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

by Patrick Iber

  59. “Electronic Prying Grows,” New York Times, 27 April 1966, 28; Luis Mercier Vega, “Carta circular No. 24,” 29 April 1966, IACF, series VI, box 8, folder 12, UC/SCRC; Murena to Mercier, 23 May 1966, IACF, series VI, box 7, folder 1, box 7, UC/SCRC; Benito Milla to Mercier, 28 June 1966, IACF, series VI, box 7, folder 12, UC/SCRC.

  60. Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 45; Mac Adam and Rodríguez Monegal, “Boom,” 30–36.

  61. Rita Guibert, “Neruda: ‘Adoro a Nueva York, aunque yo no viviría en ella,” Life en Español 28, no. 3 (1 August 1966): 60–61; Pablo Neruda, Memoirs: Confieso que he vivido (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 325; Jorge Edwards, Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 36; Edwards, Adios, poeta, 148–150. The letter is excerpted in Silber, Voices of National Liberation, 44.

  62. Edwards to Neruda, 8 July 1966 and Neruda to Edwards, 3 August 1966, in Pablo Neruda and Jorge Edwards, Correspondencia entre Pablo Neruda y Jorge Edwards: Cartas que romperemos de inmediato y recordaremos siempre, ed. Abraham Quezada Vergara (Santiago, Chile: Alfaguara, 2008), 79–83. Pablo Neruda, “La Barcarola (fragmentos),” Mundo Nuevo, no. 4 (October 1966): 19–22.

  63. Roberto Fernández Retamar to María Rosa Oliver, 19 May 1966, and Fernández Retamar to Oliver, 6 October 1966, María Rosa Oliver Papers, box 2, folder 59, Princeton.

  64. “Presentación,” Mundo Nuevo 1, no. 1 (July 1966): 4.

  65. Quoted in Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo, 47; Max Aub, Diarios, ed. Manuel Aznar Soler, vol. 3 (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2000), 47.

  66. Emir Rodríguez Monegal to Homero Alsina Thevenet, 7 March 1967 and 21 March 1967, IACF, series VI, box 26, folder 10, UC/SCRC.

  67. Michael Warner, “Sophisticated Spies: CIA’s Links to Liberal Anti-Communists, 1949–1967,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 9, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 426. See also Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, 3rd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 153–164; and Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), 93. Thomas W. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral,’ ” Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1967, 10. Other Cold War liberals, like William Bundy, similarly argued that funding had to be covert because right-wingers in the U.S. Congress would oppose funding to foreign social democrats. Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms; A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 160.

  68. Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989), 276. Luis Mercier Vega to Horacio Daniel Rodríguez, 11 December 1967, IACF, series VI, box 8, folder 15, UC/SCRC; Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Diario del P.E.N. Club,” Mundo Nuevo, no. 4 (October 1966): 51.

  69. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “La CIA y los intelectuales,” Mundo Nuevo, no. 14 (August 1967): 19.

  70. Emir Rodríguez Monegal to Pierre Emmanuel, 2 July 1967, IACF, series VI, box 11, folder 5, UC/SCRC; “El proceso de la corrupción,” Marcha, no. 1344 (10 March 1967): 16–21; Gerard Sandoz, “Más revelaciones sobre la CIA,” Marcha, no. 1354 (27 May 1967): 23; quoted, for consistency, from the English translation in Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban, and Other Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 49. Mario Vargas Llosa, “Epitafio para un imperio cultural,” Marcha, no. 1354 (27 May 1967): 31.

  7. Disenchantment and the End of the Cultural Cold War

  1. Haydée Santamaría to Mario Vargas Llosa, 14 May 1971, Mario Vargas Llosa Papers, box 6, section IIIA, folder 6, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

  2. Mario Vargas Llosa, Contra viento y marea, 1962–1982 (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983), 134–135.

  3. Emir Rodríguez Monegal to Homero Alsina Thevenet, 5 October 1967, Emir Rodríguez Monegal (ERM) Papers, box 1, folder 10, Firestone Library, Princeton.

  4. Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 3; Efraín Kristal, Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 70; Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 139.

