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

by Patrick Iber

  Botsford left Brazil in mid-1963 for Mexico to try his hand at similar reforms there. As in Brazil, the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom had earned a reputation for vitriolic anti-Communism. Like Cadernos Brasileiros, the Mexican national magazine, Examen, had a poor reputation, having become, in Botsford’s words, “no more than a virulent and reactionary platform for the small section of the Mexican anti-Communist Right.” In 1961 the CCF requested that Examen cease calling itself the organ of the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom and then that it stop carrying the affiliation at all. Even other professional anti-Communists thought that Rodrigo García Treviño, in charge of both the Mexican Association and the magazine, had gone a bit wild.23

  García Treviño, like Baciu in Brazil, actively resisted the new “open” tendencies within the CCF. García Treviño could not understand what was wrong with his behavior: was not the point of the CCF, he asked, to defend political liberties and help politicians with “democratic” inclinations? Luis Mercier Vega wrote a reply rich in ironies:

  The Congress for Cultural Freedom is not, and cannot be, a contra-Cominform. Whether for good or for ill, that is how it is. To imagine a contra-Cominform would be to suppose the existence of a worldwide force, a group of powers, a state totally committed to a worldwide strategy opposing the Soviet strategy, not only on military grounds, but also in the domains of politics and society. That does not exist. That will probably never exist. And, for my part, I am not convinced that the democracies could safeguard their claim to superiority if they adopted totalitarian methods in order to use them against totalitarianism. On the other hand, by favoring argument, improving information, and stressing their responsibilities, the Congress can, and intends to, immunize intellectuals against totalitarian gangrene and stimulate them to think for themselves. It has to do only with one sector [of the population], but it is an essential sector. And on that terrain we must wage our battles, as others wage theirs in other sectors.

  García Treviño was pushed out of the CCF and engaged it in bitter polemics, as he had once done with Communists.24

  When Botsford arrived in Mexico, he was greeted with a suggestion from García Treviño that he was some kind of secret Communist. Once he began his more routine activities, however, the far more common question from the Mexican intellectuals he approached was whether he was an agent of the CIA. “You will both be pleased to hear,” he wrote jokingly to Hunt and Josselson in October 1963, “that the current Mexico City rumor is that there’s some American in [the neighborhood of] San Angel [where Botsford settled], trying to buy Mexican intellectuals. Thus, from being a CP agent I’ve passed to the more eminent status of imperialist.” Botsford concluded that discretion was the only possible path forward for the CCF in Mexico, where he encountered suspicion of foreign meddling in cultural matters. Attempts that had been made in 1962 to recover support for CCF activities by forming groups called the Friends of Cuadernos had not been successful because, as Botsford observed drily, “Cuadernos had relatively few friends.”25

  Many of the paths Botsford started down in Mexico proved to be dead ends; he did make friends but did not build institutions. He tried to produce an anthology of Latin American poetry together with Robert Lowell, Octavio Paz, and other editors, but it was never published. A semiacademic quarterly review of Latin American social science also fell apart. The CCF briefly sought to forge a relationship with the writers’ center known as the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (CME), a fifteen-year-old initiative of the North American writer Margaret Shedd that had largely been funded with money from the Rockefeller Foundation. It provided yearlong grants for writers to allow them to devote themselves full-time to a project, and it had a remarkable track record in the 1950s of selecting talent. In its first years the CME was an extraordinary success: the most important writers of the generation—those who came to define Mexican literature of the 1950s and 1960s—wrote some of their early works while they were under grants from it. Juan Rulfo wrote both Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas there, and Carlos Fuentes finished his early novel La región más transparente on a grant from the CME. Shedd was already getting money from the Farfield Foundation, which she would have had no way of knowing was one of the CIA front groups that existed primarily to fund the CCF. Contacts with the Farfield Foundation may have also provided opportunities for the CME’s favored writers to benefit from other CCF operations; some of Shedd’s stories appeared in Encounter, as did one of Rulfo’s from El llano en llamas.26

  John Hunt had written Keith Botsford about the possibility of contacting the CME while the latter was still working in Brazil in 1962. The CME was one of the few cultural institutions in Mexico in which the state did not exercise a predominant influence, and Botsford saw his central task as constructing a viable alternative to the centralized power of the Mexican government in the arts. In contrast to the 1950s, when many foreign observers thought of Mexico’s PRI as among the most democratic of Latin America’s governments, its limitations from the liberal perspective were by then much clearer. The innovative young writers and artists who were clustered around the cultural supplement of Siempre!, for example, were generally critical of the PRI. In response to Botsford’s inquiries, Shedd asked the CCF to finance a salary for Rulfo to bring him onto the CME’s staff to work with its younger writers. But other than paying Rulfo’s salary for a couple of years, the CCF ultimately did nothing further with the CME. But although it went totally undetected, even by its recipient, additional money from the CIA did go to Rulfo. Because he was seen as a brilliant but temperamental author who had given up producing new works, at the end of the 1960s the Farfield Foundation helped him purchase a plot of land in the countryside to try to give him the space he needed to resume writing. He adored his country home but never published a complete work again. At least in this case, Farfield and CCF money did not succeed in buying anything of political value.27

