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

by Patrick Iber

  Its campaigns were remarkably successful. The apex of unity was achieved at the International Writers’ Congress for the Defense of Culture, held in the sweltering Parisian heat of June 1935. The main goal of the congress was to establish the principle that the defense of “culture” was substantively equivalent to an attack on fascism. It was part of a new conjuncture in Communist politics, a step into the Popular Front era of alliance with bourgeois and non-Communist Left parties in the interest of shared antifascism. The substantive claim that fascism was the opposite of culture was not exactly correct: European fascism had inspired significant artistic movements, and many intellectuals counted themselves among its admirers. But the thesis was appealing, and events like massive Nazi book burnings helped sustain its general plausibility. But in spite of the commitment to the Popular Front, Soviet cultural work abroad always served to draw lines of inclusion in and exclusion from the revolutionary family. Surrealists, for instance, who had been part of a radical cultural vanguard allied with Communists in the 1920s, were now viewed as lazy pederasts, fixated on dreams, indulgent of fantasy, and focused on psychosexual revolution when art should inspire the proletariat. Surrealist leader André Breton was prohibited from appearing at the Paris congress in 1935; a speech he had written, pleading for freedom of expression within the antifascist front, was met with a rejoinder by the Communist poet Louis Aragon, who insinuated that freedom of expression led to fascism.19

  If times were difficult for surrealists, they grew impossible for Trotskyists. In an apparent irony, the era of left-wing unity of the Popular Front made things even more difficult for Trotsky because states menaced by fascism did not wish to anger a potential Soviet ally by granting him safe harbor. Deported from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky had lived first in Turkey, then in France, and finally in Norway. By 1937 he was no longer welcome there either. Only one country offered him a new home: Mexico, a distant haven from dangerous times.20

  Others with similar histories would join him. Julián Gorkin and Victor Serge were the first translators of The Revolution Betrayed into Spanish and French, respectively. Gorkin had founded the Communist Party of Valencia and had trained with the Comintern in Moscow in the mid-1920s. Born Julián Gómez in 1901, he chose his nom de guerre, Gorkin, as the concatenation of the names of Lenin and the writer Gorky. But Gorkin broke with the Comintern in 1929, apparently because of disillusionment with the Stalinization of the state apparatus. He made his way to Mexico after escaping Communist persecution during the Spanish Civil War.21

  Gorkin’s friend Victor Serge had been born in Belgium to anticzarist Russian parents. Serge had been an anarchist, then a Bolshevik, a Comintern organizer, and then a sympathizer with Trotsky driven into internal exile within the Soviet Union. Well known in Western Europe for his novels written in French, Serge became the centerpiece of an international campaign to secure his freedom; its success made Serge one of the few survivors of the Soviet purges of the 1930s and set a pattern by which the right to dissent from political orthodoxy was defended internationally by taking up the case of a single exemplary figure. After years in Belgium and France, Serge made his way across the Atlantic in 1941. Like Trotsky and others who came, Serge took his diminished hopes for a better world with him to Mexico. In some places the antifascist culture of the Popular Front era had proved dynamic and powerful and was deeply rooted in local social movements. But those on the left that it rejected found that their Cultural Cold War was under way and was already a contest between the disenchanted and the faithful.22

  The period of the Popular Front largely coincided, in Mexico, with the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, whose acts of solidarity again made Mexico City a haven for a generation of the world’s leftist political refugees. After a period of short Mexican presidencies that depended on the party infrastructure of the newly formed PNR to govern, Cárdenas assumed the office in December 1934. Although he was well known as an enthusiastic advocate of thorough agrarian reform and therefore on the left of the PNR, he was a close disciple of Calles, and his first cabinet suggested continuity with previous administrations. The PCM greeted his ascent with a pledge to be with “neither Calles nor Cárdenas.” But difficult economic conditions in the context of the Great Depression led to a break between new and old regimes. Strikes had begun to increase dramatically in frequency in 1934, and their numbers continued to rise in the first months of Cárdenas’s presidency. In April 1935 ex-president Calles publicly declared that the strikes were unjustified and leading the nation to social chaos; Cárdenas, by contrast, asserted that labor’s claims were legitimate. An embittered Calles was sent into exile in the United States, and Cárdenas began an independent presidency, beloved by a wide swath of Mexico’s nationalist Left. Many saw him as the man who fulfilled the historic task of the Mexican Revolution: implementing agrarian reform, siding with labor, and initiating an ambitious program of socialist education in the countryside. He ended persecution of the PCM, and by 1937 it had revised its slogan to “Unity at all costs” with Cárdenas. Although Mexico’s government was not a parliamentary coalition and thus not a popular front in fact, it came to resemble one in spirit.23