  5. Bell to Botsford, 24 May 1967, ERM Papers, box 2, folder 23, Princeton. There were persistent questions about a 1958 essay by Dwight Macdonald titled “America! America!” that had been accepted and then rejected under pressure at Encounter. The essay was later published in other CCF magazines, as well in the unaffiliated Dissent. But there were also other examples of editorial intervention, well chronicled in Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000), 314–326.

  6. Botsford to Bell, 26 May 1967, ERM Papers, box 2, folder 23, Princeton; Botsford to Emir Rodríguez Monegal, 25 May 1967, ERM Papers, folder 23, box 2, Princeton. The full context was: “Mr. [Thomas W.] Braden [in “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral’ ”] mentioned two people he had planted in the Congress. I am certain that the other one is not John Hunt, whom I have known the better part of my life and whom I believe incapable of lying to me with such cold consistency. I brought the subject to him many times on a purely personal basis and have been assured that it is not the case.” He, like many others, thought that Melvin Lasky was the other person to whom Braden referred. On the other hand, in his letter to Bell, composed the next day, he wrote in the margin: “I have some ‘direct’ evidence of John’s longstanding links with the CIA—from the one agent in London I know personally,” showing that Botsford investigated Hunt when he could and was aware of intelligence interest in the CCF but was not sure how to deal with what he learned.

  7. Luis Mercier Vega, “Carta circular no. 46,” 21 February 1967, International Association for Cultural Freedom Papers (IACF), series VI, box 10, folder 3, Joseph L. Regenstein Library, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center (UC/SCRC), Chicago; Horacio Daniel Rodríguez to Mercier, 24 February 1967, IACF, series VI, box 8, folder 17, UC/SCRC; Hunt to Mercier, 8 March 1967, IACF, series VI, box 10, folder 3, UC/SCRC; Mercier to Horacio Daniel Rodríguez, 1 March 1967, IACF, series VI, box 8, folder 17, UC/SCRC.

  8. Milla to Mercier, 2 May 1967, IACF, series VI, box 9, folder 8, UC/SCRC; Rodrigo García Treviño, “La C.I.A. et Le Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture,” n.d., IACF, series VI, box 9, folder 10, UC/SCRC.

  9. Hunt to Mercier, 9 October 1968, IACF, series VI, box 10, folder 16, UC/SCRC; Mercier to Hunt, 15 October 1968, IACF, series VI, box 10, folder 16, UC/SCRC.

  10. Mercier to Luis Guillermo Piazza, 28 October 1966, IACF, series VI, box 7, folder 8, UC/SCRC.

  11. Mercier to Stone, 18 October 1967, IACF, series VI, box 10, folder 13, UC/SCRC; Ignacio Iglesias, Report on “Mundo Nuevo,” 15 November 1967, IACF, series VI, box 10, folder 13, UC/SCRC. Iglesias gives circulation figures of 8,900 for Cuadernos under Gorkin, 5,000 for Cuadernos under Arciniegas, and 5,000 for Mundo Nuevo (including 1,000 subscriptions “inherited” from Cuadernos).

  12. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “A propósito de ‘Mundo Nuevo,’ ” Mundo Nuevo, no. 25 (July 1968): 93; Rodríguez Monegal to Homero Alsina Thenevet, 30 May 1968, IACF, series VI, box 26, folder 10, UC/SCRC.

  13. Daniel Cosío Villegas to Shepard Stone, 13 May 1968, IACF, series VI, box 11, folder 8, UC/SCRC; Rodríguez to Mercier Vega, 26 June 1968, IACF, series VI, box 11, folder 4, UC/SCRC; Horacio Daniel Rodríguez, “Una nueva etapa,” Mundo Nuevo, nos. 26–27 (August/September 1968): 1; Cosío Villegas is quoted in María Eugenia Mudrovcic, “Mundo Nuevo”: Cultura y guerra fría en la década del 60 (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997), 110.

  14. Fred Goff, ed., “Commission on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic report,” April [?] 1966
, Norman Thomas Papers, reel 67, frame 350, New York Public Library; Juan Bosch, “El porvenir de América Latina,” Mundo Nuevo, no. 13 (July 1967): 57–61.

