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

by Patrick Iber

  11. Brenner, Idols behind Altars, 255. Siqueiros and the French artist Jean Charlot had drafted similar statements earlier. Alicia Azuela de la Cueva, Arte y poder: Renacimiento artístico y revolución social; México, 1910–1945 (Zamora, Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2005), 159.

  12. Ione Robinson, quoted in Leonard Folgarait, Seeing Mexico Photographed: The Work of Horne, Casasola, Modotti, and Álvarez Bravo (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 107; Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999), 145–146. On Modotti, see also Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary (London: Pandora, 1993); Pino Cacucci, Tina Modotti: A Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Letizia Argenteri, Tina Modotti: Between Art and Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003); and Mildred Constantine, Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life (London: Paddington Press, 1975).

  13. Hooks, Tina Modotti, 162–163; Christine Hatzky, Julio Antonio Mella (1903–1929): Eine Biografie (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2004); Raquel Tibol, Julio Antonio Mella en El Machete: Antología parcial de un luchador y su momento histórico (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Popular, 1968); Lazar Jeifets, Victor Jeifets, and Peter Huber, La Internacional comunista y América Latina, 1919–1943: Diccionario biográfico (Moscow: Instituto de Latinoamérica de la Academia de las Ciencias, 2004); Vittorio Vidali, Comandante Carlos, trans. Cristina Cámpora (Mexico City: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1986).

  14. The evidence of the Cuban’s government’s involvement is solid; the theories that allege Mexican government collaboration or Communist participation cannot be supported by any available evidence. Hatzky, Julio Antonio Mella, 300–328.

  15. Heather Fowler-Salamini, Agrarian Radicalism in Veracruz, 1920–38 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 61–64.

  16. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, trans. Max Eastman (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1945), 183–184.

  17. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 14, 219–221. Many scholars are skeptical that Trotsky fully deserves his reputation as a kind of “anti-Stalin.” Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 3–6; Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, The Breakdown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 183–219.

  18. Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 447–474; Nigel Gould-Davies, “The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 27, no. 2 (April 2003): 193–214; Abram Tertz (Andrei Donatevich Siniavskii), The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism (New York: Vintage Books, 1965); Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 62–67; Regler, Owl of Minerva, 203–216; Andrei Zhdanov, Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, and A. Stetsky, Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress (New York: International Publishers, 1935).

  19. Guillermo Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje: Ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2004), 241. Breton’s speech and his account of the congress can be found in André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 234–253. Aragon’s rejoinder is in Manuel Aznar Soler, I Congreso Internacional de Escritores para la Defensa de la Cultura, París 1935 (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana Conselleria de Cultura, Educació i Ciencia, 1987), 433–441.

  20. Only 50 of the 700 attendees of the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934 survived to the Second Congress in 1954. Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 482.

  21. Julián Gorkin, El revolucionario profesional: Testimonio de un hombre de acción (Barcelona: Aymá, 1975); Pepe Gutiérrez-Álvarez, Retratos poumistas (Seville: Espuela de Plata, 2006), 169.

  22. On Popular Front culture in the United States, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1998).

  23. Jorge Basurto, Cárdenas y el poder sindical (Mexico City: Era, 1983), 19, 118, 159.

  24. Lázaro Cárdenas, Apuntes, 1913–1940 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1972), 334; Lázaro Cárdenas, Apuntes, 1957–1966 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1973), 104; Guadalupe Pacheco Méndez, Arturo Anguiano, and Rogelio Vizcaíno A., Cárdenas y la izquierda mexicana: Ensayo, testimonios, documentos de Guadalupe Pacheco Méndez, Arturo Anguiano Orozco y Rogelio Vizcaíno A. (Mexico City: J. Pablos Editor, 1975), 125; Basurto, Cárdenas y el poder sindical, 82–98.

