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

by Patrick Iber

  In Latin America, one CIA case officer, John Hunt, and three relatively unwitting employees of the CCF, Luis Mercier Vega, Keith Botsford, and Emir Rodríguez Monegal, had the responsibility of remaking the CCF operation. Hunt, an Oklahoma-born novelist, was a Harvard graduate and Marine Corps veteran who had been recruited as a CIA case officer and officially joined the CCF in February 1956. Hunt arrived a few months after Michael Josselson suffered his first work-related heart attack and took over a great deal of operational work from his ailing superior.6

  The second reformer was Luis Mercier Vega, an improbably buttoned-down anarchist born Charles Cortvrint in Brussels in 1914 to a French father and a Chilean mother. He had fought as a member of the famous anarchist Durruti column during the Spanish Civil War and later with the Free French Forces in Africa and Lebanon during World War II. After the war he worked as a journalist and organizer for France’s anarchist trade unions and for both the French and Latin American branches of the CCF. Disciplined and organized, Mercier Vega was disdainful of literary quarrels and preferred the world of social science. He was a “walking card-file,” according to a colleague, and one of his major projects with the CCF was to build a reference library on social movements in Latin America. He took over responsibility for the Latin American department of the CCF from Gorkin on 16 October 1961, marking the end of the generation of the 1950s within the organization.7

  When Mercier Vega inherited the Latin American department of the CCF, he became the head of an organization that, as he later acknowledged, had become known as an “anti-Communist center without other intellectual content.” In Argentina, for example, when Mercier tried to organize working groups on social and cultural problems, he encountered opposition both from meritorious intellectuals who wanted nothing to do with the CCF and from active CCF members who preferred polemics to analysis. Mercier expanded the role of scholarship in CCF activity and was drawn to technical subjects: education and the university in society, the structure of political parties, the social role of the military, and even demography. Traveling with Gorkin through Latin America in 1953, Mercier had concluded that an intellectual “crossroads” was desperately needed to put an end to isolation of individual scholars and to allow them to enter into a “permanent exchange of ideas, works and men between Latin America and other continents.” He tried to make the CCF in Latin America into such a forum.8

  In some places the CCF achieved the kind of openness that it sought. In 1962 Mercier Vega established an office in Montevideo, where he remained for about a year. There he formed an especially close alliance with Benito Milla, another anarchist in exile who had fought with him in the Durruti column and who had since founded Editorial Alfa, one of Uruguay’s major publishing houses. In Uruguay the members of the most influential group of left-wing intellectuals—especially among students and professionals—were known as the terceristas, who declared themselves neutral in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Most aligned themselves, at least in the last instance, with Cuba. Milla published the works of the terceristas, as well as of their critics. This reputation for evenhandedness helped Milla when he decided to take charge of the Uruguayan national committee of the CCF and to publish a cultural bimonthly affiliated with the CCF known as Temas. The Uruguayan office, including Temas, was as intellectually open to writers of different parts of the political Left as any that the CCF had ever created in Latin America.9

  But in other countries, achieving a more open CCF required the direct dismissal of older affiliates. In Argentina, Carlos Carranza seemed to have given up on his job and was retired and replaced with the younger and more dynamic Héctor Murena, the director of Sur. (The staff of Sur had long worked with the Argentine Association for Cultural Freedom, and its existence obviated the need for a local magazine in that country.) In Chile, even Carlos de Baráibar, who had overseen what was probably the most active national center of the 1950s, was offered a book contract as severance and given false assurances that he was not being fired.10

  With Mercier Vega’s operations covering most of South America and focusing on social science, John Hunt recruited Keith Botsford in late 1961 to help with literary figures and to catalyze reform in the major countries of Brazil and Mexico. Botsford, a North American novelist, editor, and critic, had met Hunt at the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa in 1950. In 1959 Botsford was made assistant dean of the University of Puerto Rico and in 1960 became assistant to Chancellor Jaime Benítez, a close associate of Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico’s first democratically elected governor and an important broker between the U.S. government and Latin America’s anti-Communist Left. In 1961 Botsford had watched the Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom flounder during its exile in Puerto Rico. Although he was convinced of the importance of combating what he considered fuzzy-headed Latin American radicalism, Botsford confessed to unease with much of U.S. government policy toward Cuba and thought that any moderating influence that the CCF would have on the Latin American cultural Left would have to be on the basis of dialogue, not hectoring.11

