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

by Patrick Iber

  That meeting took more than a year to plan and proved to be the only major international conference that the CCF held in Latin America during the 1950s. There, the issue of Guatemala reemerged, as if to show how difficult it would be for the European fusion of liberalism and socialism to be compatible with U.S. interests in the region. The conference tried to bring together like-minded thinkers from the United States and Latin America, including the venerated literary figures Alfonso Reyes of Mexico and Rómulo Gallegos of Venezuela. In addition to these, the conference was attended by APRA’s chief intellectual, Luis Alberto Sánchez, Colombia’s Germán Arciniegas, Jaime Castillo Velasco and Carlos de Baráibar from Chile, Jaime Benítez from Puerto Rico, Raúl Roa and Mario Llerena from Cuba, Érico Veríssimo from Brazil, and the historian José Luis Romero from Argentina. The U.S. delegation included writers John Dos Passos and Ralph Ellison, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, and the historian of Mexico Frank Tannenbaum.38

  In the main room at the Inter-American Conference for Cultural Freedom, September 1956, in Mexico City. At the table, from left to right, author and playwright Mauricio Magdaleno of Mexico, poet Sara de Ibáñez of Uruguay, Venezuelan author and ex-president Rómulo Gallegos, Mexican politician Pedro de Alba, Spanish diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, Mexico’s Alfonso Reyes, and an unidentified man. In the back row, Venezuelan politician Gonzalo Barrios, Socialist Norman Thomas from the United States, and another unidentified man. Photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago; IACF, series V, section C, box 204, folder 6.

  Finally scheduled for 18–26 September 1956 and officially hosted by the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom, which had been established in 1954, the Inter-American Conference for Cultural Freedom enjoyed enough favor from the Mexican government to obtain something that the peace movement never had: a government-approved room at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Just like the peace movement, the CCF never worried about vacant seats at its events, since allies in the labor movement could order workers to sit in empty chairs. Unlike peace movement gatherings, which were never reported by the nonleftist press in Mexico, the CCF event received considerable media attention in print, radio, and television. The government even allocated part of its Sunday radio hour to publicizing the event. Pedro de Alba, a medical doctor and diplomat who had worked in the 1930s as assistant director of the Pan American Union and was, in 1956, a senator from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) as well as a member of the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom, worked to obtain government support for the proceedings. Speaking at the opening session, Senator de Alba emphasized the “constructive” nature of the conference’s anti-Communism, noting that it was motivated by a “reformist socialism detested by the Soviets, for it advocates methods to soothe the class struggle and avoid a possible revolution.”39

  Early speeches expressed points of consensus. Luis Alberto Sánchez identified dictatorship as one of the principal impediments to cultural freedom in the Americas. Another delegate made a plea for intellectual independence from the great powers, contrasting “decent intellectuals” with “servile” ones who accepted invitations from either Moscow or the U.S. Department of State. This might have been read as an attack on the conference itself, but the speaker naturally classified all those in attendance as “decent intellectuals” who would accept no form of servility.40

  But the conference took a sudden turn when Gorkin, in his capacity as conference secretary, read out a telegram of generic support for cultural freedom that Guatemala’s Carlos Castillo Armas had sent the conference. Gorkin was engaged in a quixotic effort to defend the so-called liberal nature of Castillo Armas’s repressive regime. Most did not agree, and Gorkin confessed surprise that the response of so many Latin American democrats had been almost unanimously in favor of Arbenz. But Castillo Armas had collaborated not just with the CIA to overthrow Arbenz but also with the Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza; there was no way to pretend that he was part of the Democratic Left. As much as many of the other conferees shared Gorkin’s anti-Communism, their response to his reading of the telegram from Castillo Armas was to censure Gorkin. He put it away and never brought it up again.41

