by Patrick Iber
When the Ramparts story broke, Luis Mercier Vega wrote to his colleagues that the information appeared to be “serious and well founded.” He assured his friends that what had been organized and published in Latin America had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy or the CIA, and that he would do all he could to save the Instituto Latinoamericano de Relaciones Internacionales (ILARI). Horacio Daniel Rodríguez in Buenos Aires wrote to Mercier Vega to explain the uproar and confusion that the news had created. More than forty people were pressing him for a “clarification,” and one contributor to a CCF magazine of sociology asked that his submission be postponed until the nature of ILARI could be clarified. Others requested detailed financial information from Mercier, who in turn pressed Hunt to explain (accurate) media reports that the CIA was passing money through the Hoblitzelle Foundation. Hunt, as one of the CIA men inside the CCF, told Mercier less than he knew; he explained that he would have to “go back into our records” and that “at no time did the Hoblitzelle Foundation do anything other than simply respond affirmatively or negatively as the case might be to our request for funds.” In spite of his work in Paris, the fact that Hunt answered him evasively suggests that Mercier Vega may have been among those who worked for the CCF without direct knowledge of its relationship to the CIA. The clearest expression of Mercier Vega’s views comes in a letter he wrote to Horacio Daniel Rodríguez at the beginning of March:
I find myself in a delicate position. On the one hand, the information published in the United States seems this time to correspond to some kind of reality. Departments of the CIA have supplied foundations, who in turn subsidized activities that were liberal, democratic, and sometimes directed against the politics of the United States. That’s why we see [Barry] Goldwater attacking those methods and Robert Kennedy defending them … We are entering there a complex, contradictory world unknown to me. On the other hand, I remain convinced that what we did, what we are doing and what we plan to do has nothing to do, directly or indirectly, with the—or one of the—policies of the CIA. In other words I can’t stake my life on the origin of each dollar we’ve spent in Latin America, but I can on that each dollar was spent for activities determined according to the needs of Latin America.
Mercier apparently continued to believe that the CCF had unknowingly received money from the CIA, and that there was no need to apologize for its work.7
But the scandal was tearing the CCF apart. In Uruguay, Benito Milla reported that although people still wanted to display their art in the CCF’s gallery space, no one wanted to be the first to do so after the scandal. In Chile, the Communist paper El Siglo launched a campaign against the personalities at the head of the CCF operation there, and a professor leading one of the work groups worried that the news would negatively affect his work among the university community. In Mexico, Rodrigo García Treviño, showing why he had been let go some years earlier, wrote that “to fight against red totalitarianism, I would accept the help of Satan himself.” In Colombia and Venezuela, Germán Arciniegas made public his experience trying to obtain future funding for Cuadernos, creating another unsettling round of questions.8
Over the summer Michael Josselson was forced to admit that the CCF had received money from the CIA, and that he had been responsible for maintaining that relationship. Josselson resigned his position, and Hunt soon did the same. After Hunt left, he sent one letter to Mercier Vega, along with his latest novel, expressing feelings of nostalgia for “all of the correspondence and all the maneuvering and the rest of it which occupied us during those years when we were making the changes in Latin America.” When Mercier Vega received that letter, he was dealing with an ever-shrinking budget, and he replied with a touch of pique: “At ILARI, everything is working and developing. But you can easily imagine that, besides the continual problems that come up all of the time, the most important one remains the mediocrity of our financial means that stop us from occupying the space that should come back to us. But that is one situation that you understand well.” If Mercier was coming to understand that his cherished projects had been made possible only by the support of the CIA, he never gave any other indication of this.9
In the summer of 1967 the CCF sought to distance itself from its past by changing its name to the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF). Shepard Stone, a former Ford Foundation employee who had been instrumental in securing the Ford bailout for the CCF, became its new president. Mercier Vega’s ILARI petitioned for and received inclusion within the IACF umbrella, which meant that its budget was provided by the IACF. The Ford Foundation’s grant, though politically convenient, contained a poison pill: in an attempt to goad IACF operations into self-sufficiency, the amount of the foundation’s subsidy decreased every year. This placed the IACF (and, consequently, ILARI) in a perpetual budget crisis, and only the most important programs were retained. Even as affiliates began to report that activities were returning to normal after the CIA disclosures, budgetary constraints put an end to the Latin American press service of the CCF and eliminated nearly all funding to the perennially embattled Mexican representative. With the reduction of the Colombian committee to a single correspondent, and expansion in Bolivia, ILARI in 1967 was left with functioning centers in Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Asunción, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Lima, and La Paz.10