  Botsford was a mercurial presence; charismatic and multilingual, he seemed to know everyone who mattered. He was once told that the CIA had considered recruiting him but thought him unreliable—“a badge of honor,” he later wrote. Still, as an American going about the continent on a mission to meet and charm as many Latin American artists as he could, he seemed to enjoy the inevitable speculation that he was some sort of intelligence official. Saul Bellow, a friend with whom he had once started a magazine, based the character of Thaxter in Humboldt’s Gift on him, writing that “Thaxter wanted people to believe that he was once a CIA agent. It was a wonderful rumor and he did everything to encourage it. It greatly added to his mysteriousness, and mystery was one of his little rackets.” Four months into his work with the CCF, Botsford reported that he had “rarely had work more congenial to me, or [that] offers me more scope for my possibly foolish messianism.” In spite of his reputation, Botsford was never let into the circle of those who knew details of the CIA’s relationship to the CCF; his friend Hunt, who did know, lied to him for years.12

  Botsford first traveled to Brazil, where the reforms that the CCF thought its operations required were not achieved with ease or grace. Since its inception in 1958, the Brazilian Association for Cultural Freedom’s secretary general had been Stefan Baciu, a Romanian poet and diplomat who had left his country after Communists came to power there in 1948. He was also editor of Cadernos Brasileiros, the independently operated Portuguese-language affiliate of Cuadernos, which began publishing in April 1959. The most important intellectual who worked with the CCF in Brazil was Gilberto Freyre, a sociologist most famous for 1933’s Casa-grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), an argument for locating Brazilian identity in its slaveholding past that inverted views of European racial superiority by making a virtue of cultural diversity and racial mixing. Freyre considered himself part of the Democratic Left in the 1940s but was seen as growing increasingly conservative over the course of the 1950s. In Brazilian intellectual circles Freyre straddled the line between fame and infamy; many considered him a reactionary nationalist for his celebration of the particularities of Portuguese colonialism.13

  The CCF’s other prominent intellectual associate in Brazil was the literary critic Afrânio Coutinho, who had been the editor of Seleções do “Reader’s Digest” from 1942 to 1947, the widely distributed Portuguese edition of the conservative Reader’s Digest. During that time he lived in New York, and there he learned the close reading techniques of New Criticism. The success of New Criticism in the early decades of the Cold War has sometimes been attributed to its standing as a quintessentially anti-Communist mode of literary analysis; it offered an apparently apolitical reading of texts, taking objects of study on their own terms and divorced from historical context. Coutinho’s work to spread it to Brazil supports the idea that New Criticism was seen as a way of depoliticizing cultural criticism—in a way that w
as necessarily political. Like Coutinho, another of the major practitioners and proponents of New Criticism was John Crowe Ransom, who was much admired in the CCF, and many of whose pupils were recruited for CIA work.14

  Cadernos Brasileiros and the entire Brazilian operation had acquired a reputation for reactionary anti-Communism, and the CCF sent Botsford and the composer Nicolas Nabokov to try to create a fresh start. Baciu grumbled that Nabokov acted like a “fellow traveler” for not maintaining a constant posture of explicit anti-Communism. But Nabokov chided Baciu for misunderstanding the new climate: they wanted “a firm position with respect to some various aspects of totalitarianism,” to be sure, but in a way that made it possible to “win friends, and to win them in what is now called in Italy ‘the opening to the left.’ ” Nabokov reminded Baciu of the problem that many organizations—not all of them Communist—believed that the CCF was a right-wing American organization specifically designed to fight Communism. This was not the reputation that it wanted, and Baciu resigned not long after receiving Nabokov’s letter, complaining to Mercier Vega that he felt “intrigues and police-like tone adding up to political pressure to work with Communists like [the economist] Celso Furtado.”15