  25. Cárdenas, Apuntes, 1913–1940, 368; “What Does the CTAL Mean?,” pamphlet, 1944, Vicente Lombardo Toledano FBI file. On the foreign policy objectives of the CTAL, see Amelia Kiddle, “La Política del Buen Amigo: Mexican-Latin American Relations during the Presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, 1934–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 2010), 217–220.

  26. Daniela Spenser, Unidad a toda costa: La Tercera Internacional en México durante la presidencia de Lázaro Cárdenas (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2007), 260.

  27. On Trotskyism and the LEAR, see Jean Freville, “El marxismo y la literatura,” Frente a frente, no. 5 (August 1936): 8; Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 29; and Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, 177–179. On the muralists, see Alejandro Anreus, “Los Tres Grandes: Ideologies and Styles,” in Anreus, Greeley, and Folgarait, Mexican Muralism, 49. On the Taller de Gráfica Popular, see Helga Prignitz, El Taller de Gráfica Popular en México, trans. Elizabeth Siefer (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1992). On the Argentine analogue to the LEAR, which lasted somewhat longer, see James Cane, “ ‘Unity for the Defense of Culture’: The AIAPE and the Cultural Politics of Argentine Antifascism, 1935–1943,” Hispanic American Historical Review 77, no. 3 (August 1997): 443–482.

  28. Franklin D. Roosevelt, after initially following a policy of nonintervention, likely pursued both legal and illegal means to aid the Republican side. Dominic Tierney, FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle That Divided America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); Pavel Sudoplatov, Anatoli Sudoplatov, Jerrold Schecter, Leona Schecter, and Robert Conquest, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), 30.

  29. Estimates vary between 14,000 and 40,000 refugees. El exilio Español en México, 1939–1982 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982), 101. On Mexico in the Spanish Civil War, see Mario Ojeda Revah, México y la Guerra Civil Española (Madrid: Turner, 2004); José Antonio Matesanz, Las raíces del exilio: México ante la Guerra Civil Española, 1936–1939 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999); and T. G. Powell, Mexico and the Spanish Civil War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980). There is evidence that the Soviet Union overcharged Spain for weapons it provided, although without them the Republic would surely have fallen sooner. Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (London: J. Murray, 1998).

  30. The “smoking gun” document often purported to show Communist premeditation of the attack on the anarchist-held Telefónica, which began the May Days fighting, in fact shows only that Communists thought that a government crisis would be to their advantage. Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, eds., Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 174, 184–195. For years there was uncertainty about the precise circumstances of Nin’s death. The most widely accepted version, which asserted that he had been tortured and killed in Alcalá de Henares, northeast of Madrid, was confirmed by Spanish documentary filmmakers using KGB files after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas: La Internacional Comunista y España, 1919–1939 (Barcelona: Planeta, 199
9), 376–377. Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 520; Wilebaldo Solano, El POUM en la historia: Andreu Nin y la revolución española, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Libros de la Catarata, 2000), 31.

  31. Pablo Neruda, Memoirs: Confieso que he vivido (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 130–135; Ojeda Revah, México y la Guerra Civil Española, 186. On Republican propaganda abroad, see Hugo García, The Truth about Spain! Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936–1939 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010).

  32. André Gide, Back from the U.S.S.R., 3rd ed., trans. Dorothy Bussy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1937); André Gide, Afterthoughts, a Sequel to “Back from the U.S.S.R.,” 2nd ed. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1937), 67, 71; Robert S. Thornberry, “Writers Take Sides, Stalinists Take Control: The Second International Congress for the Defense of Culture (Spain 1937),” Historian 62, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 589–605; Manuel Aznar Soler, Pensamiento literario y compromiso antifascista de la inteligencia española republicana (Barcelona: Laia, 1978); Manuel Aznar Soler and Luis Mario Schneider, Ponencias, documentos, testimonios (Barcelona: Laia, 1979); Luis Mario Schneider, Inteligencia y guerra civil en España (Barcelona: Laia, 1978); Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Tristeza de la verdad: André Gide regresa de Rusia (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1991).