  Cárdenas’s vision of a Mexican popular front was nonsectarian, a movement that would work with many varieties of leftist thinkers to mobilize a populace for the construction of social justice. Remaking Mexico’s labor movement was among the highest priorities. After the Mexican Revolution the majority of Mexico’s labor movement had sought benefits in close relations with the state, and this relationship soon devolved into clientelistic and corrupt dependence. To rebuild the labor movement, Cárdenas partnered with Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a Marxist intellectual who had broken from the official unions in the early 1930s and counseled a turn “to the left.” At a meeting in February 1936, Lombardo Toledano re-formed his small union federation as the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM). With the Marxist slogan “For a classless society,” the CTM quickly became the most important labor federation in the country. Lombardo Toledano said that he wanted independence from the Mexican government, but financial troubles soon made the CTM financially dependent on the state and forced it to abide by the desired policies of the government in all but symbolic disputes. For his part, Cárdenas saw the organization of workers as a necessary step in the construction of democracy: “Democracy in capitalist states,” he wrote in his diary in December 1935, “will always be theoretical … Political democracy cannot exist without the establishment of economic democracy.” For Cárdenas, the organization of the CTM helped workers become educated, improve their wages, and become more equal partners in society. When Cárdenas reorganized the official governing party, renaming it the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM) in early 1938, the CTM was integrated as the principal representative of the labor movement.24

  Cárdenas and Lombardo Toledano mobilized workers not only for domestic purposes but also for an international agenda. Appearing at the First Congress of the CTM in February 1938, Cárdenas called for the creation of an anti-imperialist international labor federation. By September it had become reality: representatives of labor centrals from around the continent met in Mexico City to inaugurate the Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (CTAL) and elect Lombardo Toledano to head its central committee. For Cárdenas, the CTAL was a means to project the influence of the Mexican Revolution and the goals he had for it: anti-imperialist solidarity and the defense of national sovereignty. In the days after the creation of the CTAL, again at the suggestion of Cárdenas, Lombardo Toledano sponsored the International Congress against War and Fascism, scheduled so that the same workers and international visitors could attend. Cárdenas told the assembly that it would have an important role to play in stopping the outbreak of imperialist wars that were motivated by the view that war contributed to the good health of a country’s internal economy. Cárdenas worried that if Mexico did not visibly confront fascism, this inaction could lead to military intervention in Mexico by the
United States. His government’s support for the CTAL was an expression of his commitment to antifascist diplomacy.25

  Cárdenas’s interpretation of an antifascist popular front and Lombardo Toledano’s were compatible in most respects but not identical, for Lombardo Toledano, although he never joined a Communist party, had been recruited by the Soviet Union in 1935. He traveled there just as the Popular Front strategy was being put in place and returned to Mexico with glowing reports on Soviet progress, calling the USSR the “country of the future.” From then on, he became resolutely pro-Soviet in international politics. In a private letter from 1937, Lombardo wrote that he considered it his duty not to comment on negative aspects of the Soviet government, just as he would not speak ill of the Mexican Revolution outside Mexico, because, he said, “the proletariat must have faith in its cause and labor leaders should never give to the bourgeoisie a pretext to exploit our confessions about internal errors and defects of the revolutionary movement, sowing confusion among the workers, who in the main remain uneducated.” He held to those commitments throughout his life.26

