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

by Patrick Iber

  This was perhaps most obvious in Chile, where great mistrust had existed between Christian Democrats and Allende, whose programmatic differences had been exaggerated by the differing Cold War stances that they had taken. During the long dictatorship of Pinochet, both sides reconsidered some of their earlier disagreements. The intellectuals of the Christian Democratic Party, including Eduardo Frei and Jaime Castillo Velasco, both of whom had once also been associated with the CCF, became voices for coalition politics to end the dictatorship. The brutality exercised by the dictatorships in their “dirty war” against the Left caused many who had rejected individual human rights as merely “bourgeois” to rethink their value. The mainstream of the Socialist Party came to see electoral democracy as a way to guarantee respect for human rights.

  Just as in the 1930s, Mexico in the 1970s again became a haven for many refugees from dictatorship. Institutions like the Ford Foundation that had been anathema to the radical Left helped too, establishing research centers that protected intellectuals from state repression. Their analysis, in turn, helped shape popular movements for the restoration of democracy. The Cold War—including the Cultural Cold War—had kept these parties apart. Widespread violations of human rights were divisive for the Left when they took place in Cuba, but were unifying when they were practiced by the dictatorships. This created the conditions under which the Cold War could thaw, and in which a center-left and a Left could see each other as allies rather than obstacles, with democracy as a common goal. In Mexico, where there had never been a formal dictatorship, anti–Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) intellectuals of both the Left and the Right collaborated with popular movements to force the PRI to acknowledge opposition victories at the state and local levels, making possible gradual movements toward democracy at the level of federal elections. The “pink” tide of Left and center-left governments that swept across the region in the late 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, touching nearly every country except Mexico and Colombia, was, for the most part, democratic and capitalist, with a role reserved for state welfare programs to alleviate poverty.41

  Intellectually, Octavio Paz and other antitotalitarians had been written out of the Left. But in practice, the liberal values they had hoped would be part of the Left’s program had triumphed. Even the debate between neoliberals and social democrats was, to a degree, set aside; for example, the type of program put in place by the “neoliberal” Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil in the 1990s, to give cash benefits to the poor in exchange for children’s school attendance, was, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, part of the agenda of the “social democratic” government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil, and other governments across the region as well, saw sustained economic growth along with meaningful reductions in inequality in the first decade of the new millennium, something that many of the previous generation would have assumed was impossible.

  To be sure, differences remained. Some analysis divided the “pink tide” into two Lefts that resembled Cold War divisions: one democratic and modern, the other outdated and authoritarian. To this way of thinking, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela represented the latter. Especially after he was briefly removed from power in a coup in 2002, he pledged his government to “twenty-first-century” socialism. Echoing the anti-imperialist Left of the Cold War, he made CIA and other conspiracies part of the language of the government, frustrating an opposition that could not mount a credible challenge to him. Not all of his programs to benefit the poor were effective, but high oil prices did sustain reductions in poverty and inequality, for as many times as Chávez paid homage to Cuba and Castro, his government did not stop selling oil to the United States. And as closed as he was to criticism and as much as he demonized the opposition, he was repeatedly elected, and there were no camps for opponents: his Venezuela seemed more like the child of Juan Domingo Perón and Mexico’s PRI than a repeat of twentieth-century totalitarianism. With the major totalitarian power gone, and the imperial power of the United States transformed into a less obviously interventionist form, at least in Latin America, neither antitotalitarianism nor anti-imperialism had the purchase it had once had.42

  The new democracies, like all others, were deeply flawed. Corruption and violence plagued much of the region, cutting across ideological boundaries. Inequality, even when reduced, remained appallingly high, and opportunities and rights for the poor were limited. Privatized state assets often made enormous fortunes for the well connected, and tax systems were barely redistributive. The problems of operating democratic systems in such unequal societies remained to be thought through or at least acted on. Both those in the generally neoliberal camp and those opposed to it required self-criticism and a look back to the ways in which their problems echoed those of their Cold War predecessors if they were to build a broad and deep democratic Left.

  But the romantic view of themselves that intellectuals had once had, that it was they who would have to speak for a civil society that could not speak for itself, seemed less and less applicable. Vigorous social movements sprang up across the region to defend different visions of justice. The Cold War had given intellectuals clear roles to play. It had given the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, for example, the opportunity at the height of Stalinism to promise to bear witness to the sufferings of her society. In Latin America, where the bulk of the repression was justified on anti-Communist grounds, it had allowed the Chilean Nicanor Parra to perform what he described as a “Censored Poem” during the dictatorship of Pinochet by standing, saying nothing, and retiring to applause. What gave intellectuals their power in the twentieth century was their relationship with powerful states, either as subjects of repression or as adjuncts of state power. The new democracies, however flawed, did not find them as useful. Nor did they find it necessary to repress them. This was less a sign that intellectuals had lost their grandeur or their way than it was a sign of social progress. The Cultural Cold War had offered intense dreams but no way to fulfill them. The post–Cold War world offered fewer dreams, only lowered expectations and the long, hard work of making life, slowly and unevenly, a bit less grim. Progress would be earned through the interaction of social movements, ideas, electoral politics, and economic growth. The new politics could hardly promise an end to injustice, but at least it sometimes offered the possibility that democracy itself could be made better. As always, there was much to do.