  Baciu’s version of anti-Communism, illustrated by his attitude toward Furtado (who was not a Communist) was widespread among Brazilian conservatives, who reacted with panic to the left-wing administration of João Goulart, president from 1961 to 1964. Furtado, a young economist, had in 1959 become the first director of a government planning body (the Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast, SUDENE) to deal with extreme poverty in Brazil’s arid northeast region. It aimed to use state power to spur industrialization—officials frequently compared it to the Tennessee Valley Authority of the U.S. New Deal. At first, the U.S. government considered SUDENE an important program in the Alliance for Progress, recognizing it as a nationalist project motivated by reformist goals of both political and economic modernization. But hated as it was by Brazil’s Right, SUDENE had to draw on support from a wide spectrum of left-wing technocrats, including Communists. From Furtado’s point of view, imposing an ideological test for employment would have undermined the delicate political coalition that supported the agency in the face of conservative opposition. But Communist participation eventually turned the United States against the project. For the Brazilian Right, which opposed SUDENE from its inception, Furtado’s supposed Communism became a trope that it used to undermine the legitimacy of President Goulart.16

  Keith Botsford arrived in Brazil in early 1962 and immediately overhauled the layout and content of Cadernos Brasileiros. The magazine began to rely less on the regular stable of anti-Communist CCF writers and more on Brazilian authors. But in the year and a half he remained in Brazil, Botsford made only limited progress within the Brazilian Association. Although he tried to sponsor talks and speakers, the most important foreign guest whom the Latin American department ever hosted provided him with a harrowing experience. The North American poet Robert Lowell came to Brazil in June 1962 under Botsford’s supervision. He was, Botsford later reflected, brought in to be “an outstanding American to counteract … Communist people like Neruda—[Lowell was] our side’s emissary.” But Lowell, who had been a rather conservative Catholic in the 1930s, a conscientious objector in the 1940s, close to the Kennedys in the early 1960s, and an antiwar campaigner later in the decade, was not exactly politically reliable. Lowell spoke before mostly small audiences, and his trip down the coast of Brazil passed without major incident. When he and Botsford crossed into Argentina in September, however, things unraveled. Lowell, who suffered from periodic attacks of manic depression, was drinking excessively and buying expensive food and clothing, expecting the CCF to pick up the tab. He insisted on being taken around to the equestrian statues of Buenos Aires; disrobing and mounting one statue after another, he declared himself the “Caesar of Argentina.” Botsford felt powerless to control Lowell’s mania, his spending habits, or his public disquisitions on the character of the American imperium and returned to Rio. But Lowell, who had stopped taking his medication, could not be left behind. Returning to Argentina to fetch him, Botsford found himself at a party watching Lowell wrestling on the floor with the exiled Spanish Communist poet Rafael Alberti. Botsford tried to get the other guests to help him restrain Lowell, insisting that he was sick and needed to be taken back to the United States for treatment. The other partygoers were stunned by what they saw as an attempt by the CIA to kidnap him. In the end, Botsford had to spend days with Lowell restrained and sedated in a clinic before he could be flown back to the United States. The disastrous Lowell trip was probably given the most positive spin possible by Botsford when he wrote his CCF superiors that “[Lowell] is sort of a blowtorch thaw, and terribly useful. It is impossible for these [leftist] people to hold on to their rigid positions with [him] around.”17

  Botsford left Brazil in 1963 as the situation in the country grew tenser. President Goulart, in an attempt to deal with the destructive inflation that plagued Brazil’s economy, had brought Celso Furtado into his cabinet and charged him with developing a plan to fight it. Representing the consensus ideas of the moderate Left, Furtado’s three-year plan sought to maintain economic growth while reducing the rate of inflation, which required a devaluation of the currency and an immediate increase in the cost of living. Much of Goulart’s restive union base disliked the plan, and he abandoned it after six months, replacing Furtado within his cabinet and turning to the Left for political support. Accused of being unable to govern by the military, Goulart was toppled in a coup on 1 April 1964, and replaced by Humberto Castelo Branco as the first head of the military regime that, with changes in leadership, lasted until 1985. At the time, however, many thought that the military would soon yield to democratic elections. The Brazilian Association for Cultural Freedom, unconcerned, opened an art gallery in Rio de Janeiro to showcase abstract art the very week of the coup.18

