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

by Patrick Iber

  51. Owen Roche, “Mexico Trotzkyites Peril Rail Transport: Incite Wildcat Strikes to Block Vital Shipments to U.S.,” Worker, 21 May 1944. The clipping, from Victor Serge’s FBI file, appears without any identification of its source. Its source is identified in Director, FBI to The Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service, 19 March 1950, Julián Gorkin FBI file. The pamphlet quote is from Marceau Pivert, Gustav Regler, Victor Serge, and Julián Gorkin, “La G.P.U. prepara un nuevo crímen,” 1942, Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (DGIPS), box 121, binding 46, AGN.

  52. Weissman, Victor Serge, 178. George S. Counts of Workers Defense League to Manual Ávila Camacho, 9 February 1942, Victor Serge Papers (Gen Mss 238), box 13, folder 509, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; George S. Counts to Manuel Ávila Camacho, 27 February 1942, MAC, box 824bis, folder 550/9, AGN; “160 Leading Americans Protest to Avila Camacho Communist Attempts to Deport Anti-fascist Refugees,” New Leader, 14 February 1942, 1; “CP Uses ‘Mexican Labor News’ for New Attack on Anti-Fascist Refugees,” New Leader, 7 March 1942, 1. Paz, Itinerario, 74–76; George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 121–179. On the “New York intellectuals,” see especially Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); and Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

  53. “Incidente provocado por unos conocidos Trotskistas,” El Popular, 2 April 1943; Victor Serge, “Gorkin Stabbed as Mexican CP Wrecks Erlich, Tresca Meeting,” New Leader, 17 April 1943, 1. Serge’s daughter, Jeannine, in attendance at the meeting, remembers being covered in blood when the man shielding her, the Spaniard Enrique Gironella, was injured by a thrown knife. Weissman, Ideas of Victor Serge, 12–13. Serge was unhurt in the attack. Contemporary newspaper accounts state that three, including Gorkin but not Gironella (although he was indeed injured), were taken to the hospital. “Escandalosa trifulca en el Centro Cultural Ibero Mexicano por un atraco comunista,” La Prensa, 2 April 1943, 23; “Fueron 73 los detenidos en el incidente comunista,” El Universal Gráfico, 2 April 1943, 3. Gorkin was struck in the same location where he had damaged himself on a rock as a child. The dramatic scarring, however, does not appear in photos of Gorkin before this event. Gorkin, Revolucionario profesional, 17. Other accounts of the attack can be found in Weissman, Victor Serge, 180–181; and Gallagher, All the Right Enemies, 242–243. These accounts differ in some details: whether the thugs broke in while the meeting was taking place or before it had started, the number of people who had arrived for the meeting (30 versus 300), and the number of attackers (100 versus 200). One of the few relatively impartial accounts, based on the police report of the incident, is “Fueron 73 los detenidos en el incidente comunista,” El Universal Gráfico, 2 April 1943, 3, 5.

  54. Victor Serge, “Gorkin Stabbed as Mexican CP Wrecks Erlich, Tresca Meeting,” New Leader, 17 April 1943, 1; Alianza de Obreros y Empleados Compañía de Tranvías de México to Manuel Ávila Camacho, 2 April 1943, MAC, folder 541.1/56, AGN, and other letters in the same location.

  55. “Deciden los comunistas en México apelar al terror: Se denuncian las actividades de agentes de la GPU en este país,” Excélsior, 4 April 1943, 1, 11, 15. According to the FBI, Gorkin went to the Secretaría de Gobernación on April 8. He went again on August 8, again accusing Vidali of being responsible for the attack as well as Carlo Tresca’s murder. Gorkin said that he had received a letter from Tresca twenty days before his death stating that Tresca had been having a violent debate with Vidali. Director, FBI to Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service, 19 March 1950, Julián Gorkin FBI file. Accusing Vidali of secret police crimes had begun with Trotsky when he was alive. Trotsky may have confused one Carlos Contreras (a name Vidali used as a pseudonym) with another. Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico, 346. Vidali, Comandante Carlos, 115–116. Vidali blames Gorkin in an interview with Concepción Ruiz-Funes, 1 May 1979, in Trieste, Italy, p. 143, PHO/10/36, Archivo de la Palabra del Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José Ma. Luis Mora, Mexico City. Vidali claims that he requested regularization of his immigration status in order to compensate him for his suffering in solitary confinement. His letter of request, however, avoids mention of his detention. Carlos J. Contreras [Vidali] to Manuel Ávila Camacho, 14 April 1941, MAC, folder 546.6/50, AGN.