  Conclusion

  Hundreds of years before the Cultural Cold War, propaganda played a central part in another struggle between empires. Competition between Spain and England in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries gave rise to the Black Legend of Spanish colonialism, which described Spaniards as exceptionally brutal imperialists. This notion was based partially on the writings of the sixteenth-century Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had argued that the savagery of conquest and the depraved actions of Spanish soldiers made it difficult to save the souls of the “Indians.” Although his documentation of murder and abuse led to reforms within the empire, his harrowing account became the touchstone of the Black Legend. English-language publication of Las Casas’s work spiked in moments of intense imperial rivalry, when England used evidence of Spanish barbarism both to discredit Spain’s claims to territory and to justify its own violent colonial interventions. Beyond the truth or falsity of the legend, its persistence was not an accident but an organized part of imperial competition. Critiques of one empire’s cruelty served to justify the cruelty of another.1

  Although the technology of propaganda had changed by the twentieth century, during the Cold War competition between the United States and the USSR, accounts of one empire’s transgressions were similarly used to the advantage of the other. The front groups of the Cold War both generated propaganda and were its targets, and their legacies and meanings have remained politically charged. The black legends that were attached to the World Peace Council (WPC) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)—assertions that the former was
a front for Stalinist aggression and the latter a CIA ploy to extend U.S. domination—were used to justify repression. But the legends overstate the power of the WPC and the CCF and understate their unintended consequences.

  The black legend of the WPC was promulgated by the U.S. government and anti-Communist entrepreneurs, who argued that the WPC’s language of peace masked aggressive intent, papering over Stalinist repression to dupe the well-intentioned into affiliation. But, like any black legend, that of the WPC was meant to discredit it and bolster opposing political interests, not to capture the nuances of its position and function. The WPC’s connections to Communist politics were real enough, but they were more a liability than an asset. Its rhetoric, such as that of anticosmopolitanism, was designed to criticize the culture of the West but inadvertently revealed the falsity of the Soviet Union’s claims to have eliminated ethnic strife. Affiliated artists, from Pablo Neruda to Diego Rivera, tried to write and paint in ways that accorded with socialist realism, but most found it to be an artistic and ideological dead end.

  The level of control that the Soviet empire exercised over the WPC was also frequently exaggerated. It paid most of the bills for the WPC at the global level, but many local initiatives were self-financed. WPC participants were culpably naïve—perhaps deliberately so—about the Soviet Union, but they rationalized their naïveté by arguing that it was not the Soviet Union but the United States that was responsible for the greatest suffering in their home countries. And in Latin America, at least, they had a point. Anti-Communist suppression of peace initiatives likely did more to damage democracy in the early years of the Cold War than the persistence of peace activities would have.

  Furthermore, even though the WPC was a Communist front group, it sometimes fostered organizations that were not Communist at all. The Movimiento de Liberación Nacional that operated for a few years in Mexico in the 1960s adopted and adapted much of the language of the peace campaigns and incorporated its personnel. But, at Lázaro Cárdenas’s insistence, it maintained financial and programmatic independence from the WPC, and it advocated for civil liberties in a manner characteristic of anti-Communist struggles against Communist hegemony. In a region of anti-Communist domination, Marxists and their allies could defend essential democratic rights.

  The WPC’s antagonist and counterpart, the CCF, has also been the subject of a black legend: that it was an accessory of U.S. power and part of the CIA’s strategy to ensure capitalist hegemony around the globe. Its function, as this story has it, was to divide the Left and elicit consent to U.S. power among artists and intellectuals by focusing their attention on Communist offenses, thereby conditioning a part of the Left not to automatically reject the United States and its political and cultural leadership. As with the black legend of the WPC, this view is not entirely inaccurate, but it likewise does not attend to the failures, unintended consequences, and ironies generated by the CCF’s activities.

  The CCF was not only the creation of the CIA; it was also the work of dedicated anti-Stalinist activists whose work long predated the Cold War. Their commitment to “cultural freedom” was the logical extension of their experience of trying to work with Communist groups in the decades before the Cold War began. Nor did the CIA create the Left’s divisions. These too had their roots in pre–Cold War differences of ideas and practices between Communists and groups that could be loosely described as social democratic. Even in the art world, as in its attempts to promote alternatives to Marxist painters like Diego Rivera and David Álfaro Siqueiros in Mexico in the 1950s, the CCF was more a trend follower than a trendsetter.

