associated with the Latin American branch of the CCF in the 1950s. But the difference also registered in the way its writers were living. If “universality” had meant that Latin American writers hoped to be recognized alongside their European peers, Mundo Nuevo’s “cosmopolitanism” offered the appealing possibility that Latin American writers would actually live in Europe. As many took up residence in Paris or Barcelona, Rodríguez Monegal slyly boasted that Paris had become the cultural capital of Latin America. He used the Mundo Nuevo expense account to host events and dinners, trying to act as the coordinator of the new cultural energy.60

  But the claim advanced at the PEN meeting in New York—that the Cultural Cold War was at its end—was mistaken. The Cold War’s awesome capacity to politicize every aspect of life instead turned precisely that claim into yet another battle in the Cultural Cold War. Pablo Neruda, who was the subject of considerable press attention and public adulation during his visit to New York for the conference, not least because of his criticism of the U.S. war in Vietnam, soon found himself the target of a campaign by Cuban writers. In a complaint drafted by Roberto Fernández Retamar and other members of the Casa group, Neruda was condemned for his visit to the United States and for accepting an award from the president of Peru. “We must proclaim an alert on this imperialist penetration into the field of culture,” said the letter, “against the publications financed by [the] CIA, against the conversation of our writers into trained parlour monkeys and Yankee sycophants.” Some signatures were added to the complaint without the alleged signers’ knowledge; others, worried about the political implications of having their names omitted, rushed to add them. Neruda was deeply hurt by the Cuban attack, which he interpreted as a concealed attack by Castro on his Chilean Communist Party’s preference for an electoral approach to politics rather than the Cuban insurrectionary route. He never forgave Fernández Retamar and would never again travel to the island.61

  When Mundo Nuevo’s first issue appeared, Neruda’s friend Jorge Edwards wrote to him from Paris to say that it had been released to neither “shame nor glory, with the necessary dose of anti-Communism to justify the collaboration of North American foundations, and, according to rumor, the CIA.” This was not so much a problem for Neruda, who had seen the controversy and still sent Rodríguez Monegal poems for one of the first issues of the new review, but the Cuban letter wounded him, and he began to become concerned that appearing in Mundo Nuevo would seem to confirm him as an outsider on the literary left. He wrote to Edwards in Paris, asking him to rush to Rodríguez Monegal and retrieve the verses he had provided for publication. But, he added, “The [attacks] are part of the result of the Cult [of Fidel].” Like an out-of-favor writer in the Stalinist system he had once defended, Neruda found that his attempt at engagement was being treated as heresy and so tried to withdr
aw. A few of his poems, however, appeared in the fourth issue of Mundo Nuevo. Neruda could never have participated in Cuadernos; only a few years earlier the CCF had been trying to undermine his candidacy for the Nobel Prize.62

  In the face of the “Yankee cultural offensive” of Mundo Nuevo, Fernández Retamar sent around an appeal to writers throughout the world to fill out a survey. “There is no lack of new collaborationists [with the Yankee offensive],” he wrote, “and these people must be unmasked.” Fernández Retamar’s only question was, “What do you think that the attitude of Latin American intellectuals should be in view of the growing campaign of penetration and division that, in the cultural domain as well, the United States is carrying out in our continent?” Even María Rosa Oliver worried that the letter implied an attempt by Cuba to set up a “cultural Vatican” that would have the power to determine who and what counted as a member of the authentic and appropriate Left.63

  In spite of the controversy that surrounded its origins, Mundo Nuevo was in many ways an unassailable success. The introductory note in the first issue explained that “the quality of the Latin American artist and writer has not been recognized to the degree that it deserves. For that reason it seems today not only opportune, but necessary, to undertake to recognize, in a truly international journal, the most creative work that Latin America has to give to the world.” Within a few short years the boom in Latin American literature was a recognized phenomenon; writers signed important international book contracts and began to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of their works around the globe. Scarcely fifteen years earlier, even the continent’s best writers rarely did better than to sell a few hundred copies of their works, sometimes passed around among small circles of friends. In very short order, the goals of Mundo Nuevo, were, remarkably, achieved.64