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

by Patrick Iber

  But it would be harder than they hoped. Even the Third Worldist spirit of independence from major powers could not be reflected in official policy, as was seen when Castro endorsed the Soviet Union’s military invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to put an end to the Prague Spring. The figure who incarnated the problematic relationship between artistic freedom and revolutionary commitment was the poet Heberto Padilla. In 1968 he won Cuba’s Julián del Casal Poetry Prize for his collection Fuera del juego, which contained poems that somewhat elliptically suggested a lack of revolutionary fellow feeling. “Cuban poets no longer dream (not even in the night),” he wrote in one; they were made to witness the horrors of the world. Prizewinning works were typically published by the Cuban government, the only possible publisher in the country, but Fuera del juego was granted that treatment only after extended debate within the writers’ union and the addition of a critical introduction representing the view of the authorities. It was then published but impossible to find. To the authorities, the work was “ideologically contrary to [the Cuban] Revolution.” Fuera del juego, it was asserted, was a “defense of individualism against the needs of a society constructing the future … mechanically transplanting the typical skeptical attitude of a liberal intellectual under capitalism.” Roberto Fernández Retamar announced in 1969 that the position of Camus, Fuentes, or Rodríguez Monegal of the “permanent insurrection” of the writer was “counterrevolutionary because the work of the intellectual within socialist society is not to criticize but to reinforce the political system.”20

  The possibility of tolerance was lessened further by the difficult years of the early 1970s. Castro announced a goal for a sugar harvest of ten million tons in 1970; a record was set. But it fell short of the desired total. Because so many other parts of the economy had been sacrificed to try to reach the ten million tons, the effort was seen as a great failure. Cuba had become more equal since the revolution, but early hopes that material abundance could be achieved in a few short years were painfully far from being realized; Cuba had not ceased to be poor. The years were a bad time for critics and even for friends. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis thought that he would find that his famous “culture of poverty,” which theorized that the habits and behaviors associated with poverty were passed down from one generation to the next, did not exist in a socialist state, but he arrived with a Ford Foundation grant to carry out his study and, although initially welcomed, ended up being accused of espionage, had many of his files seized, and was expelled. The French agronomist René Dumont, who also considered himself a friend of the revolution, observed that militarization of the labor force was happening because of low productivity brought about by poor economic planning. Castro’s dominant and capricious decision making alienated technicians and workers alike, and there was a deep lack of democratic control. Dumont too found himself designated as a CIA agent and an enemy of the revolution. Citizens who had once filled the plazas to hear Castro speak out of enthusiasm increasingly did so out of a sense of obligation.21

  In such an environment, filled with the whispers of secret police, Heberto Padilla began to anticipate his own suppression. In March 1971 it arrived. Padilla was arrested, accused of promoting a negative view of the Cuban Revolution, and subjected to bizarre treatment in prison. He appeared in public to recite a Soviet-style self-criticism, partially written by the police—which he, having spent time in Moscow, sardonically insisted would be a “classic of the genre”—naming names of friends who also harbored counterrevolutionary thoughts and declaring his errors. “Under the disguise of the writer in revolt,” he confessed, “I had opposed the Revolution … Among my most serious mistakes … [was] to think that I, a Cuban, could live a double life: on the one hand vegetate like a parasite in the shadow of the Revolution, while on the other cultivate my literary popularity abroad at the cost of the Revolution and helped by its enemies.” Padilla’s actions were so extreme and degrading that they constituted an invitation to read between the lines and recognize the ill treatment that had produced them. A group of international writers—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes, all of whom had been defenders of Cuba’s revolutionary government—protested Padilla’s treatment in an open letter, expressing concern that Padilla’s self-criticism recalled “the most sordid moments of … Stalinism” and calling for the Cuban Revolution to return to what they said “made us consider it as a model in the realm of socialism.” Castro responded to the criticism by saying that Cuba did not need the support of “pseudo-revolutionary intellectuals” from Paris literary salons and of “bourgeois intrigue-mongers.” Pluralistic socialists or liberals—“bourgeois liberals,” as Castro called them—were given a clear message about where they stood with the Cuban Revolution.22

  Casa de las Américas devoted a special issue to the Padilla affair, full of reaffirmations of socialist values. Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti, in his contribution, told the story of Che Guevara deciding, in one combat situation, that he could carry only medical supplies or a box of bullets and opting for the bullets. “I am not proposing that every writer put down the pen and pick up a submachine gun,” Benedetti wrote, “although sometimes that has happened and it might happen again. The priority refers here to attitudes, perspectives, points of view, but also to risks … The (revolutionary?) writers of Paris and Barcelona, facing that dilemma, seem to have opted for literature. They did not react like revolutionaries legitimately preoccupied by a difficult moment within the revolution, but simply as offended littérateurs, like jealous guardians of a fiefdom they considered to have been invaded.” Padilla’s self-criticism was a minor affair, Benedetti argued, and he more than once reminded his readers of the great sin of the bourgeois socialists who had condemned Padilla’s treatment: their participation in the CIA-sponsored CCF.23