The most valuable commodity that ILARI had was Mundo Nuevo, and although the CIA scandal did not destroy the magazine immediately, it took its toll in indirect ways. Ironically, its demise came about in part because of conflict between Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Luis Mercier Vega, two of the people associated with the CCF in Latin America with the least interest in defending U.S. politics and policies. Emir Rodríguez Monegal responded to the CIA revelations by seeking to sever his relationship with ILARI. Shepard Stone did not object, but Luis Mercier Vega thought that Mundo Nuevo provided ILARI with needed prestige and decided to intervene in the negotiations. He asked Ignacio Iglesias, a member of the Spanish Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista in exile who had worked as editor in chief of Cuadernos and who also worked in that capacity for Mundo Nuevo, to prepare a report on the present state of Rodríguez Monegal’s magazine. Mercier then sent that report on to Shepard Stone, bypassing Rodríguez Monegal. The results were surprising: Mundo Nuevo, for all its supposed influence and its undeniable quality, sold and circulated even fewer copies than had Cuadernos. Iglesias and Mercier Vega concluded that Mundo Nuevo was too “literary,” targeting a narrow audience likely to be hostile to the CCF in any case. The magazine, they argued, needed to extricate itself from the small circle of authors who dominated its pages and work to engage with the general problems of the times. Other than Rodríguez Monegal, no one at the IACF or the Ford Foundation appreciated how important that small circle of literary names in fact was.11
The intervention of Mercier and Iglesias hurt Rodríguez Monegal a great deal when he learned of it, and he announced his intention to resign a few months later, in March 1968. Publicly, he stated that the reason was that the Ford Foundation had recommended that a magazine for Latin America should be published in Latin America, while he continued to believe that Paris was the right home for Mundo Nuevo. He denied rumors that he was being thrown out for being a “leftist,” or that anyone with ILARI had ever interfered with the magazine. Privately, he wrote that “the problem can be reduced to this: it was no longer possible for me to continue making the magazine as we had planned so long ago.” On its own, the Ford Foundation’s desire to move the magazine might not have pushed him to leave. He felt, however, that “it was not going to be possible to make the move with sufficient calm and on a sufficiently solid base,” and the power struggles within ILARI contributed to this.12
But the second generation of Mundo Nuevo made no impression. The responsibility for the magazine was turned over to Horacio Daniel Rodríguez in Buenos Aires. Rodríguez, the former editor of a small CCF publication titled Informes de China, coordinated a team of representatives responsible fo
r obtaining geographically diverse submissions. In order to avoid the problems of censorship it would encounter in Argentina, the magazine continued to be printed in Paris. Since Mercier Vega and Rodríguez thought that the problem with Rodríguez Monegal’s Mundo Nuevo was that it had become too narrow, they sought to make the new Mundo Nuevo a magazine that once again dealt with aspects of sociology and political economy. But Daniel Cosío Villegas, Mexico’s liberal historian who had joined the board of directors of the IACF, thought that the new turn was a disaster. When Rodríguez solicited his opinion on the problems of the old magazine, Cosío Villegas was left with the impression that he was an “ignorant, inexperienced youngster” whose appointment was “most unfortunate … [He] cannot compare by any standard with Rodríguez Monegal.” Shepard Stone met repeatedly with Horacio Daniel Rodríguez, concerned that he did not know how to put together the sort of magazine that the Ford Foundation wanted, and that he harbored a personal ambition to become Mundo Nuevo’s sole editor. Then, during one of their meetings, Stone said plainly: “You understand that this has to be a magazine of the Left, that’s what we’ve decided. I don’t know if you will know how to make a magazine of the Left.” Horacio Daniel Rodríguez burst out laughing because, he wrote, “there was no possibility of a rational response to such stupidity.” Rodríguez kept the job, however, and explained to his readers that the new Mundo Nuevo “will be a magazine of themes more than of [individual] authors.” That was what it had to be, for the famous authors who had contributed to it under Rodríguez Monegal abandoned it in droves and never contributed to it again. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, bitter but no doubt sincere, thought the new Mundo Nuevo “a blunder that not even its proofreaders will read.”13
Rodríguez Monegal was right: his era of Mundo Nuevo had managed to be, however briefly, the cosmopolitan voice of the boom in Latin American letters. The second era of Mundo Nuevo had few readers and fewer consequences. Rodríguez Monegal had indeed relied on a small circle of friends and acquaintances to find contributors to his magazine, but it proved a remarkably propitious group of friends. And if the CCF had made that possible, it also brought it to an end.
