Neither Peace nor Freedom

by Patrick Iber

Naturally, the emergence of the diplomatic Cold War after World War II did have a considerable impact on the way in which the Cultural Cold War was conducted: it would give both foundation and furnishings to a prefabricated structure. The Soviet-aligned WPC held symposia and conferences, organized signature drives, published books and magazines, and inspired artistic production, all with the goal of depicting the United States as the great threat to peace and the Soviet Union as the paladin of justice and the defender of national sovereignty. Before Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Union had made efforts to reintroduce artistic control in the form of the official doctrine of socialist realism, and Communist artists and those who sympathized with its causes—such as Pablo Picasso, whose doves popularized the bird as a secular symbol of peace—tried to adapt to those standards to inspire support for peace-as-Communism. The Latin American artists who volunteered for the WPC, such as Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, and Diego Rivera, all tried to produce art that conformed to official Soviet socialist realism, as well as to organize support for the Soviet position.

  For former Communists, Trotskyists, social democrats, liberals, and—perhaps most important—the U.S. government, Soviet-aligned WPC activism provoked a counterreaction. Generally led by former Communists and dissident Trotskyists, campaigns to counter WPC propaganda emerged everywhere. Across Latin America and elsewhere, people volunteered for the cause, and they often did so by offering their services to the most powerful anti-Soviet ally they could imagine: the government of the United States. These relationships were eventually knit together by the CIA into the CCF. Its first meeting was held in 1950, and if it was not a mirror image of the WPC, it was at least a fun-house reflection. Both groups sought to mobilize cultural production alongside political propaganda—imbuing the former with the spirit of the latter—as part of larger political projects that concealed the interests of the states that made them possible.

  In response to the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s, the CCF sought to reorganize. Rather than present a desiccated and transplanted European anti-Communism, it sought to remake itself for the 1960s on the basis of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and scholarly foundation. In Europe the CCF is considered to have been effective in the 1950s and out-of-touch by the 1960s; in Latin America the opposite was true. It reshaped itself from a kind of anti-WPC into an anti–Casa de las Américas. Latin America became the largest area program of the CCF, and it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the CCF began life as an organization for combating Communism in Europe and ended it as one for combating the appeal of Castro in Latin America. After struggling to eliminate reactionary personnel from its national offices, it launched the magazine Mundo Nuevo in 1966, which aimed for engaged dialogue on Cuba and featured a list of authors in its early issues that would define the boom in Latin American letters then under way. Its move toward brokering a cultural peace was met with hostility by an increasingly radical Casa de las Américas. Mundo Nuevo’s attempt at outreach was seen by Casa intellectuals as a sophisticated maneuver of U.S. cultural imperialism. In one way, this proved prescient because it was soon revealed publicly that the CCF and, by extension, Mundo Nuevo, would never have existed without CIA support. This only bolstered the Cuban posture, already hostile to dialogue and criticism, of further justifying political repression within Cuba by associating dissent with U.S. imperial interests.

  Many studies of the Cultural Cold War in Latin America begin with the Cuban Revolution of 1959, at least ten if not forty years too late. They focus on the phenomenon of the Latin American 1960s and especially the writers of the boom generation. Particular attention has been given to the rivalry between Casa de las Américas and Mundo Nuevo. Casa was proudly affiliated with the Cuban government, of course, but scholars have debated, in parallel to other conversations about the Cultural Cold War, to what degree Mundo Nuevo was an instrument of U.S. propaganda. Some have focused on the ways in which Mundo Nuevo promoted theories and ideas that were useful to the United States, while others have noted its criticism of U.S. policies and have seen in it and in related ventures some potential for projects that were counterhegemonic.25

  But a narrow focus on writers has often made it impossible for the Cultural Cold War to be situated within the political currents that make it intelligible. The evidence from the archives and public records of the institutions of Latin America’s Cultural Cold War make clear that its course was influenced by debate within the Left as well as its Cold War context. Two apparently contradictory things are simultaneously true. On the one hand, many intellectuals from Latin America sought ways out of Cold War binaries. On the other, they were also responsible for inviting the Cold War in, hoping to use it to advance their interests. That none found great success illuminates the tragedy of the Left in Latin America’s Cold War.