  For Roberto Fernández Retamar, the CCF also served as the reference that demonstrated the short distance between criticism and betrayal. In his essay for Casa de las Américas, titled “Calibán,” Fernández Retamar reached back to José Enrique Rodó, whose essay Ariel had made the sprightly Ariel of Shakespeare’s The Tempest a symbol of spiritual Latin America and the hulking Caliban stand in for the industrial United States. Reinterpreting the play, Fernández Retamar revised Rodó’s allegory, arguing that Prospero represented “civilizing” colonialism, while both Ariel and Caliban were his slaves. The situation of the writer in Latin America was a colonial one, he argued, and most resembled not Ariel but Caliban, who said to Prospero, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” But Fernández Retamar’s “Calibán” was not merely a meditation on the writer in a “colonial” setting; he also made it an explicit attack on those writers who he said rejected the problematic nature of writing in the “Latin American” setting. He singled out Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes, whom he respectively called the right-wing spokesman for a powerless class and the representative of the decadent “Mexican literary mafia,” “taking advantage of the wild vociferation occasioned by a Cuban writer’s month in jail [to] break obstreperously with Cuba.” For Fernández Retamar, the problem of the moment was not Padilla’s treatment but the criticism of it. Those who rejected Cuba in 1961 because it declared itself Marxist-Leninist were more obviously reactionary, he argued, but those who were doing so in 1971 represented merely a “changing of the guard with an identical attitude.” True Cuban and Latin American culture would be revolutionary culture, born from the rejection of colonialism. Fuentes’s participation in a magazine associated with the CCF proved that he did not belong.24

  Issue no. 68 of Casa de las Américas, the September–October 1971 edition, was devoted to the topic “Culture and Revolution in Latin America.” It made a kind of official response to the Padilla affair and was illustrated by scenes of colonial violence, including this one. Some of the woodcuts used were those of the sixteenth-century artist Theodor de Bry, whose work had long been us
ed to illustrate Bartolomé de Las Casas’s account of Spanish cruelty during the conquest of the Americas. The reproductions worked by analogy to situate that issue’s printed arguments, defensive responses to international criticism of Padilla’s treatment, in the context of a colonized people menaced by a long history of imperialism. Source: Casa de las Américas, no. 68 (September–October 1971).

  In a retrospective essay looking back on the writing of “Calibán” many years later, Fernández Retamar again foregrounded the role that the CCF had played in creating the environment in which his essay was written:

  At the very outset of the cold war, before the Third World had … entered the ring with such intensity, the United States organized, among other operations, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, in which the crude anti-Communism of practical politicians was adorned with intellectual sighs and breast-beating. In Spanish, the Congress’s journal was called Cuadernos; its form was so sclerotic that it was unable to ride the rising tide of the sixties, and thus, it capsized ingloriously on its one hundredth issue. Shortly thereafter, the substitution of Mundo Nuevo for Cuadernos was planned and accomplished.

  The debate that raged around this review permeated the atmosphere in which “Caliban” was conceived. In the mid-sixties, when the imminent publication in Paris of the new review became known, a group of writers, myself included, called attention to the fact that Mundo Nuevo could do nothing more than put a better face on its predecessor and that, in essence, it would have a similar purpose … The project was clear: to challenge, from Europe and with a modern look, the hegemony of the revolutionary outlook in Latin-American intellectual work.

  Each of Fernández Retamar’s statements is perfectly correct, and his description of the fate of Cuadernos is elegant. Yet the attention he gives to the CCF is also revealing, for by the time he was writing “Calibán,” the contentious debate over Mundo Nuevo and the revelations of CIA involvement in the CCF had taken place five years earlier. Invoking the CIA, a frequent practice in militant Cuban publications, served to remind the reader that the issue was not the domestic repression of a poet but an international conflict, full of spies and treachery, over the survival of the Cuban Revolution. Opposition to the revolution, to this way of thinking, did not stem from domestic discontent but was fomented by corrupt agents of a foreign empire.25

  The “issue” of the CCF, more than the organization itself, provided a wedge between “revolutionary” and (bourgeois) “leftist” intellectuals, making it possible for the former to understand opposition to directed culture as nothing more than acquiescence to imperialism. The story of the CCF and the CIA survived not only because it was true, but also because it was useful. Fernández Retamar would go on referencing it into the next millennium. And if Fernández Retamar had a greater ability to predict the course that the CCF would take, Emir Rodríguez Monegal had a better sense of what lay in store for Cuba. The years that followed the Padilla affair were the darkest period for Cuban culture, colored in the gray hues of self-censorship and official repression. Even some of the island’s defenders, like Ángel Rama, began, often obliquely, to voice their discontent. Like Russian historians in the Soviet era who wrote histories of earlier centuries to comment on the present, Rama’s posthumously published account of Latin American intellectuals in the service of the Spanish empire, The Lettered City, can be read as a warning that the continent’s intellectuals did not play only the progressive roles that the revolution would assign to them.26

