by Patrick Iber
Vicente Lombardo Toledano gave the keynote address, making an indirect attack on the United States’ nuclear monopoly by arguing that scientific progress was the patrimony of all humanity and belonged to no single nation. He criticized U.S.-based companies operating as monopolies in Latin America and stated that a new war would turn Latin America’s countries into mere colonies of the United States. He denied that the Soviet Union had anything to do with the conference or that it was of Communist origin, although he quickly added that the Soviet Union had profoundly pacifist ends, and that those who “stoke the horrible bonfires” of war were nothing more than the lackeys of U.S. monopolies. At the closing session on 12 September, before an audience of approximately four thousand, Lombardo Toledano spoke again, calling on the people of the Americas, as supporters of peace, to act as a dike against Yankee imperialism.44
Most of the political speeches over the many days of the conference implicated the United States in warmongering. They defined violence not simply as open war but as imperialism. Juan Marinello, the president of the Cuban Communist Party, who, along with Lombardo Toledano, was one of those most responsible for organizing the 1949 event, spoke against American imperialism trampling the sovereignty of Latin American countries. A few delegates criticized both Cold War powers from a “nonaligned” position: O. John Rogge said that the excesses of capitalism were parallel to those of Communism, and that “if the United States and the Soviet Union must compete, let it be for the honor of being the champion of the oppressed.” But in general, neither criticism of the Soviet Union, nor—befitting the way in which Mexico managed its Left—of the Mexican government had any part in the congress proceedings.45
Pablo Neruda, who had been crossing the world on behalf of the peace movement since his appearance in Paris, delivered a fiery speech that evoked the sectarianism of Fadeyev at Wrocław. “Dying capitalism fills the chalice of human creation with a bitter brew,” he said; “When Fadeyev expressed in his speech at Wrocław that if hyenas used pens or typewriters they would write like the poet T. S. Eliot or the novelist Sartre, it seems to me that he offended the animal kingdom.” Neruda, however, did more than just endorse the cultural politics of the peace movement: he tried to enact them. He directed an evening of performance that was a logical extension of the cultural project in which he had been engaged for more than a decade. Traveling across the Americas, Neruda had been penning an epic poem of continental history, his Canto general, cataloging in verse his views of the heroes and villains of the Latin American past and present and binding the history of a noble, naturalistic, and pan-Latin American past to its Communist future. Neruda had been deeply influenced by the Mexican artistic scene he had encountered while working in the Chilean embassy in Mexico in the early 1940s, and he gathered many of his old friends again for his performance at the Mexico City conference of 1949. Of the many phases Neruda passed through as a poet, this one—the phase of Canto general (published in Mexico in 1950 with illustrations by Rivera and Siqueiros) and Las uvas y el viento (published in 1954)—hews closest to socialist realism. As he traveled through the Soviet bloc, he pledged to reedit his old surrealist poetry, which many of his fellow writers most admired, because it employed forms that the bourgeoisie used to separate itself from the people artistically. In his speech at the 1949 Continental Congress for Peace, Neruda spoke of rejecting his early poetic works as inadequate and inappropriate when they were presented for Russian translation, and of his own process of drawing closer to socialist realism.46
In its nationalist and anticolonial implications, Neruda’s form of Communist artistic nationalism was a kind of “indigenist” socialist realism. His evening performance at the 1949 peace conference placed at its center a madrigal choir featuring songs in indigenous languages from Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico. At the end Neruda himself performed a section from his Canto general, “Que despierte el leñador” (Let the woodcutter awake). Dancers directed by Waldeen, simultaneously the most innovative ballerina in Mexican dance and a practitioner of heroic movement in indigenous dress, interpreted the poem. It took the form of a song and a plea to the United States for a return of the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, who could put an end to the blight of racism, warmongering, and hatred that Neruda saw as typifying the United States of the late 1940s. “Let Abraham come,… and let him heft his people’s ax / against the new slavers, / against the slave’s whip, / against the poison press, / against the bloody merchandise / that they want to sell.” He imagined a smiling, multiracial uprising against the “manufacturer of hatred.” It was epic poetry and a pure distillation of the politics of the peace movement adapted to the Latin American setting.47