  33. Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 115–129; Neruda, Memoirs, 136.

  34. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, 306; Octavio Paz, Itinerario (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 66–67. An example of Paz’s continued work on behalf of Popular Front causes is the essay that he published in Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s “Stalinist” magazine, Futuro (although there is nothing either Stalinist or anti-Stalinist about the essay): “Americanidad de España,” Futuro, no. 35 (January 1939), 18–19. See also John King, The Role of Mexico’s Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture: From Tlatelolco to the “Philanthropic Ogre” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 17–18. Paz wrote his first openly anti-Stalinist essay after reading David Rousset’s 1949 work L’univers concentrationnaire, about the system of forced labor camps critical to the Soviet economy. Paz, Itinerario, 75–76; Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, 314–315, 403–411; Enrique Krauze, Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America, trans. Hank Heifetz and Natasha Wimmer (New York: Harper, 2011), 173.

  35. Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, and Albert Manning Glotzer, The Case of Leon Trotsky, 1st paperback ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2006), 491–494; John Dewey, Benjamin Stolberg, and Suzanne La Follette, Not Guilty: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, 2nd ed. (New York: Monad Press, 1972). The tacit support of Cárdenas is clear because two of the members of the committee, Benjamin Stolberg and Suzanne La Follette, were experiencing visa troubles. When Dewey cabled Cárdenas to ask him to intervene so that Stolberg and La Follette would encounter no difficulties at the U.S.-Mexico border, Cárdenas acted immediately to ensure that they could cross into Mexico. John Dewey to Lázaro Cárdenas, 3 April 1937; and Cárdenas to Secretaría de Gobernación, 4 April 1937, Gallery 3—Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (LCR), folder 546.6/77, AGN.

  36. Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey: A Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 418–421; Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile, 110.

  37. Leon Trotsky and André Breton, “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” Partisan Review 6, no. 1 (Fall 1938): 49–53. As in other places, this version of the manifesto, translated by Dwight Macdonald, strategically lists the authors of the manifesto as Breton and Diego Rivera and omits Trotsky.

  38. Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 248–274. Signers of Hook’s manifesto included, among others, Sherwood Anderson, George S. Counts, Merle Curti, John Dewey, John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, Suzanne La Follette, Sol Levitas, Eugene Lyons, James Rorty, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Norman Thomas, and Carlo Tresca. The “fascists and their allies” quote is from “To All Active Supporters of Democracy and Peace,” The Nation 149, no. 9 (26 August 1939): 228. The signers of the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism manifesto included James Burnham, James T. Farrell, Clement Greenberg, Melvin J. Lasky, Dwight Macdonald, George Novack, Philip Rahv, James Rorty, Delmore Schwartz, and Bertram Wolfe. “Statement of the L.C.F.S.,” Partisan Review 6, no. 4 (Summer 1939): 125–127. Most of the U.S. personnel of the future Congress for Cultural Freedom signed one of these two manifestos (or, in the case of James Rorty, both).

  39. Betty Kirk, Covering the Mexican Front: The Battle of Europe versus America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1942), 88.

  40. On U.S. fear of Nazism in the Americas, see Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  41. Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2003), 184–222.

  42. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 (London: Verso, 2003), 390–391; David Álfaro Siqueiros, Me llamaban el Coronelazo: Memorias (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1977), 363–364. Neruda would sometimes later maintain that he did not know Siqueiros and was acting out of solidarity with someone who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. This was not true; Neruda had in fact met Siqueiros at least in 1939, although it was true that Neruda arrived in Mexico to work as Chilean consul after Siqueiros’s attempt to assassinate Trotsky. Jorge Edwards, Adios, poeta . . . : Memorias (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1990), 277–280.