  It was part of the complex legacy of the CCF to have contributed, in different ways and at different times, to the justification of both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence. Its exposure as a CIA front had made networks of cultural imperialism visible while at the same time failing to convince anyone that its power was modest. The product of both U.S. national security interests and the community of thinkers that struggled to define an anti-Communist Left that might in turn influence the United States, it survived, like other front organizations of the Cold War, as a projection of both its own actions and the imaginations of its critics. But if Mundo Nuevo’s fate showed how difficult it would be for a democratic socialism to emerge from even a convoluted alliance with the United States, the Padilla affair and Casa’s reaction showed, similarly, that no such thing would be forthcoming from Cuba.

  The World Peace Council had lacked significant cultural influence since the death of Stalin in 1953, and the CCF never really recovered from the revelations of its relationship with the CIA. The Padilla affair broke the spine of Cuban cultural leadership, and it too would never again regain its former appeal. Prominent supporters remained: Gabriel García Márquez, most notably, kept his criticisms of Cuban developments private, believing that doing so gave him more influence and the ability to assist occasionally in securing the release of political prisoners. But the taboo of criticizing Cuba from the Left had been broken, and with it came the final splintering of intellectual life. All the major Latin American cultural projects representing Cold War interests had been shattered. Their fragments could still be sharp and dangerous, but they would assuredly be smaller. Nonetheless, their patterns—including the sorting of intellectuals into mutually antagonistic and mutually exclusive antitotalitarian and anti-imperialist camps—would persist. Each great hope of the Left to emerge in the next years would be refracted through those lenses.27

  The troubles of the Cold War fronts revealed problems with each of their visions of a just society, which all would have described as a democratic socialism while meaning different things by that phrase. The Chile of Salvador Allende (1970–1973) was aligned with none of these three tendencies, but it was, in many ways, a perfect synecdoche for the end of democratic socialist hopes in the region and the world. Allende, a medical doctor and member of his country’s Socialist Party, had run many times for president before winning a narrow plurality of the vote in 1970. (He joked that his tombstone would read “Here lies Salvador Allende, future president of the Republic.”) His version of democratic socialism had points of contact with each of the three major strands of the Latin American Left: the democratic, the orthodox Communist, and the Cuban. As recently as 1960 he had attended the international conference of the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom of the Democratic Left, although he eventually broke off his friendship with Rómulo Betancourt because of their diverging views on Cuba. He was a close friend of Pablo Neruda, and Allende’s Socialist Party was part of an electoral alliance with Chile’s orthodox Communist Party, which favored building socialism through electoral politics instead of armed revolution. The Chilean Left also included supporters of rapid, Cuba-style transformation; Allende himself had traveled to the Tricontinental Conference in 1966, and he valued Fidel Castro’s counsel.28

  After the election of 1970, it immediately became clear that Chile’s right wing would do what it could to bring down Latin America’s first elected Marxist. Similarly, before Allende even took office, the Nixon administration cast about for ways to avoid his presidency. The CIA tried scheming with the center-left Christian Democratic Party, with which it had long enjoyed close contacts, to prevent Allende from taking office, but failed. Other regional anti-Communist powers, like the dictatorship of Brazil, also worked to undermine his government. The staunch refusal of the Christian Democratic representatives of the Democratic Left to work with Chile’s democratically elected Socialist president over the course of his term in office was one of the factors that led to government crisis and downfall.29

  Allende’s first steps at reestablishing relations with Cuba also went poorly. He sent the left-wing writer Jorge Edwards—long a friend and aide to Pablo Neruda and a guest in Havana for the Cultural Congress of 1968—to make the first contacts. But Edwards’s status as a writer and his friendship with Heberto Padilla caused him to be viewed with suspicion and placed under near-constant surveillance. His trip ended a few months later when he was expelled from the country. Edwards began writing a book that he hoped would
be a warning that Chile should not follow Cuba’s example, but even if it had come soon enough, few would have listened.

  Allende had to deal with many leftist groups who thought that his legal, constitutional path to socialism was timid and inappropriate—some even welcomed a military coup, thinking that it would hasten a continental revolution. Armed confrontations between left- and right-wing groups grew in frequency. Workers organized themselves, and some took over factories and farms without the legal authority to do so, betting that Allende would not dare to confront them. They were right, but the situation and the economy spiraled out of control. After one of Allende’s semiregular consultations with Neruda in 1972, Neruda wrote to Jorge Edwards that Allende did not even agree with his own officials who recommended that he refuse to negotiate with the North American companies whose copper interests had been nationalized. “What to think!” wrote Neruda, who agreed with Allende and was increasingly concerned that the situation was growing hopeless; “There are days in which I don’t know what is happening to me.”30