If North America’s hero, Lincoln, lay dormant and absent, “Que despierte el leñador” offered a parallel figure who was the very picture of present vigilance: Joseph Stalin. (“His bedroom light is turned off late. / The world and his country allow him no rest.”) The Soviet Union’s struggle was portrayed as the world’s struggle, and its acts of construction made possible a new dawn for all countries. The poem ends with hopes of peace for all of the Americas, but it also contains a warning. Neruda enumerated Latin America’s hostility to U.S. intervention by invoking a whole pantheon of revolutionary heroes (Tupac Amaru, anachronistically; Augusto César Sandino, appropriately; Emiliano Zapata, much less so) inspiring a people who would rise from the earth itself to destroy any invasion: “But if you arm your hordes, North America,… we’ll pound like a Colombian fist, / we’ll rise to deny you bread and water, / we’ll rise to burn you in hell.”48
The Continental Congress for Peace in Mexico City, September 1949. The background mural features a proletarian worker carrying the flags of many nations confronting a skeletal warmonger. Photo courtesy Archivo General de la Nación, collection Hermanos Mayo, envelope 7851.
The great irony of “Que despierte el leñador” was that Neruda’s Canto general owed much to the example of Walt Whitman, whom Neruda greatly admired but who never would have been allowed to write under Soviet conditions. Whitman and Lincoln had also been admired by artists of the Popular Front period, especially in the United States, and Whitman was, in some ways, an excellent choice for a distant poetic hero of the peace movement. He believed in an egalitarian democratic community (of men, at any rate) and was known for sounding the drums of war in support of the Union cause during the U.S. Civil War—like the Partisans of Peace, more a believer in justice than in peace. Still, during the war he visited the bedsides of the war wounded of both the Union and the Confederacy and saw them both with sympathy. His poems also drew for their subjects from ordinary objects and experiences, as called for by the directives of socialist realism. On the other hand, Whitman was initially disliked by many critics in his day and largely rejected by the poetry-reading masses. His poems were precisely the sort of erotic and degenerate mess that abandoned structure for free verse; they would have been utterly out of bounds in the peace movement and certainly would never have been allowed to develop under the Communist cultural politics of that period. Still, Whitman’s work was reproduced from time to time in peace movement propaganda, and in 1950 the WPC awarded Neruda its International Peace Prize in recognition of “Que despierte el leñador.”49
In the years after the Mexican conference, Neruda lived in exile in Europe as a guest of the WPC. He spent a great deal of his time in the Soviet Union, China, and the Eastern bloc and was designated as the WPC’s representative to the United Nations. He participated in every major European reunion of the WPC. After a meeting in Vienna, held in December 1952, he sought to organize his own conference in Santiago, which would prove to be the last major peace-like gathering held in Latin America in the 1950s. After another trip to the Soviet Union, he returned to Chile in January 1953; by then, Neruda’s bête noire, Gabriel González Videla, had been replaced as president by Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, Chile’s former dictator who had been strategically made into one of the honorary presidents of the Mexico City gathering of 1949, and wh
o now promised to repeal the anti-Communist ley maldita. Still, the mayor of Santiago was opposed to allowing the gathering to meet in the municipal theater, and Neruda had to call on a friend, who pressed President Ibáñez to persuade the mayor to allow the event to proceed in light of the important guests who would be attending. Even so, the visas for the Soviet and Chinese delegations were granted only at the last minute, which made it impossible for the Soviet delegates to attend. According to the CIA, Neruda, who had privately expressed the view in 1950 that the “[peace] campaign in Latin America had been a complete failure,” also failed to find funds for his congress while he was in European exile. But even without outside funding, Neruda’s Continental Cultural Congress (CCC) was held in Santiago from 26 April to 3 May 1953, opening less than a month after the death of Stalin.50