  15. The grant allotted $1.5 million for 1967, $1.3 million for 1968, $1.1 million in 1969 and 1970, and $1 million in 1971 and 1972. Volker Rolf Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 240. These quantities were reduced to $900,000 for 1970, $750,000 for 1971, and $600,000 for 1972. Fiscal years began in November, so the payment for 1967, for instance, was disbursed in late 1966. ILARI received $320,000 in 1967, $250,000 in 1968, and $200,000 in 1969 and 1970. Mercier to Shepard Stone, 3 January 1969, IACF, series VI, box 13, folder 2, UC/SCRC. Money for Aportes and Cadernos Brasileiros was allocated separately, as it was for Mundo Nuevo. Mundo Nuevo was given a three-year, $225,000 grant in 1968. Howard R. Dressner to Shepard Stone, 22 April 1968, PA68–335, Ford Foundation Archives (FFA), New York. E. J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 369; Louis Mercier Vega, Roads to Power in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1969), 24–25.

  16. Luis Mercier Vega, “The Myth of the Guerrilla,” Dissent, May–June 1968, 20–21. Mercier Vega’s analysis holds up well for the “first generation” of guerrillas in Latin America but not so well for the second. Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 26–28.

  17. Mercier Vega, Roads to Power in Latin America, 3, 200. In the anarchist tradition, the “United States is not a model” essay argued that Latin American development required coparticipation and self-government, free from the intervention of the state. Fernando Guillén Martínez, “Los Estados Unidos y América Latina,” Aportes, no. 7 (January 1968): 4–28; Orlando Fals Borda, “Ciencia y compromiso: Problemas metodológicos del libro ‘La subversión en Colombia,’ ” Aportes, no. 8 (April 1968): 117–128; Aldo Solari, “Algunas reflexiones sobre el problema de los valores, la objetividad y el compromiso en las ciencias sociales,” Aportes, no. 13 (July 1969): 6–24; Orlando Fals Borda, “La crisis social y la orientación sociológica: Una réplica,” Aportes, no. 15 (January 1970): 62–76; Aldo Solari, “Usos y abusos de la sociología: Una dúplica,” Aportes, no. 19 (January 1971): 42–53. Narrative report on International Association for Cultural Freedom for 1970, 15 March 1971, p. 18, PA57–395, FFA. Other participants included Edward Shils, S. N. Eisenstadt, Kalman Silvert, Richard Morse, Oscar Lewis, Paul Goodman, Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Celso Furtado, Domingo Rivarola, and Aldo Solari.

  18. Kalman Silvert to Luis Mercier Vega, 26 February 1971, PA68–335, FFA; Luis Mercier Vega, “Desaparición del ILARI,” Aportes, no. 26 (October 1972): 4; “Obituary,” Interrogations, no. 13 (January 1978): 4. Mercier Vega’s suicide was probably spurred by the natural death of his unmarried partner, Eliane Casserini, who had assisted with much of his work with the CCF. Roselyne Chenu, interview by the author, Chicago, Ill., 2 November 2006.

  19. Irwin Silber, Voices of National Liberation: The Revolutionary Ideology of the “Third World” Expressed by Intellectuals and Artists at the Cultural Congress of Havana, January 1968 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Central Book Company, 1970), 124, 267, 325; David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 75.

  20. Heberto Padilla, Fuera del juego (Lima: Ecoma, 1968), 5, 8–9. Some of the poems in Fuera del juego had been published earlier, even in Casa de las Américas and other official magazines, without incident. Part of the reason for the sudden reproach seems to have been that Padilla had defended Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s work Tres tristes tigres in the pages of El Caimán Barbudo, and Cabrera Infante had been declared a traitor to the revolution. Fernández Retamar is quoted in Kristal, Temptation of the Word, 71.

  21. René Dumont, Is Cuba Socialist? (London: Deutsch, 1974); Jorge Edwards, Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 17. Oscar Lewis to Carleton Beals, 14 September 1961, Oscar Lewis Papers, box 55, folder “Beals,” University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; John Womack, “An American in Cuba,” New York Review of Books, 4 August 1977, 25–29; Oscar Lewis, Ruth M. Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon, Four Men: Living the Revolution; An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).