  A few of Botsford’s friendships did pay off. Everyone acknowledged that Carlos Fuentes, an ambitious and cosmopolitan young writer, was one of Mexico’s most important literary talents. In the 1950s he had coedited a literary magazine, the Revista Mexicana de Literatura, that sought a middle ground politically between the directed cultural world of the Soviet Union and what he described as literary McCarthyism in the United States. He looked warily at the Neruda of Las uvas y el viento, rejecting both “socialist realism” and the “capitalist realism” of U.S. popular fiction. But the older writers of the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom of the 1950s had worked to alienate Fuentes; an official review in Examen declared that his ambitious debut novel “did not interest them as a literary work.” Yet when Botsford discovered that he and Fuentes lived close to each other, he reached out. Fuentes, still shuttling between Cuba and Mexico on behalf of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, had recently visited the United States and had been pleasantly surprised by the attitudes of his interlocutors there. He and Botsford discussed the possibility of his engaging in a kind of trilateral diplomacy to bring together some kind of debate about Cuban cultural politics with critical members of the U.S. intelligentsia. In one conversation Botsford put it to Fuentes that it was hard to understand why “such obviously intelligent people as himself support regimes in which he would find himself quite uncomfortable, unable to speak with even the relative freedom he enjoys in Mexico, and so on … He [Fuentes] said he understood the argument perfectly well, but thought that a good number of intellectuals, from pride, through rationalization, for nationalistic reasons, or even to ‘work from inside’ and not to abandon the field totally to their opponents, would stay, even granting that the situation was far from ideal.” Botsford thought this a significant admission and began to treat Fuentes as a convert. When Hunt planned a visit to Mexico, Botsford described Fuentes, perhaps aspirationally, as “a good man and on our side.” The next year, when Botsford played an organizational role in a meeting of International PEN, the human rights organization for poets, essayists, and noveli
sts, the CCF arranged to pay Fuentes’s travel expenses. None of this indicated that Fuentes had ceased to be a left-wing intellectual, but it did show that the CCF could notch some successes with its more open approach.28

  But for literary impact, there was no one more affected by the presence of the CCF than the satirist Jorge Ibargüengoitia, who become Botsford’s closest friend during his time in Mexico. Ibargüengoitia was a graduate of the CME and, in the early 1960s, a struggling playwright. He later remembered Botsford’s time in Mexico as slightly ridiculous. Botsford lived in an enormous and opulent house that was absurdly grandiose by the standards of all but the most successful Mexican writers. His attempts to entertain there ran up against insuperable cultural obstacles. Several guests walked out when Botsford put on a performance of modern music that included a deck of shuffling cards as a percussion instrument. Although Botsford was frequently irritated that his guests arrived late, taking it as a sign of their lack of seriousness, Ibargüengoitia remembered that Botsford kept giving out the name of his street incorrectly. Still, Ibargüengoitia valued his friendship with Botsford. First, he gave fine career advice: Ibargüengoitia, looking back, said that it was Botsford who had encouraged him to leave drama for novel writing; he helped him publish chapters of his work-in-progress farce of postrevolutionary Mexico, Los relámpagos de agosto, in Cadernos Brasileiros and gave him the idea that later became the novel Las muertas.29

  Still, it was Cuba’s Casa de las Américas, not the CCF, that in 1964 recognized Los relámpagos de agosto as a masterful short novel. Ibargüengoitia also drew on his relationship with Botsford to satirize 1960s Mexico’s atmosphere of literary suspicion combined with financial neediness. In “Conversaciones con Bloomsbury,” a story that features Bloomsbury as a lightly fictionalized Botsford, the stand-in for Ibargüenogitia writes of his surprise at discovering that Cuadernos is a real magazine: he had thought “Bloomsbury” a complete impostor when he had first met him. And he wrote that “Cuadernos, which I had never read, [had] a decidedly anti-Communist air; but on studying it carefully, I began to suspect that it was just the opposite; that is, an apparently anti-Communist magazine, made by the Communists, to discredit the anti-Communists.”30