  43. Pete Hamill, Diego Rivera (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 192–194; Patrick Marnham, Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 288. Hamill and Marnham’s references are based on unpublished research, now decades old, by William Chase of the University of Pittsburgh. The information on Gorkin comes from Report on Julián Gómez García, 16 December 1944, Julián Gorkin FBI file.

  44. Luis-Martín Lozano, Juan Coronel Rivera, and Benedikt Taschen, eds., Diego Rivera: The Complete Murals (Hong Kong: Taschen, 2008), 398; Marnham, Dreaming with His Eyes Open, 292. Trotsky’s final days are vividly described in Bertrand Patenaude, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

  45. Ferdinand Lundberg to Hook, n.d. [Summer 1941], Sidney Hook Papers, folder 7, box 117, Hoover Institution Archives (HIA), Stanford, Calif. The law that the Trotskyists were charged with violating was the Smith Act, which would be used against the leadership of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) in 1949. Although it was aware of the dangerous precedent being set, the CPUSA supported the prosecution in 1941. Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 123–124.

  46. “Repercusiones en México de la ruptura entre nazis y soviets: Mensaje a las centrales y organismos obreros miembros de la CTAL,” La Prensa, 24 June 1941. Communist parties got their new instructions after a meeting of Soviet agents in Mexico and Central America in Guatemala in July 1941. “Instructions from Moscow to Communist Organizations of Mexico,” 30 July 1941, Record Group 226—files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Research and Analysis Branch, report 10386, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Md.; “Activities and Public Utterances of Vicente Lombardo Toledano in Chile,” 30 October 1942, OSS, report 24797, NARA; “Resolutions Approved at the Havana Meeting of the Executive Council of the Confederation of Latin American Labor (CTAL),” 31 July 1943, Jay Lovestone Papers, box 247, folder 6, HIA. The CTAL also warned that it expected democratic powers to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of countries and to allow them to choose their own form of government at the end of the war, rejecting the “New Christian Order,” superimperialism, and the Trotskyist permanent revolution.

  47. Igor Damaskin and Geoffrey Elliott
, Kitty Harris: The Spy with Seventeen Names (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2001), 210–218; John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 283–285.

  48. Monica Rankin, ¡México, la patria! Propaganda and Production during World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

  49. Gorkin had been charged with indiscipline in 1931 as a member of a Spanish Trotskyist group. Pelai Pagès, El movimiento trotskista en España (1930–1935): La Izquierda Comunista de España y las disidencias comunistas durante la Segunda República (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1977), 41; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 26. The magazines were Análisis and Mundo. Weissman, Victor Serge, 264; Olga Glondys, La guerra fría cultural y el exilio republicano español: Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura (1953–1965) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2012), 33–36. President Cárdenas granted Serge asylum in the final days of his term as president, having received a decisive petition from his friend, the historian Frank Tannenbaum. Tannenbaum to Lázaro Cárdenas, 21 October 1940, LCR, folder 546.6/295, AGN.

  50. Having obtained a shipment of arms, Costa Amic remained in Mexico, where he became an associate of the exiled Trotsky. Carlos Zapata Vela, Conversaciones con Heriberto Jara (Mexico City: Costa-Amic Editores, 1992), 90. He can be seen in photos with Trotsky in Alain Dugrand, James T. Farrell, and Pierre Broué, Trotsky, Mexico, 1937–1940 (Paris: Editions Payot, 1988), 53–54. On Nazi starvation strategies, see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 416–417. Weissman, Victor Serge, 262; Victor Serge, Mémoires (Paris: Club des Éditeurs, Le Seuil, 1957), 379; Exilio Español en Mexico, 1939–1982, 618–619; Victor Serge, Hitler contra Stalin: La fase decisiva de la Guerra Mundial (Mexico City: Ediciones Quetzal, 1941); Julián Gorkin, Caníbales políticos: Hitler y Stalin en España (Mexico City: Ediciones Quetzal, 1941).