  Reading about the telegram incident in the newspaper, the Guatemalan author Mario Monteforte Toledo, who had not originally been invited to the conference, appeared the next day to make a speech. Monteforte was no Communist fellow traveler. In time, he would join the Mexican branch of the CCF. He had volunteered to fight in the U.S. Army during World War II. A government official during the Arévalo years—he had been president of the Guatemalan Congress in 1948 and 1949—he resigned in 1950 and departed for Mexico, frustrated in part with what he saw as growing Communist influence over governmental decisions. He held Arbenz in especially low esteem. (In 1957, Monteforte published a novel that he had finished in 1955, Una manera de morir, that paints a bleak picture of ideological conformism and in another environment might have been something of a Spanish-language Darkness at Noon.) But he liked the coup even less, and after Castillo Armas took power by force in 1954, Monteforte returned to Guatemala, where he published two opposition newspapers critical of the new government and its ties to the United States. Eventually, in 1956, citing a conspiracy on Castillo Armas’s life, Guatemalan government officials threw sand in his presses, pulled him from his house, took him to prison, and dumped him at the Honduran border along with other intellectual dissidents. He made his way to Costa Rica, where, with the assistance of President José Figueres, he was able to return to Mexico.42

  Julián Gorkin speaking at the Inter-American Conference for Cultural Freedom. The indentation and scarring on his forehead, the result of a childhood accident coupled with his injury at the Erlich, Alter, and Tresca memorial meeting with Victor Serge in 1943, are visible. Photo courtesy Archivo General de la Nación, Collection Hermanos Mayo, envelope 10,424.

  At the Inter-American Conference, Monteforte Toledo told the story of his life. He spoke about his experiences serving in the U.S. Army, the good spirit of many North Americans, and the extraordinary lack of knowledge of most Americans about their own government’s actions in Latin America. “North American imperialism is real,” he said, and he implored those in the audience with academic jobs in the United States to explain this to the North American public. His speech struck a chord. In a follow-up to Monteforte, while warning that the United States still needed to play an important role in fighting Soviet propaganda in Latin America, even the temperamentally conservative Spaniard Salvador de Madariaga expressed his agreement that the ill-advised policies of the United States were a great threat to culture in the Americas.43

  From that point onward, the problem of U.S. imperialism dominated discussion. Some of the North American delegates defended the United States against specific charges while acknowledging that U.S. policy toward Latin America merited criticism. Others broadened the discussion. Argentine historian José Luis Romero argued that the problem with imperialism was not the character of the North American people but part of the nature of the capitalist system. Future president of Costa Rica Luis Alberto Monge, then secretary general of the anti-Communist union confederation Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT), headquartered in Mexico City, criticized the U.S. government for supporting Latin American dictators and for having intervened in Guatemala. “The politics of the United States,” he said, “has taken a belligerent attitude against the Communist threat, but frequently that belligerent attitude has ended up as a hysterical anti-Communism that instead of constituting a true defense of liberty becomes a straitjacket for intellectuals. Because of that hysterical anti-Communism, labor leaders can acquire habits contrary to that very liberty.”44

  Comments like these made their way to officials of the CCF in the United States and Europe, who found them alarming. In response to the proceedings in Mexico, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in the United States proposed to conv
ene a forum called “The North American Image in Latin American Culture” to think about the so-called problem of anti-Americanism. Norman Thomas wrote to Josselson in Paris that “after a pretty honest facing of the lack of various freedoms in Latin America … our Latin American friends turned with enthusiasm to criticism of the United States as somehow responsible for most of their ills. This criticism with few exceptions wasn’t well documented and was very repetitious … It was criticism of the United States which got the real applause from the galleries.” Gorkin vigorously defended the conference to Josselson and sent out surveys to each of the participants to ensure that they did not share Thomas’s dim estimation of what had occurred. Many supported Gorkin: Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to Josselson: “You need not be disturbed about the expressions of anti-Americanism. They were to be expected from people who experience the effects of policies which we liberals in the U.S. also criticize and seek to change.” Gorkin looked to the positive: he was glad that the proceedings had given no opportunities for the Communist press to accuse those gathered of being agents of the State Department. The planned response by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom went nowhere because that group’s financial troubles caused it to vote to cease operations in January 1957. Josselson, however, thinking in stereotypes, became convinced that it was difficult to get “Latin-Americans to talk sensibly on specific topics instead of indulging in empty rhetoric and demagogy” and thereafter remained wary of approving any further major work in Latin America.45