But harassment continued. After the second day of the CCC, a judge ordered El Siglo, the newspaper of the still-illegal Communist Party, closed for ten days, citing its campaign of “permanent conspiracy.” The bourgeois and government press declined to report on the event, creating a kind of news blackout during the days of the actual meeting. Responding to the climate of suppression, Neruda promised that the CCC would offer culture and not politics. Still, echoes of the language of earlier peace congresses were unmistakable, and the Santiago conference was a final exercise in cultural Stalinism. “I know and admire the Soviet people,” Neruda said at the congress, “and its leaders for their extraordinary deeds, indelible in human history. But what I most admire in that land is its dedication to culture. Perhaps above all else, this is the most fundamental and impressive feature of Soviet life, with the full flowering of the individual, as never before achieved in history.” The Chilean writer Fernando Santiván spoke in favor of cultural exchange among the American republics but wondered whether the nations of Latin America were allowed an independent economic and spiritual existence, or whether U.S. power was so strong that it stopped them from developing according to their rightful national characteristics. The two congress participants who reported on the proceedings for the Cominform’s newspaper, Brazil’s Jorge Amado and the Chilean Communist writer Volodia Teitelboim, explicitly connected Santiván’s speech to the still-germane rhetoric of cosmopolitanism: “An analysis of the content of the national peculiarities of our cultures led the [Continental Cultural] Congress resolutely to reject all forms of cosmopolitanism … Fernando Santiván called on the delegates resolutely to counteract the flow of ‘publications’ from the U.S., permeated with the venom of cosmopolitanism, and to use on a broad scale, in literature and art, the many-sided richness of our folklore and our national cultural legacy.” Within the Soviet Union itself, however, the post-Stalin leadership soon backed away from the paranoid anti-Semitism of the “cosmopolitan” idea.51
It would take a few years for Jorge Amado to catch up. Amado had joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s, and his early novels were, at least in broad terms, “Communist novels,” populated by malign landowners and noble rural “proletarians.” The “indigenous” elements of these works drew not on autochthonous Brazilians but on the traditions and practices of Afro-Brazilians in the country’s northeast. When the Communist Party was outlawed in 1948, Amado left for self-imposed exile, traveling on behalf of the Partisans of Peace. For the greater part of two years, he lived in a castle at the invitation of the Czechoslovakian Union of Writers. (Amado named his Czechoslovakian-born daughter, Paloma, after Picasso’s dove.) He published an account of his travels through the Soviet Union in 1951, titled O mundo da paz, making the moral case for the Soviet approach to literature and the arts: “In the Soviet Union, literature actually became a weapon of the people in building the future, in the fight against the remnants of the influence of capitalist society, against the remnants of a past full of prejudices from which it is necessary to free man in the same way as [the Soviet Union] did away with social injustices.”52
O mundo da paz was deemed subversive in Brazil, and Amado was charged with violating national security laws when he returned there in 1952. (The trial concluded without a verdict.) Traveling between Europe and Brazil, Amado finished the major novel he had begun in Czechoslovakia: a three-volume epic of the Brazilian people’s struggle to overcome the tyranny of the government of Getúlio Vargas during the 1930s, Os subterrâneos da liberdade. As with Neruda’s work from this period, it was the most didactic of his career, and one that he himself later agreed deserved criticism for its adherence to Zhdanovite socialist realism.53
Neruda’s and Amado’s artistic participation in the peace movement was primarily driven by moral considerations, but there were material benefits as well. Travel junkets were a not-inconsiderable compensation, particularly for the less famous, allowing beneficiaries to travel at virtually no cost to themselves and enjoy the best luxuries that the hosting societies had to offer. Especially favored authors who were selected by the Soviet government for translation and distribution (like Amado and Neruda) could accumulate significant wealth that could be accessed only on trips to the Eastern bloc because of inconvertible currency. Whether work selected for translation was simply pirated or whether its author would receive royalties was similarly a political decision used to reward favored authors.
