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

by Patrick Iber

  33. Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 117; Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (New York: Picador, 2003), 23.

  34. Rushdie, Jaguar Smile, xviii; Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 137–174.

  35. Rushdie, Jaguar Smile, xvi. Emphasis in the original.

  36. Stephen Kinzer, Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua (Boston: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2007), 120; Claire Brewster, Responding to Crisis in Contemporary Mexico: The Political Writings of Paz, Fuentes, Monsiváis, and Poniatowska (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 22. Maarten van Delden, “Polemical Paz,” Literal, no. 7 (2006): 16–18. Sergio Ramírez, Adiós muchachos: Una memoria de la revolución sandinista (San José, Costa Rica: Aguilar, 1999), 288–289; Gioconda Belli, The Country under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 277.

  37. “Coinciden destacados priistas: Imprudentes y torpes las declaraciones del autor de El hablador, Vargas Llosa,” El Día, 1 September 1990; Arnaldo Córdova, “La difícil libertad,” Uno más uno, 31 August 1990. Bell had laid out his position in Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976). On the trajectory and values of Vuelta and its eventual transformation into Letras Libres after the death of Paz in 1998, see Ignacio Sánchez Prado, “Claiming Liberalism: Enrique Krauze, Vuelta, Letras Libres, and the Reconfiguration of the Mexican Intellectual Class,” Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos 26, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 47–78.

  38. Alma Guillermoprieto, Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 166; Mario Vargas Llosa, A Fish in the Water: A Memoir, trans. Helen Lane (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 41–44. In some areas, such as the fight against HIV, Cardoso recognized the limits the markets placed on securing just outcomes. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Brian Winter, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006), 216. On Paz and the Siglo XX conference, see Rafael Lemus, “Octavio Paz o las trampas del liberalismo,” Confabulario de El Universal, 29 March 2014.

  39. One of the most powerful media companies in the world, Televisa maintained a close relationship with the PRI. Celeste González de Bustamante, “Muy buenas noches”: Mexico, Television, and the Cold War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

  40. Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1993).

  41. Cardoso and Winter, Accidental President of Brazil, 113; Jeffrey Puryear, Thinking Politics: Intellectuals and Democracy in Chile, 1973–1988 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Those who remained left-wing critics of the Ford Foundation lamented these developments, seeing in them, not incorrectly from their point of view, the creation of an antidictatorial coalition that would not challenge Western liberal market hegemony: James Petras, “The Metamorphosis of Latin America’s Intellectuals,” Latin American Perspectives 17, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 102–112. Julia Preston and Sam Dillon, Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 118–147.

  42. Jorge G. Castañeda, “Latin America’s Left Turn,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 3 (May/June 2006): 28–43.

  Conclusion

  1. Benjamin Keen, “The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 4 (November 1969): 717. Keen is clear that elements of the Black Legend preceded even the conquest of the Americas, and that English editions were also reissued for antipapist reasons within England, not just ones of imperial competition.

  2. Frank Tannenbaum, “Estados Unidos y América Latina,” Cuadernos, no. 53 (October 1961): 84.

  3. In a rather direct analogy to the publication of Las Casas’s work in England, the only foreign book about the Cultural Cold War that has been translated and published in Cuba is the one most critical of the CCF: Frances Stonor Saunders, La CIA y la Guerra Fría Cultural, trans. Rafael Fonte (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2003).

  4. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, Para leer al pato Donald: Comunicación de masa y colonialismo (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1972), 89.

  Acknowledgments

  More than half a lifetime ago, as a young man who loved both literature and mathematics, I was captivated by the world Jorge Luis Borges crafted in “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagined a possibly infinite library, made up of all possible books of a fixed length and given a fixed number of characters. It is populated by monk-like residents who search out meaning among the gibberish, and who frequently despair. (If all the book permutations were present in the library, the number of books he imagines would easily surpass the number of elementary particles physicists tell us exist in our universe.)

  For me, the story has always captured something of the power of actual libraries. It is the simplest of tasks to surround oneself with more knowledge than it would be possible to assimilate in several lifetimes. But now I have written a book, and the entire process seems different than it should be. The monks in Borges’s library look for perfect texts, but they know that most readable things they find will be flawed. Yet what would be missing from a randomly generated universal library is the thing that matters most to the production of actual human books: time. What goes between the covers of a book is not simply a collection of words and images, but years in the life of the author that could have been spent doing many things but were devoted instead to producing one very particular work. A library contains knowledge, but it also encloses time—in my case, a decade or so of life, cataloged and shelved.