  56. The account of embassy pressure comes from Gorkin, who described it in an appendix to the 1957 French edition of Serge’s Memoirs. Serge, Mémoires, 381–382; Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), xvii. The newsmagazine was Así, a forerunner to Siempre! Gorkin and Serge wrote there frequently in 1943 about the war and their hopes for a socialist Europe after the end of the war, but both disappear as contributors in early 1944. For example, see Victor Serge, “El eje perdido en África,” Así, no. 114 (16 January 1943): 14–15; and Julián Gorkin, “44, año de la invasión,” Así, no. 167 (22 January 1944): 11.The documents relating to Pivert and Serge are located in “Marceau Pivert Aujard y Otros,” July 1944, DGIPS, box 121, folder 46, AGN. Gorkin’s documents are in “Trotzkysmo [sic],” July 1944, DGIPS, box 127, folder 1, tome 4, AGN.

  57. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, xvii; Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York: New York Review Books, 2004). The other novel he wrote during that period was not published until 1971: Victor Serge, The Unforgiving Years (New York: New York Review Books, 2008). Some have argued that Serge was poisoned. Both Serge and Tina Modotti, who had become Vidali’s lover, died in taxis in Mexico City, and the union of taxi drivers was Communist controlled. Cacucci, Tina Modotti, 205. However, both Serge and Modotti were very ill before their deaths and likely passed away because of natural causes.

  2. Making Peace with Repression, Making Repression with Peace

  1. Andrew Barnard, “Chile,” in Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948, ed. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 85–86; Andrew Barnard, “Chilean Communists, Radical Presidents and Chilean Relations with the United States, 1940–1947,” Journal of Latin American Studies 13, no. 2 (November 1981): 363–374.

  2. “Yo acuso,” 6 January 1948, in Pablo Neruda, Obras completas, vol. 4 (Barcelona: Galaxia Gútenberg: Círculo de Lectores, 1999), 730; Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 202–235.

  3. Ilya Ehrenburg, Post-war Years, 1945–1954 (London: MacGibben & Kee, 1966), 144; Patrick O’Brian, Picasso: Pablo Ruiz Picasso; A Biography (New York: Putnam, 1976), 396; Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art (New York: Icon Editions, 1993), 301.

  4. Clive Rose, The Soviet Propaganda Network: A Directory of Organisations Serving Soviet Foreign Policy (London: Pinter, 1988), 57–108; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 221–222; Annie Kriegel, “ ‘Lutte pour la Paix’ et ‘Mouvement pour la Paix’ dans la stratégie et la structure du mouvement Communiste international,” in L’Union Soviétique dans les relations internationales, ed. Francis Conte and Jean-Louis Martres (Paris: Economica, 1982), 223–241; Donald H. McLachlan, “The Partisans of Peace,” International Affairs 27, no. 1 (January 1951): 10–17; Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 582; Daix, Picasso, 301; Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 272; Jo Langer, Convictions: Memories of a Life Shared with a Good Communist (London: A. Deutsch, 1979), 161.

  5. Lawrence S. Wittner, One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1993); Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); Lawrence S. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Robbie Lieberman, The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945–1963 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Alessandro Brogi, Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 122–156.

