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

by Patrick Iber

  Although the boom was under way by the time Mundo Nuevo published its first issue, the magazine supported the phenomenon. Many of the magazine’s featured writers—none of whom would have contributed to a magazine like Cuadernos—became the great successes of their generation. And Mundo Nuevo helped ensure that the boom would be remembered for its stylistic and aesthetic inventiveness as well as its leftist political commitment. (Some authors of the boom, like Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, intended to be both leftist and aesthetically inventive.) But although Mundo Nuevo’s most remarkable features were literary, it did run some political essays, such as a critical assessment of intellectuals involved in the war in Vietnam that appeared in its second number. Rodríguez Monegal wrote to a friend that “the political commentary about Vietnam, to be completely frank with you, reflects a necessarily critical attitude in a magazine that has been accused of maintaining connections with the CIA.” The response of Max Aub, a Spanish writer who maintained an independent position in the Cold War and thought that minimizing the issues of Cuba and Vietnam meant that Mundo Nuevo should rename itself The Ostrich, suggests that Rodríguez Monegal had a point.65

  But privately, Rodríguez Monegal cared less about CIA involvement than he might have. Initially, he responded to the revelations by arguing that they showed only that money had been passed through dummy foundations to the CCF; he did not think that this meant that the CCF had ever known that it was receiving money from the CIA. He wrongly thought that all the money that had funded Mundo Nuevo came from the Ford Foundation, and he insisted that the articles critical of U.S. policy that appeared in Mundo Nuevo demonstrated its independence. “We have no interest in defending the Congress publicly or privately,” he wrote to a friend, “much less the CIA whose intentions are very difficult to champion.” But in a bit of private bravado, he later wrote: “My position is that if the CIA is surreptitiously paying for Mundo Nuevo, blessed be the CIA because this magazine does not play their game: it reflects an authentically Latin American position … I don’t see why we, who are making a truly independent magazine, have to carry around the skeletons of our inglorious ancestors.” But he understood that others would have to be convinced that what he thought was “ancient history” actually had little or no bearing on the present.66

  In fact, the history of the CCF could not be avoided. In March 1967 a San Francisco–based journal of the New Left titled Ramparts published an account of the CIA’s covert relationship with the National Student Association. Its reporter added a level of detail that the articles in the New York Times the previous year had never revealed. Through foundation records, Ramparts traced contributions to their proxy foundations (such as the Farfield Foundation) and finally to their intended recipients, including the CCF. The “Ramparts flap” was, in the words of one intelligence historian, “one of the worst operational catastrophes in CIA history.” Dozens of programs had to be dismantled almost immediately. President Johnson appointed a committee that recommended that covert funding to private groups be eliminated; if such organizations still wanted government funding, it should be given to them openly. Cord Meyer, who had been responsible for liaison and support of the “non-Communist Left” programs since 1954, later wrote that the CIA carried out this “dismantling” with considerable regret, aware that powerful Communist-controlled fronts still operated, and that they had no such restrictions on their behavior. Tom Braden, who had overseen the programs before 1954, published an article in May titled “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral,’ ” defending the CIA’s actions as a necessary part of the Cold War and stating that more licit funding had been impossible because, he wrote, “the idea that [the U.S.] Congress would have approved many of our projects was almost as likely as the John Birch Society’s approving Medicare.” Although his provocative remarks probably did little to convince skeptics, they did at least put to rest any notion that the journalists might have had the basics of the story wrong.67

  The Ford-financed CCF had made Latin America its major priority. At the beginning of the 1950s CCF activity in the region was minimal. In 1966 the Latin American budget made up the single largest institutional cost to the CCF, receiving about 40 percent of its overall budget allocation. The CCF had remade itself over the course of the 1960s. It had worked to engage both writers and social scientists with a common and related logic. To the social scientists, it had tried to create an environment in which social problems could be studied within a framework that it considered rational. To the writers, it had tried to send the message that, in the words of Emir Rodríguez Monegal at PEN, it is “difficult for writers to be independent spirits,” but that there was no other choice.68

  Having been taken in, Rodríguez Monegal was in a difficult position and tried to twist the scandal to bolster his reputation. “As hurtful as they are,” he wrote, “these [CIA] revelations do nothing except confirm something obvious: the difficulty of winning and keeping freedom. The condition of the independent intellectual in the modern world is a condition of risk and poverty … The CIA, or other corruptors from other factions, can pay independent intellectuals without them knowing. What they cannot do is buy them.” He had proved by his own example his thesis that maintaining one’s status as an independent critic and an outside thinker was difficult work. But he was not convinced that the very idea of the intellectual as an “independent critic” was useful to the United States in the Cold War context, because adopting it transformed the stance of the politically committed radical intellectual from one of responsibility to one of irresponsibility.69