  So this is what I want to say: the years I have spent on this project have been hard ones, but I am happy with the choices that I have made. When this project began, I was young, unmarried, and childless. My wife, Nicole, should know that there is no one with whom I would have rather spent these past years, and my two boys, Isaiah and Julian, should know someday how much joy they have given me. I do not have the words to express how important they have been, but their continued presence has been the most important thing in my life. The care of other members of my families—including many Hammonds, Ibers, and Louies—have made progress on this book possible.

  One does not build ideas alone. Among scholars and friends of more or less my own generation, I have benefited greatly from conversations with María Balandrán, Matt Barton, Pablo Ben, Jake Betz, Ananya Chakravarti, Denali DeGraf, Stuart Easterling, Frederico Freitas, Olga Glondys, James Halliday, Amanda Hartzmark, Darryl Heller, José Ángel Hernández, Ben Johnson, James Kaltreider, Patrick Kelly, Jamie Kreiner, Sam Lebovic, Aiala Levy, Casey Lurtz, Monica Mercado, Calvin Miaw, Nicole Mottier, Raphael Murillo, Sarah Osten, Jaime Pensado, Ben Peters, Ann Schneider, Diana Schwartz, Aaron Shaw, Peter Simons, Antonio Sotomayor, Jackie Sumner, Tess Taylor, Germán Vergara, Matt Vitz, Mikael Wolfe, and Julia Young. Special thanks to Carlos Bravo Regidor, whose interests have overlapped with mine in a way that has made him an especially good interlocutor, as well as a close friend.

  Academic conversation is also increasingly taking place on social media, and I am grateful for insights acquired from people whom I have never met in person. This list too could be long, but I would especially like to thank Aaron Bady, Tim Barker, L. D. Burnett, Gerry Canavan, Merlin Chowkwanyun, Paula Daccarett, Robert Greene, Andrew Hartman, Jeet Heer, Matt Hunte, Bill King, Peter Krupa, Noah McCormack, Drew McKevitt, Kurt Newman, Arissa Oh, Kristy Rawson, Linda Rodríguez, Colin Snider, Greg Weeks, Audra Wolfe, Ben Wurgaft, Richard Yeselson, and Brian Zimmerman. A chain of inquiry involving Heer and Yeselson led me to Alan Wald, then to Susan Weissman, and finally to Trotsky’s grandson Esteban Volkov, who solved a mystery by identifying Antonio Hidalgo as the man standing next to Trotsky in the photo in Chapter 1.

  All historians are indebted to librarians and archivists too numerous to name. I have also had the good fortune to talk to a few of the people who now inhabit these pages. Although I have preferred to rely on the documentary record and have cited these conver
sations little, I appreciate the time, generosity, and insights of Keith Botsford, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (who identified most of the people in the MLN photo in Chapter 5), Roselyne Chenu, Jorge Edwards, John Hunt, Luis B. Prieto, Rob Prince, Raquel Tibol, and Jack Womack. As I have traveled through Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, I have been treated with unfailing courtesy by Matías Bosch, Joaquín Fermandois, Karina Jannello, Jorge Myers, Elisa Servín, Daniela Spenser, and Horacio Tarcus.

  Alhough the years during which this project was completed were professionally challenging, they have also been rewarding. At the University of Chicago, I was part of a wonderful community of scholars who did more than anyone else to shape the historian I am today. Special thanks go to Dain Borges, Bruce Cumings, Emilio Kourí, and especially Mauricio Tenorio for never losing faith or patience. I could not have asked for better teachers. At Stanford, I would like to thank the entire community of scholars at the Humanities Center, and the Mellon Fellows more specifically. Thank you to J. P. Daughton and Lanier Anderson for your confidence, and to Zephyr Frank, Jennifer Burns, and Caroline Winterer for your company. A long time ago, Jorge Ruffinelli and Sergio Missana taught a course that helped me think differently about my future. During a few different intervals at Berkeley, I have been deeply grateful for the support of Max Auffhammer, Richard Cándida-Smith, Margaret Chowning, Brad DeLong, Nils Gilman, Rosemary Joyce, Alan Karras, and Peter Zinoman. Thanks to John Lear and Eric Zolov for their help and insight, to Mark Healey for being a stalwart friend and counselor, and to Arturo García Bustos for the honor of allowing us to use his artwork as a cover image. Thank you to George Hammond for your help with proofreading, among much else. Thank you to my future students and colleagues at the University of Texas at El Paso for the opportunity to work as a part of your community. I have been delighted to work with Harvard University Press, and especially my editor Brian Distelberg. I appreciate his trust in this project and want to thank him and the anonymous reviewers for everything they have done to make the final text as good as possible. Financially, this project could not have been completed without the support of the University of Chicago and its Center for Latin American Studies, the Mellon Foundation, the George C. Marshall Foundation, and a UC-AFT Unit 18 Professional Development grant.