At the same time, participants in the peace movement were not bathed in “Moscow gold” and were expected to bear some of the costs of implementing its programs. There is no doubt that, at the widest level of generality, the Soviet Union, and to some extent other Communist countries, provided the great bulk of the financing for the WPC. However, local initiatives were often self-financed, and the best available evidence suggests that the Latin American gatherings generally had few of their costs defrayed. The Mexican Pro-Peace Committee had some of its expenses covered by the WPC but raised most of its money via gifts and loans from its wealthiest supporters and from raffles, book signings, and auctioning off works of art donated by sympathetic painters.54
In the waning moments of the Continental Congress for Peace in Mexico in 1949, David Álfaro Siqueiros reminded everyone present that the congress had run a deficit, and he solicited contributions from the audience. The man in charge of peace campaigning for the Mexican Communist Party frequently remarked on the need for local fund-raising, given the absence of support from the WPC. For the conference in Santiago organized by Neruda in 1953, U.S. government documentation reports that Neruda never succeeded in his goal of obtaining funds from international sources. He raised money for the conference by holding a “kermesse” at one of his houses, counting on the support of wealthy Communists and sympathizers to pay a significant portion of the bill. Although all delegates to that meeting except Diego Rivera and Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén paid their own travel and hotel expenses, the congress still closed with a deficit of half a million pesos. The peace movement in Latin America obtained a bit of “Moscow bronze,” but Moscow gold was elusive, and in fact, Latin American Communists probably subsidized Moscow’s priorities more than the other way around.55
Some of the costs could be offset, for the major benefactors if not for the rank and file, by later awarding prizes to wealthy patrons in recognition of their sacrifices. The International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace among Peoples (usually known simply as the Stalin Peace Prize) was first awarded in 1950 by the Soviet Union and was given out largely, at least in its first years, in return for work on behalf of the peace movement. (The WPC awarded its own International Peace Prize, which typically went to a rather similar list of people.) The Stalin Prize conferred a medal and a cash award equivalent to about $25,000. In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin’s crimes, the name of the prize was changed to the Lenin Peace Prize, and previous winners were asked to return and exchange their medals, although some chose not to do so. Recipients of the Stalin Prize also received diplomatic status equivalent to that of a party official while they were in the Soviet Union, and that gave them some power to protect one another. Since prizewinners had to be approved
at very high levels, a recipient would be seen as capable of representing the best of art. When the playwright Bertolt Brecht was being harassed for his “formalism” by the East German Communist Party in 1954, Jorge Amado acted behind the scenes to help Brecht win the prize, superseding local pressures with an official stamp of approval and restoring some artistic flexibility for Brecht.56
The cost of receiving these benefits was silence on the less appealing facts to which these writers, however shielded the experiences they had in the Soviet bloc, were certainly privy. Ideas of the functioning of the Soviet Union were based on a kind of evolved political fantasy of social justice that had to exist to contrast with the wretched state of affairs that existed in the Americas or Europe. “How can you, as a writer, admire and love the Soviet Union?” a Brazilian official once asked Amado, and he replied with the surprising explanation that as a writer, he loved the Soviet Union because of the full freedom of printing, criticism, and self-criticism that existed there. Amado explained that there was no need for an opposition press when the publishing responsibilities lay with the state, the authentic representation of the people. If one takes the “independent critic” as the ideal model for intellectuals, this was a serious capitulation to power and a reminder that a “committed” intellectual was a compromised one. Amado writes in his memoirs of his deep sadness at learning of the existence of official Soviet anti-Semitism—and thus the falsity of his beliefs about the achievement of Soviet ethnic and racial harmony. But this had not stopped him from using the anti-Semitic language of cosmopolitanism in peace propaganda. Under Stalin, Amado later reflected, “It was not easy [being] a Communist.” But to stop remained, at least for a time, unthinkable.57