  22. Heberto Padilla and Carlos Verdecia, La mala memoria: Conversación con Heberto Padilla (Buenos Aires: Kosmos, 1992), 81–89; “Havana Discloses Arrest of Writer,” New York Times, 2 May 1971, 9; “Text of the Statement,” New York Times, 22 May 1971, 8; “ ‘Confessions’ of a Cuban Poet,” New York Times, 26 May 1971, 43; the full text of Padilla’s self-criticism was published in Casa de las Américas 11, nos. 65–66 (March–June 1971): 191–203.

  23. Mario Benedetti, “Las prioridades del escritor,” Casa de las Américas 12, no. 68 (September–October 1971): 75.

  24. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Calibán,” Casa de las Américas 12, no. 68 (September–October 1971): 124–151. Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban, and Other Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 30.

  25. Criticism of Padilla had first appeared in the Cuban army magazine Verde Olivo, which frequently described Guillermo Cabrera Infante as a CIA agent. For example, Leopoldo Avila, “Las respuestas de Caín,” Verde Olivo, 3 November 1968, 17–18. Fernández Retamar, Caliban, and Other Essays, 48–49.

  26. Roberto Fernández Retamar, Cuba defendida (Buenos Aires: Nuestra América, 2004), 313–320. The period from 1971 to 1976 was known as the quinquenio gris. Elzbieta Sklodowska and Ben A. Heller, eds., Roberto Fernández Retamar y los estudios latinoamericanos (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Universidad de Pittsburgh, 2000), 156–157. It is difficult to maintain repressive conditions indefinitely, and the environment for artists did improve in the late 1970s. See John M. Kirk and Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Culture and the Cuban Revolution: Conversations in Havana (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001). Ángel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

  27. On García Márquez and Cuban political prisoners, see Reinol González, Y Fidel creó el punto X (Miami: Saeta Ediciones, 1987), 17–30. A few, like the Argentine crime writer Rodolfo Walsh, were radicalized in favor of Cuba by the Padilla affair. He reasoned that if Padilla had been a peasant, no one would have complained. Michael McCaughan, True Crimes: Rodolfo Walsh (London: Latin America Bureau, 2002), 164–167.

  28. Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 36; Robert J. Alexander, The Tragedy of Chile (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), 140–141. As there was CIA support to defeat Allende, so Moscow sent money to Allende directly and to the Chilean Communist Party to support him in 1970. But the Soviet Union backed away from support of his government. Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 71–79; Olga Uliánova, “La Unidad Popular y el golpe militar en Chile: Percepciones y análisis soviéticos,” Estudios Públicos, no. 79 (Winter 2000): 83–171.

  29. The CIA’s actions are documented in Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: New Press, 2004). How much effect they had will perhaps forever remain a matter of debate; many historians believe that the United States was relatively impotent to influence the course of events. See, for example, Joaquín Fermandois, Mundo y fin de mundo: Chile en la política mundial, 1900–2004 (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2005), 333; and Paul E. Sigmund, The United States and Democracy in Chile (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 201–212. On Brazil’s role, see Tanya Harmer, “Brazil’s Cold War in the Southern Cone, 1970–
1975,” Cold War History 12, no. 4 (2012): 659–681. Responsibility for the fall of Allende’s government is surely one of the most litigated of historical cases. The ideological rather than pragmatic character of Chile’s “centrists” has been identified as an important factor: Arturo Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, Chile (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 34.

  30. The classic case study of the Yarur factory, the first to be seized, is Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Neruda to “Georgius,” 26 November 1972, in Pablo Neruda and Jorge Edwards Correspondencia entre Pablo Neruda y Jorge Edwards: Cartas que romperemos de inmediato y recordaremos siempre, ed. Abraham Quezada Vergara (Santiago, Chile: Alfaguara, 2008), 113; Jorge Edwards, Adios, poeta . . . : Memorias (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1990), 257.

  31. 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), 53–57, 104; Claudia Gilman, Entre la pluma y el fusil: Debates y dilemas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2003), 281–306; Enrique Krauze, Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America, trans. Hank Heifetz and Natasha Wimmer (New York: Harper, 2011), 245.

  32. Gabriel Zaid, “Enemy Colleagues,” Dissent, Winter 1982, 17–18. The CIA was interested in trying to recruit Dalton as a double agent, and he had been apprehended and interrogated by the CIA. But there is no evidence that he was recruited. Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 114–117.