  The intellectual expression of the Popular Front in Mexico came to be the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR), founded in 1933 as the Mexican cousin of the better-known French Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, created a year earlier by André Gide, Henri Barbusse, and André Malraux. With close but nonexclusive ties to the PCM, the LEAR worked to place Marxist criteria at the center of intellectual self-definition, insisting that Marxism was the correct way to assess the validity of art and literature. The LEAR argued that the proper role for the intellectual was active political militancy, and, after it decided to align with the Cárdenas government, it channeled that militancy into the preferred causes of the Popular Front. Under Cárdenas, the LEAR enjoyed government support, and in turn it assisted Cardenista projects for socialist education, antifascism, and aid for the Spanish Republic. Even as individual muralists, like Rivera and Siqueiros, quarreled publicly over the politics of art—with Siqueiros insisting on pro-Soviet militant orthodoxy and Rivera on an ersatz Trotskyism that allowed him to act as he pleased—the Mexican muralist tradition was recognized the world over as an original contribution to the world scene, resulting in the spread of works of public art in socialist realist style. Even as the LEAR faltered in 1937 and 1938, affiliated artists created the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an artistic community that produced woodcuts and prints in support of left-wing causes for decades to come.27

  No cause was dearer to the global Left of the Popular Front era than the fate of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. France, England, and the United States remained neutral in the conflict between the elected government of the Spanish Republic and the nationalist insurgency of Francisco Franco that erupted in 1936. The Western democracies feared that engaging militarily with Franco’s forces and his fascist supporters in Germany and Italy would lead to wider European conflict. This left the Soviet Union as the Republic’s only powerful international ally, giving Communists considerable power within the Republican camp and creating in Spain a kind of kindergarten for the Soviet Union’s future intelligence operations. It was there, for example, that the grounds for the assassination of Trotsky were laid.28

  Apart from Stalin, who extracted a high price for his support, Lázaro Cárdenas was the only world leader to provide consistent moral and material aid to the Republic. Mexico sent arms and ammunition to the Spanish Republicans, though far less than the Soviet Union could provide. Additionally, a few hundred Mexicans—most of them recruited by the Communist Party, including the painter Siqueiros—journeyed to Spain to fight for the Republic. Mexican diplomats represented Spanish interests to other countries in Latin America that had sided with Franco. In 1937 Mexico welcomed a group of war orphans; when the war was lost, some 25,000 Spaniards came to Mexico to live in what became for many a permanent exile.29

  In spite of its symbolic importance in the minds of sympathizers as a heroic stand of a united Left against fascism, the Spanish Civil War became almost as well known for conflict within the Republican ranks. The anarchists, bourgeois democrats, socialists, Communists, and independent Marxist groups who made up the Republican side had forged a volatile alliance. Libertarian anarchists had little philosophical affinity with the Communists, but the greatest animosity existed between the Communists and the small, anti-Stalinist Marxist party known as the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). The anarchists and the POUM believed that the war could not be won without pushing forward revolutionary reorganization within Republican territory; Communists believed that the war had to be the first priority. In May 1937 the Catalan government and Communists on the one side and anarchists and the POUM on the other erected barricades and engaged in street warfare in Barcelona, resulting in hundreds of deaths. The POUM claimed that the fighting erupted as the result of deliberate Communist provocation; what is certain is that tensions on all sides were high, and open violence was nearly inevitable. The POUM, whose role in the events was marginal, but which had been fiercely opposed to Popular Front alliances that included Communists, was blamed and pursued. The offices of the POUM’s principal newspaper, Barcelona’s La Batalla—edited by Julián Gorkin, the future refugee in Mexico—were raided. POUM founder Andreu Nin was detained and killed on orders from the Soviet secret police. Gorkin and other POUM leaders were tried and sentenced to fifteen years in prison for the roles they had played in the May Days, although they were absolved of charges of desertion and espionage on behalf of fascism. They were evacuated from prison some months later when Barcelona was set to fall to the Nationalists, and the fortunate, including Gorkin, were able to cross into France.30