  Privately, however, he decided to work to end his affiliation with ILARI. “In the present context of literary life in Latin America (a context which continues to deteriorate owing to guerrillas more or less encouraged by Cuba, military dictators congenial to the Pentagon, the big stick of Mr. Johnson in the Caribbean, and the war in Vietnam),” he wrote, “it is quite impossible to envision the continuation of a revue that is at the same time ‘independent’ and published under the patronage, even indirect, of the International Association for Cultural Freedom.” Marcha covered the controversy, securing exclusive rights to the Spanish translation of the articles in Ramparts that definitively established the CIA-CCF relationship. It published, as did other major publications, an account by Mario Vargas Llosa of the history of the CCF and its downfall: “The ‘cultural empire’ [the CCF] built with such painstaking cleverness, at such expense, has collapsed like a house of cards, and the pity is that, among its smoking ruins lie, broken, dirtied, guilty and innocent, those who acted in good faith and those who did so in bad faith, those who believed that they were there to fight for freedom and those who solely were interested in picking up their pay.” Vargas Llosa was concerned that the CIA’s intervention might have distorted the literary world in which he moved. He now wondered whether, for example, the support that the CCF’s Melvin Lasky had offered Soviet dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had been earned on the basis of literary merit or for the political gain that the United States might get from promoting his work. In his assessment Vargas Llosa wrote almost exclusively of the scandal in the European context—he too lived in Paris—making just a single mention of Cuadernos, and then only to note how little it had accomplished.70

  The consequence of the CIA revelations, then, was to undermine the entire project that the CCF had been engaged in over the 1960s. Its attempts at outreach and engagement were, inescapably, a part of empire. The CCF had worked to become more liberal in the 1960s and had in some ways succeeded. It demonstrated the manner in which sets of ideas, from modernization theory to the definition of the intellectual as an independent critic, were intended to play their roles in the Cold War. But its lasting legacy, through its connection to the CIA, had less to do with any particular programmatic success than with making anti-imperialist discourse credible. Revelations of CIA involvement in a variety of cultural and civil society organizations combined to give the intelligence agency a reputation for sinist
er efficacy, but they also showed that the agency could not control its public reputation or keep its programs secret. The experience of the CCF reveals the limits of CIA power even within its organization: as elsewhere, it was neither helpless nor powerful enough to alter fundamental trends. Anti-Communism had its own, often local, logic. John Hunt’s attempt to liberalize the CCF in Brazil after the coup failed. Mexican intellectuals wanted different things from the CCF than what it offered, and Keith Botsford’s most lasting legacies there were to deliver a few years’ salary for Juan Rulfo and to inspire, both intentionally and by accident, some of Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s finest writing. Its best candidate, Jorge Luis Borges, never won the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile it published a magazine, Cuadernos, that lost friends and failed to influence people. Mundo Nuevo arrived in 1966 and finally achieved the openness that the CCF had been seeking, just in time to be the most discredited by the CIA revelations. The CCF was far more complex than a simple puppet of U.S. empire, but it could not escape the consequences of affiliation with its secret patron. The CCF remained for years a symbol of the strength and power of U.S. cultural imperialism. If the facts surrounding it had been shrouded in less secrecy, they might also have pointed toward its weaknesses and contradictions.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Disenchantment and the End of the Cultural Cold War

  In 1967 the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Literary Prize, given by the Venezuelan government, in recognition of his novel The Green House. At the time, Vargas Llosa was a radical socialist and a member of the board of directors of Casa de las Américas, convinced of the hopeless corruption of Latin American politics outside Cuba. Venezuela’s head of state, meanwhile, was a member of the center-left Acción Democrática party, which had good relations with the United States. Venezuela’s government had been fighting a leftist guerrilla insurgency supported by Cuba and had suspended constitutional guarantees. Within Vargas Llosa’s radical circles, the country was considered a murderous puppet of North American imperialism. Casa’s Haydée Santamaría wrote that its president represented “murder, repression, [and] treason to our people.” Notified of his award and unsure whether he should accept, Vargas Llosa asked the board of Casa for guidance. It recommended that he accept the prize but publicly donate the prize money to Che Guevara.1

  “Literature is fire,” Vargas Llosa declared in his acceptance speech, “it means nonconformism and rebellion … The raison d’être of the writer is protest, contradiction, and criticism.” The work of the writer, he said, was a form of “permanent insurrection.” Capitalist society was beyond redemption; only by following the Cuban model, Vargas Llosa announced, could Latin America free itself from its current oppressors. He made his speech on 2 October; seven days later Che Guevara was killed by the Bolivian army with the assistance of the CIA, ending his doomed effort to foment continental revolution.2

  This moment epitomized the Cultural Cold War in Latin America at its height in the late 1960s. The period was marked by an unprecedented degree of polarization, in which nearly all ideas were understood relative to their position in the war of ideologies. “The atmosphere of guerrilla warfare … will not be limited to the jungles and mountains of Latin America but is now being extended to include literary life,” lamented Emir Rodríguez Monegal after he was assaulted by some Far Left students during a trip to Chile. But Vargas Llosa spoke for the many radicalized writers and intellectuals of that decade who were inspired by Cuba and disgusted with liberal reform. The moment of the 1960s produced the boom in Latin American literature, and thus the new style of “Latin American intellectual,” of which Vargas Llosa was an archetypal example—a man (and almost all were men) who wrote a literature that revealed the corruption of local politics and of capitalism, were lauded with international prizes, and lived as easily in Europe as in the Americas.3

