Neither Peace nor Freedom

by Patrick Iber

  17. The relationship of intellectuals to the state has been a major preoccupation of several historiographies of the region. With a broad lens, Nicola Miller has argued that the influence of intellectuals in Spanish America has been exaggerated, but she makes an exception for Brazil; Miller, In the Shadow of the State, 82. Because of its focus on the construction of national identity, Miller’s lucid book does not really engage with Cold War intellectuals’ international work. Because of the high degree of perceived co-optation, scholars of and from Mexico have produced a great deal of writing trying to specify the origins of different categories of intellectuals in that country, as well as their influence or lack of it. Among the most important are Charles A. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana, 1917–1959 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2009); Roderic Camp, Charles A. Hale, and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, eds., Los intelectuales y el poder en México: Memorias de la VI Conferencia de Historiadores Mexicanos y Estadounidenses (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1991); Roderic Camp, Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); and Gabriel Zaid, De los libros al poder (Mexico City: Oceano, 1998). There are parallel literatures in other countries, where currents, institutions, and political movements differed. The point is not to settle on a single definition of an intellectual, but rather to note that intellectuals’ self-concept was shaped by their historical circumstances, and that those who saw themselves not just as Mexican, or Argentine, or Dominican intellectuals but rather as “Latin American” intellectuals expanded with the Cold War because they conceived of problems as “Latin American” in scope.

  18. Paco Ignacio Taibo, Guevara, Also Known as Che, trans. Martin Michael Roberts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 300; Régis Debray, Prison Writings, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 190–191.

  19. The argument of Latin America as laboratory is that of Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 2–5. The “racketeer” was Smedley Darlington Butler, “America’s Armed Forces,” Common Sense 6, no. 11 (November 1935): 8. For careful examinations of how U.S. occupations tried to foster political democracy on the U.S. model but left dictatorships instead, see Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); and Alan McPherson, The Invaded: How Latin Americans and Their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In some cases, Butler’s self-criticism seems largely warranted; in others, such as U.S. intervention in the Mexican Revolution, he oversimplifies U.S. motivations for intervention. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 156–167, 196–199. On the assumptions of U.S. liberal empire and cultural relations that emerged from them, see especially Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982); and G. M. Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Donato Salvatore, Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998).

  20. Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); J. Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy, 1936–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Dept. of State, 1977); Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch, eds., ¡Américas unidas! Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2012); Antônio Pedro Tota, O imperialismo sedutor: A americanização do Brasil na época da Segunda Guerra (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 2000). Julie Prieto locates the creation of U.S. public diplomacy as a response to the Mexican Revolution. Julie Prieto, “The Borders of Culture: Public Diplomacy in United States–Mexico Relations, 1920–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2013). European states, and even the Soviet Union, began the process somewhat earlier. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Mark C. Donfried, eds., Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 18; Jean-François Fayet, “VOKS: The Third Dimension of Soviet Foreign Policy,” in Gienow-Hecht and Donfried, Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, 33–49. Cultural diplomacy—though not yet its “public” variant, aimed at ordinary people—was not the province only of European powers. Mexico, for example, made a calculated show of its bid for modernity at late nineteenth-century world’s fairs by, ironically, looking back hundreds of years to the civilizations that had occupied its lands before the arrival of Spanish colonialism in an attempt to claim the inheritance of a great nation. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

  21. On U.S. cultural diplomacy and its contradictions after the war, see Laura Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); and Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  22. On the collapse of the Good Neighbor Policy, see Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); Steven Schwartzberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America during the Truman Years (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); and Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, eds., Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On U.S. cultural propaganda in Latin America during the early Cold War, see Seth Fein, “New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way,” Diplomatic History 28, no. 5 (November 2004): 703–748; and Warren Dean, “The USIA Book Program: How Translations of ‘Politically Correct’ Books Are (Secretly?) Subsidized for Sale in Latin America,” Point of Contact 3 (October 1976): 4–14.

  23. President Kennedy is quoted in Arthur Meier Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 769. The dictatorship in question was Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, perhaps the most totalitarian government in the Western Hemisphere during the twentieth century. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xii; John Coatsworth, “The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 221; Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). Recent transnational scholarship has emphasized the multilayered nature of Latin America’s Cold War, showing that it had local, national, and international dimensions. Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Consideration of the region’s Cultural Cold War sup
ports that interpretation.

  24. For example, Octavio Paz, El ogro filantrópico: Historia y política, 1971–1978 (Mexico City: Círculo de lectores, 1979), 380.