When the CIA revelations had necessitated a public response in 1967, Rodríguez Monegal’s essay intimated that independent intellectual “sharpshooters” like himself had been hired into CIA projects specifically so that they would subsequently be discredited. This was a fantasy, and perhaps he did not even believe it himself, but on the consequences he was not far wrong. Because of the timing of the CIA revelations and his visibility in launching and defending his magazine, Rodríguez Monegal’s reputation would suffer more because of his affiliation with the CCF than anyone else’s. The engaged, open debate with Cuba he had sought could not and would not occur.
Rodríguez Monegal had been trapped. On the one hand, his idea of the role of the independent intellectual had made him a good choice when the CCF had been looking for a way to reach out to the Left in a way that still demonstrated the intransigence of Cuba’s official cultural institutions. But his experience also showed the near impossibility of having a project with democratic socialist values funded by the U.S. government, or even by the Ford Foundation, over the long term. In the pages of Mundo Nuevo, Rodríguez Monegal had championed the cause of Juan Bosch, the Dominican writer and politician who had been part of the Democratic Left. Elected with covert CIA support, he was overthrown by the Dominican military in 1963 after only a few months in office. By 1965 his return to office was blocked by U.S. military intervention and by covert support for his opponent during the election the following year. Bosch wrote of his experience, “I have always seen that you cannot have democracy here without the U.S., but now I learn that you cannot have democracy here with the U.S.” Mundo Nuevo was the cultural analogue to his experience: a symbol of the difficulty of building a social democratic Left that would depend on U.S. sympathy and support in the context of Cold War Latin America.14
Like Rodríguez Monegal, Luis Mercier Vega was not interested in defending U.S. policy or in serving as an agent. As an anarchist, Mercier Vega mistrusted state power and worried about attempts to manipulate the masses by both socialist and populist governments, but he retained his sympathy for the poor and his dislike of authoritarianism. Because the size of the Ford Foundation’s grant to the IACF decreased annually, he was left defending a constantly diminishing operation. In 1969 ILARI closed operations in Chile and Uruguay and was left with only Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Peru; Mercier Vega also created a special center in Paraguay to coordinate social science research. (On one of his many trips to Latin America in that period, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was pleased to find that he was known as the author of Primitive Rebels to the director of a publication whose very existence tickled him: the Revista Paraguaya de Sociología. He might or might not have been further amused to learn that the magazine existed only because of support from ILARI.) Aportes, Mercier Vega’s quarterly journal, printed long, analytical articles, primarily by European and Latin American academics. His anarchism made him particularly interested in the struggle for control of the state. He saw capture of the state as the mechanism by which a secure livelihood could be obtained in Latin America, but the multiple paths to power were not equally legitimate. He saw universities—which he called the “factor[ies] that [produce] the middle class”—primarily as a means for passing privilege from one generation to the next rather than as centers of research. Similarly, he argued that the armed forces had entered into politics by forming alliances with political parties. Most distressingly for an anarchist, he found this also true of grassroots and workers’ groups, which he described as being mobilized by populist governments and demagogues for demonstration effect.15
Mercier Vega’s editorial hand at Aportes was light, and he was interested in projects that explored the condition of poor and marginalized populations, generally carried out by left-wing scholars. What he could not abide were ideas that he regarded as simplifying ideologies, by which he meant principally Marxism and Che Guevara’s “foco” theory (meaning “focal point” or “ground zero”) that a small group of armed guerrillas could create the conditions for revolution. In his analysis, the guerrilla enterprise, however romantic, was the provenance of disaffected middle- and upper-class youth for whom taking to the mountains was the best career choice they could imagine. His frequent insistence that the sociopolitical situation of each Latin American country be analyzed on its own terms constituted an implicit critique of Guevarist ideology. Mercier Vega intended his apparently apolitical calls for an analysis of concrete national situations to upset the slogans and clichés he observed among simple partisans of Marx or Guevara.16