  With few governments willing to offer aid, the Spanish Republic courted the favor of the world’s intellectuals. Working to portray itself as the cultured and enlightened side in the civil war, the embattled Republic partially sponsored a major conference that was held as the successor to the Paris writers’ meeting of 1935. It relied for organization on the Communist-controlled Association of Writers for the Defense of Culture that had been established in Paris. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, then living in France and not yet officially a member of the Communist Party but considering himself one in practice, received a large sum of money from the Spanish Republican government to aid in the organization of the conference.31

  Convening primarily in Valencia and Madrid during July 1937, the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture generated significant sympathy for the Republican cause. It attracted notable figures—Vicente Huidobro from Chile, Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden from the United Kingdom, César Vallejo from Peru, Nicolás Guillén from Cuba, André Malraux and Julien Benda from France, and Ilya Ehrenburg from the Soviet Union (via France)—who reiterated their support for the Republic and their opposition to fascism in the name of culture. The fate of Victor Serge and the exclusion of the surrealists had been the fault lines at the Paris congress of 1935; the great controversy that occupied the Spanish proceedings was how to treat André Gide. Gide had presided over the 1935 predecessor congress and had been considered one of the most important Communist sympathizers among the world’s intellectuals until he returned from a tour of the Soviet Union in 1936 with a critical portrait of official conformity, cultural repression, and a cult of personality surrounding Stalin. “Those who do not applaud him [Stalin] considers his enemies,” Gide wrote. “The U.S.S.R. is not what we had hoped it would be, what it promised to be, what it still strives to appear. It has betrayed all our hopes.” Gide was effectively excised from the Left for publishing such sentiments at such a vulnerable time for the Spanish Republic and was derided during the congress as a sympathizer of Hitler for criticizing the Soviet Union at a time of active combat with fascism.32

  Evident in reactions to the Valencia congress are habits of mind and political commitments that endured into the Cold War. For Pablo Neruda, the Spanish Civil War was part of a process of political aw
akening that drew him closer to official support for Communism. Neruda’s close friend, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, was executed by Nationalists in August 1936: the physical and very personal representation of the fascism-as-death-of-culture thesis. For the rest of his life, Neruda’s Communist convictions would be linked to the days of Spain’s heroic resistance. It was a choice, Neruda thought, between “darkness and hope.”33

  Others saw darkness on the Republican side as well. Mexico’s young poet Octavio Paz went to Spain for the Valencia congress and was eventually joined by a large contingent from the Mexican LEAR. Paz, who at that time in his life viewed Communism with sympathy, was troubled by the attacks that made Gide “anti-Spain” because he had been critical of the Soviet Union. In private meetings Paz spoke about the “forbidden” subjects—like the treatment of Gide and the disappearance of Andreu Nin—and he left Spain uneasy about the role that Communists were playing in culture and politics. Although he broke with no left-wing commitments when he returned from Spain, his experiences there established the basis for his future anti-Stalinism. Once they arrived in Mexico, after the end of the civil war, the anti-Stalinists Victor Serge and Julián Gorkin became important political tutors of Paz.34

  The Spanish Civil War was a foundational experience for many left-wing intellectuals, whose future politics hinged on whether they believed, or came to believe, that Communists had played a noble or malign role in the conflict. In 1939 Franco’s forces defeated what remained of the divided Republic, but the intra-Left rivalries continued to burn. Republican survivors and supporters were left believing that betrayals by enemies among their supposed allies had allowed fascism to triumph. Regardless of their views of the matter, Mexico welcomed them, and exiles arrived there not as representatives of a unified Spain but as a divided Spanish Left still at war with itself via separate mutual aid organizations to support the immigration and transition of pro- and anti-Communist refugees. Adding greatly to these tensions was the presence in Mexico of the greatest threat to unity in the Communist world and, at least in theory, to Communist hegemony: Leon Trotsky himself.