  25. Some books that take the prehistory of the Cold War seriously are Irene Rostagno, Searching for Recognition: The Promotion of Latin American Literature in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997); Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Germán Alburquerque, La trinchera letrada: Intelectuales latinoamericanos y Guerra Fría (Santiago, Chile: Ariadna Ediciones, 2011); 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); and Claire Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). The strength of Glondys’s book is its analysis of the Spanish exile community rather than Latin American politics. The book that does the most to situate Mundo Nuevo as part of U.S. policies is María Eugenia Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo: Cultura y guerra fría en la década del 60 (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997). Works that emphasize its counterhegemonic potential include Russell Cobb, “Promoting Literature in the Most Dangerous Area in the World: The Cold War, the Boom, and Mundo Nuevo,” in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, ed. Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 248; Russell Cobb, “The Politics of Literary Prestige: Promoting the Latin American ‘Boom’ in the Pages of Mundo Nuevo,” A Contracorriente 5, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 75–94; and Deborah Cohn, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), 23. Other insightful works on intellectuals in the 1960s include Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007); Idalia Morejón Arnaiz, Política y polémica en América Latina: Las revistas Casa de las Américas y Mundo Nuevo (Mexico City: Educación y Cultura, 2010); and Claudia Gilman, Entre la pluma y el fusil: Debates y dilemas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina, 2003). Gilman’s exploration of intellectual debate is especially detailed, though she focuses more the intra-Latin American issues than the global Cold War.

  26. These questions each represent schools of historical analysis of Latin America’s Cold War. Jorge Castañeda has criticized the Left for its Marxist-inspired abandonment of the liberal institutions of democracy: Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed. The “two devils” argument is made at the local and regional levels, respectively, by David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Brands, Latin America’s Cold War. Accounts that emphasize the power of U.S.-led reaction while allowing that it is not a full explanation include Grandin, Last Colonial Massacre; and Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a formulation of the problem, see Gil Joseph, “What We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies,” in In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Gil Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 28.

  1. Exile and Dissent in the Making of the Cultural Cold War

  1. Victor Serge, Julián Gorkin, and Marceau Pivert to ciudadanos de México y Presidente de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 16 January 1942, gallery 3, Manuel Ávila Camacho (MAC), box 824bis, folder 550/9, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico City.

  2. Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope (London: Verso, 2001), 178–179; Gustav Regler, The Owl of Minerva: The Autobiography of Gustav Regler (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959), 167–171; Isabelle Tombs, “Erlich and Alter, ‘The Sacco and Vanzetti of the USSR’: An Episode in the Wartime History of International Socialism,” Journal of Contemporary History 23, no. 4 (October 1988): 531–549; Nunzio Pernicone, Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Dorothy Gallagher, All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Gorkin’s suspicions are in Director, FBI to Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service, 19 March 1950, Julián Gorkin FBI file. Like many other Soviet cultural operatives, Otto Katz was eventually murdered by the governments he served. In the postwar Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia, Katz was forced to make a false confession of having been a spy for Britain, France, and the United States during the war, a Trotskyite since the 1920s, a conspirator against the people, and a bourgeois idealist. He was put to death in 1952. Eugen Loebl, Sentenced and Tried: The Stalinist Purges in Czechoslovakia (London: Elek, 1969), 151–158.

  3. The man protecting Serge’s daughter, Jeannine, was Enrique Gironella, another member of Gorkin’s POUM. Susan Weissman, The Ideas of Victor Serge: A Life as a Work of Art (Glasgow: Critique Books, 1997), 12–13; “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.

  4. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 17; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1994); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 122; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1, Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For opposite views of a “centered” versus a “decentered” Cold War, see the contributions of Stephanson and Westad to Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, eds., Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For the case for a “long” Cold War in Latin America, see Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

  5. Jean Van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacán (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 103. Mexico’s asylum policy coexisted with an immigration policy that, like those of other nations, was based on cultural prejudices. Immigration permits were not granted to minority groups, including Jews, who were considered difficult to assimilate. Daniela Gleizer Salzman, México frente a la inmigración de refugiados judíos, 1934–1940 (Mexico City: CONACULTA-INAH, Fundación Cultura Eduardo Cohen, 2000), 76, 183–184.

  6. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 94; Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, “Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the United States, 1880s–1930s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1156–1187; José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, The Shadow of Ulysses: Public Intellectual Exchange across the U.S.-Mexican Border (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2000), 4–6; John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1914).

  7. José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 87–88; Irene Rostagno, Searching for Recognition: The Promotion of Latin American Literature in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), 1–30; James Burkhart Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York: Wiley, 1968).

  8. Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 20–52; Gilbert M. Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 221–222.

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p; 9. Robin Adèle Greeley, “Muralism and the State in Post-revolution Mexico, 1920–1970,” in Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 18.

  10. El Machete became the official newspaper of the PCM in late 1924. Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 36; Anita Brenner, Idols behind Altars (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929), 244–259; Philip Stein, Siqueiros: His Life and Works (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 54. On the origins of Communism in Mexico, see Daniela Spenser, “Emissaries of the Communist International in Mexico,” American Communist History 6, no. 2 (2007): 151–170; Daniela Spenser, Los primeros tropiezos de la Internacional Comunista en México (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2009); Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo, Historia del comunismo en México (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1985), 15–57; Daniela Spenser and Rina Ortiz Peralta, La Internacional Comunista en Mexico: Los primeros tropiezos, documentos, 1919–1922 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México, 2006); Charles Shipman, It Had to Be Revolution: Memoirs of an American Radical (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico, 20–27.

  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.