  Brazil’s coup proved to be the beginning of a wave of military uprisings in South America. The military governments conducted brutal counterinsurgencies against the Left in their home countries and even abroad, suppressing both electoral democracy and, relatedly, cultural freedoms. Although he was a moderate among the military rulers, Castelo Branco was still empowered by a series of so-called institutional acts to suspend constitutional guarantees, leading to repression at the universities and exile for many potential opponents of the military government. Castelo Branco also used his powers to cancel the political rights of many opponents, including Furtado. The coup itself was not something that the CCF was in a position to do anything about: the U.S. government, though not one of the major actors in the coup, had communicated its willingness to see Goulart removed from office and had provided covert support to coup plotters.19

  The CCF, however, whether following CIA guidance or acting on its own, hoped for a quick return to political normalcy and disapproved of Castelo Branco’s persecution of the moderate Left. A few weeks after the coup, John Hunt wrote to Afrânio Coutinho asking Cadernos Brasileiros and the Brazilian Association to “play a constructive role in the new intellectual and political environment in Brazil.” Hunt said that he welcomed the end of “political and economic chaos” and the “threat to freedom” represented by Goulart, but he wanted it made clear that the CCF should be opposed to persecution of liberals or the Left and specifically mentioned Furtado, who he had heard had been imprisoned. “Your record is such that no one can accuse you or the Congress of being pro-communist,” he wrote Coutinho, “and, at the same time, this gives us a chance to show unmistakably our liberal standpoint. In short, being anti-Goulart is not a sufficient reason for excesses committed against democratic procedures, and I think we should be courageous enough to say so.”20

  Coutinho rejected Hunt’s facts and his reasoning. He believed that the military had the support of the Brazilian people and had put an end to Communist infiltration, thus normalizing the constitution. He insisted that
leftists, including moderates, had been attempting to install a leftist totalitarian regime. He described a military that had just removed a government from power by force as belonging to the “democratic center.” Furtado, he allowed, was not a Communist, but he had been allied with them; besides, Coutinho added, Furtado had not been arrested, he had only had his political rights suspended for ten years, being stripped of his right to vote or hold office. Coutinho wanted nothing to do with any campaign to restore Furtado’s political rights or in any other way upset the military government.21

  Hunt, however, continued to press his case, stating that the defense of Furtado should be taken up out of general respect for intellectual freedom. But sensing that he would get no cooperation, Hunt tried to outmaneuver Coutinho by using other parts of the CCF apparatus, including the Science and Freedom Committee—which was not part of the Latin American operation—to carry out an investigation of the state of educational freedom in Brazil. Its report on the situation in Brazilian universities documented 42 cases of professors leaving the country or about to leave, 20 living outside the country who were thinking of not returning, 25 deprived of political rights, 31 dismissed or placed on retirement lists, and 129 intellectuals who were imprisoned. The report also documented books confiscated (from an encyclical of Pope John XXIII to Graham Greene’s spy farce Our Man in Havana) and an atmosphere in which meetings of students, intellectuals, and workers were considered subversive. Hunt tried to bolster the authority of the report by obtaining the supporting signature of Robert Oppenheimer Jr. and pressed the members of the Brazilian Association to get a response from the government. One member was able to meet directly with Brazil’s military leadership, but the government declared the CCF’s report naïve, saying that it gave the impression that the government came to destroy the universities. It could not be doing so, it argued tautologically, because “we never had Universities in Brazil.” True, the military government acknowledged, some professors had been replaced. But, it was said, “The new ones are as good and serious as the others; the freedom of teaching is respected.” Although the government’s response was almost self-refuting, Coutinho had effectively outflanked Hunt; the Brazilian Association for Cultural Freedom took no action to defend the rights of critics of the military government. The government, instead, ordered its cultural attachés to declare the CCF report a misinformation campaign. Over a period of about two years, contributors to Cadernos Brasileiros gradually moved into the opposition as the military government it had initially greeted with relief showed that it would not relinquish power quickly. But Hunt, the CIA case officer, had been unable to bring Coutinho, the local representative, around to a more liberal plan of action. In this instance, when the CIA tried to call the tune, the piper packed up his flute and left.22