  If one thing can be said to characterize the intellectual moment of the 1960s, it is perhaps how close many felt to realizing their utopian visions. Literature professor Diana Sorensen argues that the era featured an intensity of belief and feeling, “framed by the twin rhythms of euphoria and despair.” Those who wanted to replicate Cuba and create many Vietnams across the region had their version of utopia. But although the moderates who opposed them thought of themselves as antiutopian, in a way their own utopia—in which the United States acted in good faith as a friend to regional democracy, and in which technocratic leadership would improve living conditions without requiring popular mobilization—was just as implausible. The great hope of the left-wing intellectual in the twentieth century had been the construction of a humane socialism. As the institutions of the Cultural Cold War fell, one by one, they represented the loss of possibility and pathways to it. Even moments of triumph contained warnings of the fragility of the utopias they meant to construct. When Vargas Llosa had queried the board of Casa about how to respond to the offer of the Gallegos prize, he had been assured that if he donated the prize money to Che Guevara, he would be secretly reimbursed by the Cuban government. It was an offer he declined, but one he would later point to as a key moment in his eventual disillusionment with the Left. Max Weber had written of the “disenchantment of the world” that came when modern science displaced religious feeling as an explanation for natural phenomena. As the utopias of the 1960s fell away in the 1970s and beyond, the Cultural Cold War underwent a disenchantment of the word. Intellectuals lost faith in the states that had inspired them. And states would never consider intellectuals so powerful, or so valuable, again.4

  Given the shock of the CIA revelations, the subsequent decline of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was surprisingly gradual. Perhaps unexpectedly, given that he was widely considered to be among the CCF employees most likely to be CIA agents, Keith Botsford was among the most offended. In the initial wake of the disclosures, many CCF affiliates argued that the CIA had not interfered with CCF activity and had only financed it at a distance. Even when it was acknowledged that Michael Josselson had been a CIA agent from the beginning, private debate continued among its members about the degree to which the CCF had operated independently. In May 1967, for example, Daniel Bell wrote to Keith Botsford, arguing that he had of course heard about government financial involvement for years but had not pried, trusting his friends’ integrity and that measures would be taken to reduce any secret dependency over time.5

  But the CIA’s influence had not been insignificant. Botsford countered Bell with a long letter, outlining his personal anguish over whether he should go public with evidence that suggested the CIA had in fact played the CCF to conform to the needs of the intelligence agency and to the U.S. national interest more broadly. He admitted that it was difficult to draw distinctions between Josselson’s private behavior and his behavior in his capacity as a CIA employee. But he cited his work with PEN and his disagreements with Josselson over Cuadernos as evidence that, at the very least, Josselson’s CIA affiliation had shaped the CCF’s work more than was being conceded publicly:

  Take the parlous case of Cuadernos, against whose direction I fought for three arduous years. Arciniegas was a fink. That much was clear. His magazine would do nothing in [Latin America], that much was also clear. No one read it, that was clear. It was a pile of shit, that was clear. I am sure that John [Hunt] agreed—so John is let out. Most of the Congress agreed. I sat in a meeting at which everyone condemned the poor bloody mag outright … It lasted because Mike [Josselson] insisted that it would last. I have that on paper. Now, what were the alternatives? Let it die? Have another? Open up Cuadernos to new contributors? Well, the last was covered because Mike had put in Arciniegas, and Arciniegas wanted no one but his own kind of Latin American. Let it die? That would have implied failure of an operation—unthinkable to Mike. (Let me be clear: that CUADERNOS was not ENCOUNTER or MONAT: it was a fink magazine, admittedly. Its distributors in [Latin America] were Cuban exiles; its correspondents belonged to the paralytic wing of the “Liberal” reaction.) Sta
rt a new one? There were grave risks involved. If you handled the CIA’s money, which would be used to start it, what would you do?

  Botsford said that he could think of countless examples of phone calls in which Josselson played a role in shaping the content of Encounter. That Botsford had “won” most of his disputes with Josselson over a period of years, he argued, did not prove that pressure had not existed. “Ideas freely arrived at are fine things,” he wrote, but he pointed out that Josselson’s influence came from his constant, diligent work behind the scenes: “In short, there is no substitute for administrative efficiency.” Botsford was torn but could not forgive Josselson his years of lies. In another letter to a colleague, he wrote: “It is simply not true that each member of the Congress acted in total freedom. Josselson disposed of us all.” What Botsford could not countenance was the thought that John Hunt, whom he had known for some seventeen years—and who opposed Josselson on many questions of strategy—was capable of, as he put it, “lying to me with such cold consistency.” On that matter he was mistaken.6