  There are a few people without whom the course of my life would have been different and less rewarding. My father helped me learn Spanish at a young age. Mark Mancall steered me toward history and introduced me to the set of problems that I still find fascinating. My interest in what a democratic Left would look like in Latin America has been informed by my time living in El Salvador with John Guiliano, Jon Cortina, S.J., and many other friends. And Alma Guillermoprieto has shown me, among many other things, that even the best of writers must also be a diligent editor.

  Finally, the period during which I have worked on this project has been marked by the deaths of two extraordinary people. Before he passed away in 2010, I was fortunate to have known Friedrich Katz. His life intersected with my work—I once stumbled on his father’s FBI file, which mentioned a teenage “Federico Katz” living in Mexico—and as we talked about what I was finding in the archives, he helped me think through many issues. He treated me with the same gallantry and respect that he afforded to everyone in his life. He had a warm sense of humor; one of his favorite jokes was the quip “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; in Communism, it is the other way around.” Katz seems to me to have been a man whose personal and professional life was pledged to bringing about the end of exploitation, irrespective of the political system behind it, and the generous way in which he treated those around him was but one expression of that commitment. He is a constant example.

  When my mother passed away unexpectedly in early 2014, it was during a visit to see her new grandson that was also supposed to help me, her son, finish this book. It has been a heartbreaking loss. She had an incredible soul. She was loving and generous, tolerant of my many faults, and supportive of the turns I have taken in my life. She read to me patiently when I was a child and listened to me as I grew up. My mother did not especially care for electoral politics, but she believed deeply in justice and, most especially, in peace. With the hope that the future may hold more of both, I dedicate this book to her memory.

  Index

  Abstract expressionism, 113–114, 183

  Aja, Pedro Vicente, 130–131, 138–139, 290–291n42

  Alba, Pedro de, 103–104

  Alberti, Rafael, 182

  Alemán, Miguel, 71–72, 111, 154, 167

  Allende, Salvador, 111, 227–229, 235, 312n28

  Alliance for Progress, 175, 177, 181–182

  Amado, Jorge, 2, 14, 51, 59–60, 64–65, 77–80

  American Federation of Labor, 43, 54–55, 84–86, 90, 96–97, 123, 220

  Anti-anti-Communism, 60, 64, 134, 148–149, 152–153, 168

  Anti-Communist entrepreneurs, 84–85, 87, 94, 95

  Anti-Communist Left, 3, 14, 15, 52–53, 95–99, 175–176, 180, 196, 204, 228, 229–230, 232–233, 235–236; as refugees in Mexico, 19–21, 36, 43–47; and the Dies Committee, 40–41; in the labor movement, 54–56, 84–85, 123, 132–133, 220; and antipeace campaigns, 61–63, 87–88, 91–92; and the CCF, 85–87, 95, 98–99, 226–227, 241–243; views of the United States, 96–99, 218, 307n58; and the Cuban Revolution, 115, 116–131, 134–140; ideas about freedom, 148–149, 173, 232; and Salvador Allende, 227

  Antitotalitarianism. See Totalitarianism

  Aportes, 198, 219–220, 242, 310n15

  Arbenz, Jacobo, 12, 99–100, 104, 154, 281n31

  Arciniegas, Germán, 89–90, 102, 190–191, 213, 215, 304n32

  Arévalo, Juan José, 52, 96, 99–101, 104

  Asociación de Escritores y Artistas Americanos, 127, 131, 132

  Baciu, Stefan, 180–181

  Baldwin, Roger, 45, 97, 103, 107

  Baráibar, Carlos de, 91–93, 102, 107, 111, 179

  Barrenechea, Julio, 111

  Batalla de Bassols, Clementina, 164, 167

  Batista, Fulgencio, 17, 72, 117, 120–131, 158

  Bell, Daniel, 45, 213, 233, 281n35

  Benda, Julien, 5–6, 35, 252n8

  Benedetti, Mario, 223

  Bernal, J. D., 152, 156

  Betancourt, Rómulo, 53, 95, 97, 122, 175, 227; and the IADF, 98; and Fidel Castro, 134, 137