  In much of Europe the Cold War saw the expansion of social democratic governments with robust welfare states, political freedom, and electoral democracy. Similar projects were much less successful in Latin America despite (or perhaps because of) its deeply unequal societies. Why did social democracy not flourish in Latin America? Why did the effort to define and build a humane socialism in the region fail? Three major arguments have been offered in explanation. One posits that Latin American democracy experienced relatively few gains because of a decision by the Left in the wake of the Cuban Revolution to abandon democracy in favor of Marxist fantasies and the mythology of revolutionary change carried out by small groups of soldiers. A rival explanation imagines democracy as a moderate position and explains that oscillation between “two devils,” the extreme Right and the extreme Left, made gradual progress impossible. Alternatively, many argue that the Left’s democratic visions, including those of grassroots Marxists, were simply crushed by reactionary alliances of Latin American conservatives with U.S. backing.26

  The history of the region’s intellectuals during the Cold War suggests a different framing of the problem of Latin America’s missing social democracy altogether: it shows that each of the Left’s currents made important contributions to building and outlining a more just society, but each was also blind in important ways to the destructive elements of its own strategy and vision. In an environment that was partly their own creation and partly imposed on them, artists and intellectuals formed transnational communities that sought to bring a humane socialism to Latin America, but they repeatedly found that their attempts to formulate solutions were tangled up in the interests of empires. They sought independence but could not avoid having the problems of their sponsors—whether the CIA, the Soviet Union, or revolutionary Cuba—become their own.

  Cold War debate tended to reduce front groups to the interests of their sponsors, casting each participant in them as nothing more than a warrior in the service of a foreign empire. Such legends deny that multiple logics operate wherever collective action is taken. Although inevitably partial, that reasoning captured enough truth to serve as justification for the suppression of dissent supposedly made illegitimate by its foreign nature. This dynamic recurred throughout the Cold War—and after—where accusations of foreign entanglement served as proxies to delegitimize one’s political opponents. If it is true that responses to war should be proportionate to the threat, it has always been the case that responses to the Cultural Cold War have far exceeded the potential of its works to cause harm. The Soviet-sponsored peace movement was suppressed across the “West”; the CCF sometimes defended regimes inimical to “cultural freedom” simply because they were anti-Communist; and, later, revolutionary Cuba exaggerated the importance of the CCF to justify the suppression of internal critics. But the projects of cultural hegemony, even those of the United States, were porous rather than solid. They regularly failed to meet their objectives and sometimes acted in a way that was seemingly indifferent to the interests of empire. Occasionally their most serious consequences proved unintentionally inimical to their patron’s plans.

  Mundo Nuevo and Casa de las Américas became
great rivals, for example, and are generally seen as opposites. But the CCF and its personnel had actually played important roles in campaigns to depose Fidel Castro’s dictatorial predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, and even participated in Casa de las Américas events in the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Communist fronts could take surprising directions as well: the WPC aligned itself with a significant left-wing social movement in Mexico in the early 1960s known as the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN). The MLN overtook the peace agenda and defended civil liberties in Mexico. Supporters of Cuba and the Soviet Union, when faced with authoritarian anti-Communism, sometimes defied expectations by becoming some of democracy’s best defenders.