  Although the CCF’s major international gathering in the 1950s had made a bad impression on CCF management, local committees worked diligently throughout the decade. The actions of the most active and most successful CCF chapter during the 1950s, the Chilean committee under Carlos de Baráibar, illustrate the techniques that the CCF used to frustrate Communist front activity. Responding to a minor Chilean conference associated with the peace movement in 1955, for example, Baráibar used members of the CCF, ORIT, and allied student organizations to encourage delegates to request that a resolution be included that condemned not just Latin American dictatorships but totalitarianism and dictatorship everywhere. When this was declined, anti-Communist student organizations walked out. Subsequently, when a meeting of the Communist-affiliated youth organization was set to be held in Chile, the CCF published material that persuaded the government to ban the meeting. A few months later the CCF supervised a rival inter-American meeting of youths that included representatives from the U.S.-based National Student Association, which, like the CCF, was secretly backed by the CIA. Baráibar received considerable praise from centrist anti-Communists for his work, including future president Eduardo Frei, who was a member of the committee. The Argentine committee was similarly active; it was established in December 1955, shortly after a military coup deposed the government of Juan Domingo Perón, which was generally understood by CCF affiliates as a manifestation of Latin American totalitarianism. It brought together some of the country’s most prominent intellectuals and similarly worked against efforts by Communists to extend their cultural programs to Argentina.46

  The streets of Santiago, Chile, 1956. A poster at a news kiosk advertises various events of the Congress for Cultural Freedom: a meeting of the youth committee and speeches by Julio César Jobet, a socialist intellectual who argued for a humanist Marxism; Raúl Rettig, a leader of the Radical Party who later served as Salvador Allende’s ambassador to Brazil and the lead author of the truth commission’s report on crimes committed by the Pinochet regime; José Ignacio Palma Vicuña, a Christian Democratic politician; and Eduardo Moore, a liberal. Photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago; IACF, series II, box 204, folder 10.

  At the continental level, the CIA and the CCF worked together with favored publishers to support the publication of dozens of book titles. In the United States, the CCF’s regular partner was Frederick A. Praeger, an Austrian immigrant who frequently worked with the CCF and more directly with the U.S. government and the CIA on other work. Praeger, who was personally and professionally invested in the success of the anti-Communist Left, used U.S. government subsidies and purchases to make otherwise unprofitable works good business. The U.S. government, for its part, got from Praeger an independent imprint that betrayed no immediate sign of state support. For example, the CCF considered it essential that Milovan Djilas’s The New Class—which argued that contrary to rhetoric that made Communism out to be a classless society, it was producing a new class system based on proximity to the state bureaucracy—get wide distribution. The final pages of the manuscript were smuggled out of Yugoslavia by a Time reporter and eventually supplied to Praeger by a CIA officer who supervised its translation and distribution. The particular power of the argument came from Djilas’s history as a Communist, so Josselson was incensed when Praeger’s paperback edition failed to include a biographical note. The purpose of publication was not only the book’s content but also its context and the political consequences that it was expected to generate. Praeger had several offers as he sought to prepare the Latin American edition of The New Class, but Josselson and Gorkin sought to maximize political influence instead of profits and insisted that he accept an inferior monetary offer from Argentina’s Editorial Sudamericana, since they believed that it would be in the best position to distribute the book widely throughout the continent. Praeger balked, but Josselson insisted, and, threatened with the loss of future business, Praeger assented.47