  Still, the CIA unquestionably played an important role in the organization of the CCF, and many affiliates knew something about the connection. The argument for the “disinterested CIA” made by some defenders of the CCF is not credible. But its opposite, the breezy assumption that just about everyone, on some level, knew what was going on, also does not stand up to scrutiny. Although the Latin American operation can in no way stand in for the CCF as a whole, it was by the mid-1960s the most important regional operation within the CCF, and its history shows how limited knowledge of its CIA connections was. Even important members, including Luis Mercier Vega and Keith Botsford, may not have had direct knowledge of the CIA’s relationship to the CCF; more remote affiliates probably knew even less. Although some micromanagement by agency officials took place, the principal way in which the CIA intervened in the CCF was by hiring the people who it thought would do the best job of making the CCF an effective organization. The CIA was naturally interested in the outcomes, but it did not always speak with one voice: John Hunt and Michael Josselson were both directly employed by the CIA but took opposing views on major issues, such as the usefulness of Cuadernos. And local affiliates, such as those in Brazil around the time of the coup in 1964, did not always obey the requests of the CIA employees in the CCF.

  Insofar as the CCF was an instrument of U.S. hegemony, it was a complicated one. It was not really the case that the CCF was ever intentionally counterhegemonic in the sense of opposing U.S. power. It did criticize the United States, but generally from the point of view of the anti-Communist Left, arguing that the United States should be a more resolute supporter of left-wing reform in order to avoid left-wing revolution. The historian Frank Tannenbaum, writing about U.S. policy toward Latin America in Cuadernos in 1961, argued that “Our anti-Communist policy [meaning that of the United States] would have caused other feelings if it had been combined with a positive support for democracy … Nevertheless, unfortunately, we [the United States] have been opposed to Communism, but we have not visibly supported democracy.” Criticism of the United States in CCF publications generally expressed disappointment in the mistakes of the United States, whereas the Soviet Union was condemned outright. The Latin American projects sponsored by the CCF that were most critical of the United States were those of Luis Mercier Vega’s Aportes and Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s Mundo Nuevo; both were simultaneously critical of the United States and of Cuban cultural politics and Marxist analysis. But Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s belief that the role of the intellectual lay in independent criticism, for example, was useful in some ways to U.S. interests, not opposed to them. He fully intended that criticism would be directed toward the United States. But in the left-wing communities who were the intended audience for his message, his idea of the intellectual was also a potentially helpful one for the United States since it challenged the propriety of unconditional support for Cuba among left-wing intellectuals.2

  The dark view of the CIA as the master manipulator of Latin American politics in no way should be replaced with a sunny picture of the CIA as a friend of the Left so long as the Left was anti-Communist. The case of the CCF does show, however, the limits of the CIA’s power to shape the course of events in the absence of local allies. The United States was the strongest imperial power in Latin America in the twentieth century, and it got what it wanted often enough, frequently with tragic results. Still, it was not omnipotent. Moreover, the United States, rather than oscillating between liberal and authoritarian foreign policies, pursued both simultaneously. The CCF was part of a liberal current within the CIA that tried to encourage social reform in Latin America in a way that would also serve the ends of anti-Communism. It was, in a Gramscian sense, part of plans to build consent for U.S. hegemony in the region. But there is more than one possible form for hegemony to take, and Latin America might have experienced a somewhat more tolerable hegemony if the liberals had succeeded more often in creating the conditions for stable alliances between the United States and Latin America’s anti-Communist Left.

  Just as the black legend of the WPC justified anti-Communist repression throughout the region, the black legend of the CCF was used by Casa de las Américas to justify repression within Communist Cuba. By the late 1960s both Casa and the CCF had suppressed how much they had once had in common. They had erased the participation of CCF personnel in Cuba’s government and in Casa de las América
s itself in 1959. They had forgotten the work done by parts of the CCF for Fidel Castro during the struggle against Batista, especially in the critical area of public relations. Supporting Castro was probably the most important political action taken by the members of the CCF in Latin America, and it was, entirely by accident, surely the most counterhegemonic action it ever took. That the CCF’s most important political success was to help Fidel Castro to power is only one piece of evidence that the role of Cold War fronts in constructing hegemony can best be understood within a framework of ironic Gramscianism. By its work, it had discredited Communism; by its existence and exposure as a CIA front, it discredited anti-Communism.3

  At the inaugural meeting of the CCF in 1950, Sidney Hook had argued that “the fundamental distinction of our time must be drawn … not in terms of a free market in goods or a closed market but only in terms of a free market in ideas.” Since Hook knew that the CCF was a CIA-sponsored project that was presumably distorting the “free market in ideas,” his statement might serve as a reminder of the hypocrisies that anti-Communists were willing to tolerate in the name of liberal values. But more important, the existence of the CCF strongly suggested that a free, competitive market in ideas was not a good model for thinking through the transmission of thought during the Cold War. The market in ideas was not free at all; it was full of subsidized firms producing many substandard goods and occasionally, in spite of everything, something of real quality. A world without the CCF would hardly have been one without foreign intervention in the arts and culture; indeed, intervention was so ubiquitous that it could be difficult to identify the line between what was authentic and what was imposed.