  By the early 1970s the major front groups of Latin America’s Cultural Cold War had been exhausted. The WPC had been repressed and was discredited by its Stalinist associations; the CCF, for its connection to the United States; and Casa de las Américas because of the Cuban government’s jailing of a prominent poet in 1971, who was then forced to perform a public self-criticism that reminded many of Stalinist practices. But if the high tide of the Cultural Cold War had receded by the mid-1970s, its watermark remained. The fact that the CCF, the WPC, and Casa were fronts had certainly imposed limitations on their actions. Members of these groups framed issues in ways that made it close to impossible to see their patrons in a negative light. Partisans of the Soviet-sponsored WPC had defended as pacific attempts by the Soviet Union to attain its own security, even through violence, but had defined as warmongering similar actions by the United States. Members of the CIA-sponsored CCF generally criticized the United States only for its “errors” in deviating from an ideal, imagined anti-Communist liberalism and had no coherent plan to help the United States support the region’s anti-Communist Left. The commitment of Casa-affiliated intellectuals to anti-imperialism and defense of the revolution made criticism of the Cuban government and its widespread violation of human rights next to impossible. All the fronts unquestionably also provided cover for spies or for the collection of intelligence and could not have existed without the financial backing of their patrons.

  Latin America’s Cultural Cold War was farce and tragedy not in sequence but simultaneously. For intellectuals engaged in politics, and for the political movements that they supported, there were only troubling options. Communists were repressed, so although their utopias eschewed the traditional freedoms of liberal societies, in the Latin American context, they could sometimes act as the defenders of civil liberties. But the Sartrean position, followed by many intellectuals in Latin America, that the everyday violence of society justified retributive violence was plausible and even correct—except that the violence that it inspired rarely solved the problems it intended to and created others besides. Those who opted for a Camus-like route would find that their moderate socialism could come only via a crooked alliance with the United States, and their reforms would have to be timid, halting, inadequate to the task, and easily appropriated by the Right. Each camp would accuse the others of corruption and of operating in the service of foreign empire. But it was not so much an issue of corruption as of the inscription of intellectuals’ preexisting campaigns onto the Cold War. The evidence from Latin America suggests that the Cultural Cold War is best understood within a framework of “ironic Gramscianism”—the pursuit of cultural hegemony through a combination of coercion and consent, incorporating many agendas. But the consequences were so varied that cultural fronts produced nearly as many ironies as they did movements in the direction that their patrons hoped. State sponsorship was accepted and mobilized, but it bore unexpected costs. Compromise—perhaps sometimes even corruption—was not an exception; it was the natural condition of the engaged intellectual. And the experience of Latin America’s Left during the Cold War was less a betrayal of democracy than a true paucity of options. The failures of each front group show how difficult it would be to build a more democratic politics in the environment of the Cold War. Social democracy during Latin America’s Cold War did not fail because the wrong path was chosen, but because all the paths that could be imagined were so tangled.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Exile and Dissent in the Making of the Cultural Cold War

  “None of us has a heart condition or the slightest intention to commit suicide,” they wrote in a letter addressed to the president of Mexico in January 1942, but still they feared for their lives. The writers were Victor Serge, a Belgian-born Russian novelist, the French socialist Marceau Pivert, and the Spaniard Julián Gorkin, secretary general of a small dissident Spanish Marxist party persecuted by Communist authorities during the Spanish Civil War. All three were weathering World War II in Mexico City, seemingly a world away from a European continent engulfed in war. Yet they remained in the middle of the struggle, and although they were all, in the language of the day, “men of the Left,” the immediate danger they faced came not from the fascist Axis but from Soviet-aligned Communists.1

  Serge, Gorkin, and Pivert had all been sympathizers, if not followers, of the Communist alternative represented by Leon Trotsky, murdered in the study of his Mexico City home two years earlier by a Spanish Soviet agent with an ice ax. By 1942, when they wrote their letter, the Soviet Union and the United States were allies in the war effort against Nazi Germany and the Axis powers, and Mexico would soon officially join the Allied cause. The three men insisted that this wartime alliance should not make criticism of the Soviet Union impermissible and, as a result of their outspokenness, found their Mexico City homes conspicuously and threateningly monitored by orthodox Communist political opponents. If they were found dead, they wanted it publicly known that no one should accept that the end of their lives had arrived by accident.