  6. Outside biographies of major figures like Neruda, there is virtually no scholarship on the World Peace Council in Latin America. (A few exceptions, discussed in Chapter 5, concern the 1960s and generally express confusion about whether the WPC was or was not a Soviet front.) Part of the problem is that the records of the WPC have probably been destroyed. Robert Prince, “The Last of the WPC Mohicans … or, Ghost Ship of Lonnrotinkatu, Part 3,” 1 August 2011, http://robertjprince.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/the-last-of-the-wpc-mohicans-or-ghost-ship-of-lonnrotinkatu-part-3/. Additionally, in nearly all personal collections I have consulted, whether in Europe, the United States, or Latin America, the sections on peace participation appear to have been culled. Here and in Chapter 5 I have tried to make judicious use of intelligence files and the collections of involved individuals and Communist parties to give as full a picture as possible of the movement.

  7. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, “Fighting Fascism and Forging New Political Activism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the Cold War,” in De-centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, ed. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (London: Routledge, 2012), 52–72; Denis McShane, International Labour and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 2.

  8. On this conjuncture in Latin American politics, see especially Bethell and Roxborough, Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War; Greg Grandin, “The Liberal Traditions in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 2012): 68–91; and Peter H. Smith, Democracy in Latin America: Political Change in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27–28.

  9. George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 4, In Front of Your Nose: 1945–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968): 9. From the large pool of scholarship on the origins of the Cold War, this paragraph draws especially from Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1953 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), 36–63; and V. M. Zubok and Konstantin Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 36–54.

  10. Lovestone to Brown, 21 June 1949, box 29, folder 7; and Lovestone to Brown, 4 April 1951, box 29, folder 11, record group 18–004, Irving Brown Papers, George Meany Memorial Archives (GMMA), Silver Spring, Md. Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999); Henry W. Berger, “Union Diplomacy: America’s Labor Foreign Policy in Latin America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1966), 271; Ben Rathbun, The Point Man: Irving Brown and the Deadly Post-1945 Struggle for Europe and Africa (Montreux: Minerva Press, 1996); Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2003), 214–217; Anthony Carew, “The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA,” Labor History 39, no. 1 (February 1998): 30–31.

  11. Latin America as laboratory is one of the major arguments of Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 15–16. On the differing but overlapping strategies of State Department liberals and conservatives, see Steven Schwartzberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America during the Truman years (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).

  12. Serafino Romualdi, Presidents and Peons: Recollections of a Labor Ambassador in Latin America (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967), vi. On Soviet funding for the WFTU, see Patrick Iber, “Managing Mexico’s Cold War: Vicente Lombardo Toledano and the Uses of Political Intelligence,” in “Spy Reports: Content, Methodology, and Historiography in Mexico’s Secret Police Archives,” ed. Tanalís Padilla and Louise E. Walker, special issue, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 19, no. 1 (July 2013): 11–19.

  13. Kees Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896–1948 (Montréal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2004), 281.

  14. Teresa Toranska, “Them”: Stalin’s Polish Puppets, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 314–318.

  15. “Americanism,” For a Lasting Peace, for a People’s Democracy, no. 18 (15 September 1949): 4.

  16. Address by Juan Marinello, 7 September 1949, gallery 3, Miguel Alemán Valdés (MAV) Records, box 324, folder 433/503, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico City; Georges Coginot, “Cosmopolitanism—Weapon of Predatory U.S. Imperialism,” For a Lasting Peace, for a People’s Democracy, no. 34 (25 August 1950): 3.

  17. Full transcripts of the speeches at the Wrocław congress are found in Dispatch no. 618 from American Embassy, Warsaw, Poland, 8 September 1948, 800.00B/4–848, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Md. Sartre, who would later be an ally of the peace movement, was at this time considered hostile because of articles he had written questioning whether the writer’s work was compatible with Stalinist politics. Gertje Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 107.

  18. Crocker to Secretary of State, 27 August 1948 and 31 August 1948, 800.00B/8–2748 and 800.00B/8–3148, NARA; Dominique Desanti, Les Staliniens, 1944–1956: Une expérience politique (Paris: Fayard, 1975), 115–116.

  19. Desanti, Staliniens, 113–115; Toranska, “Them,” 290–291. Hovde is quoted in Enclosure no. 10 to Dispatch no. 618, 8 September 1948, 800.00B/4–848; Huxley in Dispatch no. 596, 1 September 1948, 800.00B/9–148, NARA.