But, equally, Mercier Vega was not at all confident that the United States was a reliable ally. He found the sloganistic analysis of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations’ labor ambassador Serafino Romualdi to be as empty as that of Marxist politicians. For related reasons, he criticized the prescriptions of North American and European economists and even the technocratic modernization theory that had been part of the CCF tradition. “One would hope,” he wrote, “that at least the Europeans and North Americans who are so prodigal in recipes they have not tried out would be prudent in their offer of magic solutions, even if they are afraid of being overtaken by a revolution [in Latin America]. Too much emphasis on economic indices and figures which measure economic expansion frequently leads experts and planners to forget what human suffering is. Without suspecting it, they form part of a technocratic tradition.” One essay in Aportes argued explicitly against the major assumption of modernization theory that the terminal point of development would resemble the United States. “The United States is not a model” for Latin American development, the essay argued, and the most useful thing that it could do would be to stop trying to implant its bourgeois norms around the world. Aportes impartially hosted an extended debate between Aldo Solari and Orlando Fals Borda on the merits o
f “value-free sociology” in Latin America, which was a proxy for differences in approach between liberal and radical scholars. ILARI, which increasingly had to deal with censorship of its publications, especially in Argentina and Brazil, even sponsored an event in New York titled “The Role of the Intellectual in Authoritarian Countries” with the participation of a spectrum of thinkers from the United States and Latin America that included genuinely radical voices such as Noam Chomsky.17
When Aportes published its last issue in October 1972, Mercier’s farewell emphasized the pride he felt in having taken the politicized centers of the past and creating groups of nonconformist intellectuals. He lashed out at the Ford Foundation for its decision not to renew support, implying without evidence that it had abandoned its liberal tradition and bowed to U.S. government pressure. ILARI had fulfilled its role, he thought, as a “sower of unease.” Mercier promised to return to journalism. Shepard Stone, who had headed the IACF since 1967, left it in 1973; the IACF itself operated at a minimal level until 1977, when it closed its doors completely. Mercier, two years after leaving ILARI, founded a new magazine, Interrogations, dedicated to the exploration of contemporary anarchist thought. He edited the magazine for two years and then helped oversee its transfer to new management. In November 1977, as so many other Cold Warriors of his generation had done, he committed suicide.18
With the organized liberal project in disarray after the CIA revelations, Cuba’s Casa de las Américas might have been in an enviable position. Indeed, the mid-1960s were heady days for Cuba. The Tricontinental Conference took place in 1966, leading to the establishment of anti-imperialist solidarity organizations in 1967. In January 1968 Havana hosted a major cultural congress, where many participants argued that revolutionary intellectual practice should be dedicated to the creation of new selves, liberated from the concepts and categories of imperialism. The recently killed Che Guevara had written of the need to develop an “ideological-cultural mechanism” that created the “New Man” under socialism but also permitted free inquiry, and many of the Cuban authors at the meeting insisted that their militancy did not require the suppression of diverse forms of art or literature in Cuba and that artistic individuality could be maintained even as they worked to end selfish individualism. “Art is not a luxury, it is a necessity,” argued the Chilean painter Roberto Matta: “I expect … that we may discuss to what extent the triumph of our internal guerrillas will depend upon the success of our [creative] effort; and that an integral man, a poet, a new man, may become reality.” At the closing session, Fidel Castro declared to cheers from the audience that Yankee imperialists were the enemies of humanity, and that “perhaps [the imperialists] will say that this [Congress] is a Vietnam in the field of culture; they will say that guerrillas have begun to appear among intellectual workers.” The closing resolution declared that it was the “sacred duty of every honest intellectual to join this general movement of unrelenting struggle against the Yankee imperialists, to awaken the consciousness of the peoples to denounce and strongly condemn the Yankee crimes.”19