  For publications that were more specific to certain Latin American contexts, the CCF had other publishers with whom it worked closely. One of the most important of these was Bartolomeu Costa Amic in Mexico, the publisher living in exile who had once been close to Trotsky and was a personal friend of Julián Gorkin. Many CCF publications for Mexican and Latin American audiences rolled off Costa Amic’s presses, including the magazine of the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom, Examen. Bankrupt in Mexico after bringing out the works of Gorkin and Victor Serge in the early 1940s, Costa Amic found success in the Cold War era as the house publisher of the works of the anti-Communist Left. “[It was the] best deal I ever had,” Costa Amic reportedly once said. “The CIA pays for the printing, and then they buy all the copies!”48

  The politics of the CCF, so centered on the antitotalitarian idea of the freedom of the individual artist or writer to produce as he or she pleased, also involved the sponsorship of original works of art and analysis. The irony of the matter was that freedom was defined as the absence of state interference in the production of thought and culture, but then, through the CCF, the U.S. government was interfering in the production of thought and culture. The mildly mitigating factor in this hypocrisy was that much of the interference was not especially effective.

  The centerpiece of the CCF’s Latin American publishing efforts, for example, the magazine Cuadernos, was never a great success. It circulated many fewer copies than the English-language Encounter and fewer even than the German-language Der Monat, despite serving the better part of two continents plus Spain. Gorkin wanted Cuadernos to be at the heart of the CCF’s political and cultural project, and, like Josselson, he did not want CCF activity in Latin America to be primarily constructed to bridge the divide between Latin America and the United States. Under Gorkin’s editorship, the pages of Cuadernos were filled almost entirely with Hispanic poetics, anti-Soviet propaganda, and reports on the culture and politics of Europe and Latin America. Its favored authors were mostly Spanish Republicans. When the Chilean Communist newspaper El Siglo described Gorkin’s activities as “to subjugate [Latin] American culture to a cosmopolitan and de-nationalizing politics,” the description was plainly hostile but really not inaccurate. The idiom of Gorkin’s campaign was European, and his model of Latin American cultural identity was cosmopolitan in the sense of being international and urban. In contrast to artists associated with the WPC, Gorkin paid little attention to the contributions of indigenous cultures to national cultural
identities in Latin America. His Latin America was, for the most part, one of “universal” elites, esteemed not for speaking to nationally specific concerns but for their ability to achieve renown among European peers. But Gorkin’s was an ersatz universalism. Cuadernos reprinted prominent pieces from CCF-affiliated magazines such as Encounter and Preuves, but the editors of Encounter were not interested in using articles from the less-prestigious Cuadernos.49

  For all of Gorkin’s reputation as a European “universalist,” his taste in literature was surprisingly old-fashioned. Gorkin’s favorite Latin American writer was Rómulo Gallegos, the novelist and deposed president of Venezuela. As a writer, Gallegos was best known for 1929’s Doña Bárbara, which by the 1950s was beginning to seem a novel out of a different century. A profoundly creole book that made no obvious concession to European tastes, Doña Bárbara employed regional language, evoking Venezuelan Spanish as it was actually spoken. Its central dramatic tension was that of civilization versus barbarism and the necessity for Latin America to build its political and cultural identity around the former. It was a respected work with a liberal message that in the 1950s was particularly championed by intellectuals of the anti-Communist Left—Gallegos had been Rómulo Betancourt’s teacher and was a symbol of Acción Democrática. This may have served to put off some of the best young writers in Latin America, who imagined more thoroughgoing social change than its author called for and were branching out from regional literatures to participate instead in international, experimental literary influences. In the 1950s many young writers were not looking for works that would find acceptance in Europe for their universal qualities; they were reading world literature for its most interesting writers (like Franz Kafka and William Faulkner) and trying to participate in those inspirational modern currents. One of those young writers, Gabriel García Márquez, later famous for his decades-long friendship with Fidel Castro, was once asked whether he held Gallegos to be a great novelist, and he replied, “In his novel Canaima there’s a description of a chicken that’s really quite good.” A magazine that held out Gallegos as its icon was unlikely to find many followers among the rising generation of writers. But the purpose of a magazine like Cuadernos was less to win converts than to consolidate an outlook—a set of ideas about culture and politics that would aid the anti-Communist cause in the Cold War.50