  20. “Preparations for World Congress of Intellectuals,” 18 August 1948, 800.00B/8–1848, NARA; Jorge Amado, Navegação de cabotagem: Apontamentos para um livro de memórias que jamais escreverei (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1992), 27–29. Amado’s speech is in Embassy Dispatch no. 618, 8 September 1948, 800.00B/9–848, NARA.

  21. Daix, Picasso, 299.

  22. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 248.

  23. Charles Grutzner, “ ‘Cultural’ Visas Denied to British,” New York Times, 22 March 1949, 1; “Department Explains: Unofficial Delegates Excluded Simply as Communists,” New York Times, 22 March 1949, 16.

  24. “Report on Recent Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace,” 21 July 1949, pp. 103–109, 800.00B/7–2149, NARA. Dmitri Shostakovich and Isaak Glikman, Story of a Friendship: The Letters of Dmitry Shostakovich to Isaak Glikman, 1941–1975 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 213, 31; Phillip Deery, “Shostakovich, the Waldorf Conference and the Cold War,” American Communist History 11, no. 2 (2012): 161–180. As a result of Shostakovich’s visit, censors unfroze his works, as well as those of Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin, Nikolai Myaskovsky, and others. Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator (New York: Knopf, 2004), 233–234.

  25. Dmitri Shostakovich and Solomon Volkov, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Limelight Editions, 2004), xlii–xliii; Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin, 238–240; Deery, “Shostakovich, the Waldorf Conference and the Cold War,” 175–176.

  26. On Rousset’s trial, see Lottman, Left Bank, 273–274; and John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifesto
s: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (New York: Norton, 2009), 244–262. Rousset became an important member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 382–396; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000), 54–55; Michael Warner, Hearts and Minds: Three Case Studies of the CIA’s Covert Support of American Anti-Communist Groups in the Cold War, 1949–1967 (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 1999), 13; Michael Warner, “Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949–50,” Studies in Intelligence 38, no. 5 (1995): 89–98; Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 70–98.

  27. Claudin, Communist Movement, 577; Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 129; Michel Pinault, Frédéric Joliot-Curie (Paris: O. Jacob, 2000), 440–445.

  28. Lieberman, Strangest Dream, 89; Jorge Amado, O mundo da paz: União Soviética e democracias populares, 4th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Vitória, 1953), 40, 55; Andrew Brown, J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 328; Wittner, One World or None, 178–183.

  29. James Burnham, “Rhetoric and Peace,” Partisan Review 17, no. 8 (1950): 866; Wittner, One World or None, 180; Kriegel, “ ‘Lutte pour la Paix’ et ‘Mouvement pour la Paix,’ ” 232. László Kürti, “ ‘Songs for the Father, Babies for the Mother’: Visual, Literary and Personal Experiences of Hungarians during the Beginning of the Cold War, 1948–1956” (paper presented at the conference “De-centering the Cold War,” Tucson, Arizona, 2010).

  30. “Appel de M. Frédéric Joliot-Curie, President du Conseil Mondial de la Paix Contre l’Utilisation de l’Arme Bacteriologique,” Le Bulletin du Conseil Mondial de la Paix, no. 21 (15 March 1952), in Frédéric Joliot-Curie Papers, box F59, folder 208, Institut Curie, Paris, France. The charges were brought to the attention of Joliot-Curie by the president of the Chinese Committee for the Defense of Peace, Kuo Mo-jo. These charges, reported by the Communist press throughout the world, remain controversial. Soviet documents that demonstrate an elaborate campaign by Chinese and North Korean authorities to deceive international inspectors have been reported: Kathryn Weathersby, “Deceiving the Deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the Allegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use in Korea,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 11 (Winter 1998): 176–185. On the divisions over Hungary, see, for example, “Correspondance avec M. F. Joliot-Curie,” Le Christianisme Social 65, no. 1 (January 1957): 87–96.