  Peril seemed to mount. The men were accused of heading a Nazi fifth column in Mexico, and a coordinated campaign of slander flowed from the pen of Otto Katz, a Czech journalist who had been part of the Comintern’s cultural propaganda apparatus for more than a decade. Writing as André Simone, Katz enjoyed the protection of the labor newspaper El Popular, whose pro-Soviet patron loathed anything redolent of Trotskyism. News of other deaths arrived in the months that followed: Two Jewish trade unionists from Poland, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, were executed in the Soviet Union for advocating more democratic versions of socialism. Carlo Tresca, an Italian antifascist and anti-Communist, was gunned down in the streets of New York. Gorkin had received a letter from Tresca a few weeks before his death stating that he had been having a violent debate with the Italian Communist Vittorio Vidali, and Gorkin suspected that Vidali was responsible for the murder. Although Gorkin was likely wrong—the available evidence points to a Mafia assassin—Gorkin and his associates believed that advocacy of a more democratic socialism than what Stalin offered was becoming a deadly risk.2

  Reproduction of a Communist political cartoon that links Nazism to Trotskyism. The tree growing from the skull of Trotsky is inscribed with swastikas and the names of Victor Serge, Julián Gorkin, Marceau Pivert, Gustav Regler, and one actual Trotskyist, the Spaniard Grandizo Munis. When Regler, Gorkin, Serge, and Pivert reproduced the cartoon in a pamphlet produced to defend themselves, they added a caption that reads “Stalinism openly preaches murder. After felling Trotsky, it announces our liquidation.” Image courtesy Archivo General de la Nación, “Marceau Pivert Aujard y Otros,” July 1944, Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (DGIPS), box 121, folder 46.

  Serge, Gorkin, and Pivert planned a memorial for Erlich, Alter, and Tresca for the night of 1 April 1943. As they convened in the hall of the Centro Cultural Ibero-Mexicano, a menacing crowd gathered outside. Dozens of men, many of them members of pro-Communist unions, held revolvers, knives, and pieces of broken furniture. Pushing their way into the hall, they yelled “You are Germans! Enemies of Mexico!” A thrown knife struck a Spanish exile who was shielding Serge’s daughter, bathing her in his blood. Another blow dented Gorkin’s skull. And still the police were nowhere to be seen.3

  Traditi
onally, the Cultural Cold War has been seen as part of a clash of empires: an extended argument in poetry and prose, sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union, to claim the moral high ground and the superiority of capitalism over socialism or vice versa. But in 1942 and 1943 Serge, Pivert, and Gorkin—political writers all—were at risk not precisely because of superpower antagonism but because of a struggle for political and ideological supremacy within the international Left. If their memorial had taken place a few years later, it might have been seen as one of the key moments of the early Cultural Cold War. But the year was 1943, and instead it is evidence both of the porousness of the boundaries of the Cold War and that the foundations of the Cultural Cold War lay in the fractured history of the global Left.

  The Cold War, and even more so its cultural counterpart, has no agreed-on beginning. Even given the traditional dating to the late 1940s, it seemed to arrive at different places at different moments. If it came to a clear end with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, this too is only in retrospect: the Cold War was repeatedly declared over while it continued to take place. Focusing on ideological competition, some historians have made the Cold War a phenomenon of most of the “short twentieth century,” from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union. Seen in this light, the Cold War was a competition over the best way of organizing a just and modern society. It was also global, a kind of international civil war, because of the way in which it elevated political struggle within nations to civilizational heights, justifying repression to defend one system of arranging human affairs over another. Certainly for the world outside Europe, including Latin America, cycles of anti-Communist repression and foreign intervention predated the official years of the Cold War.4

  Similarly, the particularly Cultural Cold War was built on what could be described as an international civil war within the global Left to define the ideas and practices that would guide political change. The divisions were evident at least from the time the Russian Revolution created an existing form of Communism and, in the Communist International (Comintern), a vehicle for its global dissemination. State interests—essential though they were when U.S.-Soviet diplomatic tensions settled into place over the course of the late 1940s—in many ways only hitched themselves to these existing conflicts. Superpower rivalry came to guarantee that the Cultural Cold War would be relatively well financed, but it began in the Left’s internal conflicts and its troubled relationship with dissenters.