  Black Legend, 239, 315n1

  “Boom” in Latin American literature, 15, 143, 174, 198–199, 206–207, 212, 218

  Borges, Jorge Luis, 65, 190–192, 205, 210, 225, 304n36

  Bosch, Juan, 218, 279n25

  Botsford, Keith, 178–180, 192, 210, 214; in Brazil, 180–183; response to CIA revelations, 180, 213–214, 309n6; in Mexico, 185–190

  Braden, Tom, 208, 309n6

  Breakaway Generation, 112–114, 202

  Breton, André, 30, 38–39, 43, 140

  Brown, Irving, 54

  Burnham, James, 45, 63, 89–90

  Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 134, 140, 198, 205, 306n49, 312n25

  Cadernos Brasileiros, 180–182, 184–185, 189

  Calles, Plutarco Elías, 25–26, 31

  Camus, Albert, 1, 4–5, 201, 222

  Cardenal, Ernesto, 231

  Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc, 147, 154, 157, 167–168, 170

  Cárdenas, Lázaro, 31–34, 40, 71–72, 127, 151; and Leon Trotsky, 36–37, 263n35; and the MLN, 147–148, 165, 167–170, 240; and the WPC, 152–158, 161–165; and the Cuban Revolution, 158–160; and the Tricontinental Conference, 171–172

  Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 1, 176, 233, 236

  Caribbean Legion, 96, 99, 121, 129, 134

  Carranza, Carlos, 174, 179

  Casa de las Américas, 10, 14–17, 131–132, 143, 189–190, 211, 242–243; increasing militancy, 200–201; and the Padilla affair, 221–227, 289n31

  Castelo Branco, Humberto, 183–184, 302n20

  Castillo Armas, Carlos, 100, 104–105, 115

  Castillo Velasco, Jaime, 92–93, 102
, 236

  Castro, Fidel, 5, 12, 111, 121, 146, 172–173, 206, 221–223, 228, 229, 237; and the anti-Communist Left, 17, 116–118, 122, 123–126, 128–135, 137–140, 243; and the CIA, 119, 129–130, 133, 137, 138–139, 141; on art in revolution, 141–142; and Lázaro Cárdenas, 148, 158–160

  Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 2, 11–12, 54, 83–84, 107, 181, 183, 211, 222, 226, 237; and the anti-Communist Left, 47, 96, 98–99, 228; and the coup in Guatemala, 99–100, 104; and book publishing, 108–109; and Fidel Castro, 119, 129–130, 133, 137, 138–139, 141, 176; and the MLN, 165. See also Congress for Cultural Freedom

  Centro Mexicano de Escritores, 186–188, 303n26

  Chávez, Hugo, 237

  Chibás, Eduardo, 123

  Chomsky, Noam, 220

  Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), 54, 56–58, 60, 62–63, 77, 85, 185

  Comintern (Communist International), 19, 22, 26, 28, 30, 36, 39, 54

  Committee for Cultural Freedom, 39, 42, 61

  Committee in Defense of Leon Trotsky, 37–38

  Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina, 32, 123, 154; and World War II, 42–43; and the Cold War, 55, 96, 99, 164

  Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba, 121–124, 132–133

  Confederación de Trabajadores de México, 32, 42, 45–46, 52, 55, 154

  Conferencia Latinoamericana por la Soberanía Nacional, la Emancipación Económica y la Paz, 161–165, 171–172

  Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 2–3, 13, 16–17, 62, 86–87, 145; and the CIA, 6–7, 12, 14–15, 62, 85, 87, 88–90, 93–94, 177, 178, 196–197, 200, 204–205, 207–210, 212–216, 218, 226–227, 241–242; and U.S. hegemony, 6–7, 16, 18, 85, 90, 241–243; and Spanish exiles in Latin America, 13, 86, 90–91; and antipeace campaigns, 87–92; in Mexico, 87–88, 103, 111–114, 185–190; in Chile, 92–94, 107; and the coup in Guatemala, 99–102, 104–106; and The Future of Freedom conference (Milan, 1955), 101–102; and the Inter-American Conference for Cultural Freedom (Mexico City, 1956), 102–107, 128; and book publishing, 108–109; in Argentina, 108, 179, 192–195; and the Breakaway generation, 111–114; and anti-Neruda campaigns, 111, 191–192, 304n35; and Cuba, 115, 118–119, 126–128, 130–132, 137–139, 140, 141, 180; and reforms in the 1960s, 174, 177–180, 190–191; in Brazil, 180–185; and the Formation of Elites in Latin America conference (Montevideo, 1965), 195–196; and ILARI, 197, 209, 214–217, 219, 220; and the Black Legend, 239, 240–241. See also Mundo Nuevo