  Botsford left Mexico in 1965, frustrated and wondering how he had managed to fail so spectacularly. “All travelers are liars and carry their own countries about with them, like great weights,” he wrote. He had not been able to avoid showing his impatience with what he considered petty nationalism; he had hobnobbed with elites but had failed to meet common people; he remained, in their minds and his, a Yankee, a gringo. “The air grew so oppressive in Mexico,” he wrote retrospectively, “the sinister totem-Stalinism of that most subtly totalitarian of states so intolerable, that instead of the easy drive North I had promised myself, I did twenty hours flat out to Laredo, and practically kissed the chiliburger-littered macadam of the Customs shed.” He continued to work with Hunt, however, and, through CCF and CIA connections in International PEN, was put in charge of assembling the roundtable discussions at its 1965 meeting in Bled, Yugoslavia. Through the Farfield Foundation and the CCF, many writers who were friendly to the CCF (or at least not unfriendly, like Carlos Fuentes) had their travel expenses covered, helping ensure that Arthur Miller was elected head of International PEN instead of Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias, considered by many too much a fellow traveler.31

  Whatever Botsford’s failings as a cultural ambassador, he at least saw clearly the problems of Cuadernos, which everywhere proved an obstacle to his labors. Luis Mercier Vega and Botsford agreed that the magazine was the CCF’s most important asset in Latin America and were frustrated that it seemed so inert. In 1963 they wrote that the magazine needed a “more open attitude, politically and culturally, [in order to create a] place for intelligent debate and the presentation of diverse points-of-view.” Botsford pleaded with Germán Arciniegas, who had replaced Gorkin as editor in chief, to consider publishing more exciting up-and-coming writers, even Cuban writers, regardless of whether they were politically too far to the left for his comfort. Botsford even compared Cuadernos unfavorably with Casa de las Américas, which published a more diverse array of writers before 1965 (including Botsford himself). Trying to cut the cultural Left out of the conversation, he said, would be like “cutting out from US literature all artistic movements to the left of the New Yorker.” But Arciniegas refused.32

  Trashing Cuadernos became a sort of sport among the younger CCF affiliates. Horacio Daniel Rodríguez, an Argentine journalist with social democratic political opinions who was brought into the CCF as part of Mercier’s new generation, wrote in 1963: “Did you get number 76—September—of Cuadernos? You couldn’t ask for anything better: an essay by Borges that’s approximately 15 years old and that has been published to death in Argentina; a story by the ultra-McCarthyist Manuel Peyrou; a reproduction of [Héctor] Murena’s article published in La Nación last June 23rd, but slightly modified so as not to be recognized right away … In sum, whatever.” Murena, who worked for Sur and directed the fine-arts program for the Argentine Association, was similarly dismissive of the magazine. On one occasion, when he received a submission that did not fit into Sur’s plans, he offered to send it to Cuadernos instead. Its author declined, saying that “that magazine is too [politically] committed.” “Committed to what?” Murena asked Mercier privately. “Nonsense?”33

  But Arciniegas remained oblivious to the small niche that his magazine occupied and opposed to any opening to the Left. The other supporter of maintaining Cuadernos as it existed was Michael Josselson, the principal CIA agent responsible for the CCF, who bristled when Botsford sent in field reports indicating problems. But Josselson’s deputy John Hunt came to agree with the views of Mercier and Botsford and began to search for a new editor to launch a new magazine. Arciniegas was told that Cuadernos would be discontinued because of irresolvable financial problems in June 1965, and the debut of its replacement, Mundo Nuevo, was slated for July 1966. Arciniegas, however, liked his work and wanted to continue it. He traveled to the United States, unaware that the death of his magazine was widely considered a strategic necessity, to ask for funds directly from the philanthropic foundations that had contributed to the CCF. Arciniegas arranged to meet with a friend of his who worked for the Ford Foundation. Before his interview Alberto Lleras Camargo, former president of Colombia and the Organization of American States, warned Arciniegas that the person he was going to meet “doesn’t give a cent without the prior approval of the CIA.” Indeed, Arciniegas was out of luck: the Ford Foundation denied his request for funding. Embittered by his experience, he asked to be removed as a member of the CCF.34

  But if its impact on Latin American literature had been limited, the CCF did play a role in increasing the international renown of its favored writers. In 1963 the CCF received notice that Pablo Neruda was on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature and might win. Over decades of poetic production, Neruda had surely written enough transcendent poetry to deserve the prize as much as anyone—and enough purple propaganda to disqualify him for life, depending on how one chose to judge the oeuvre. Gorkin and John Hunt worked to make sure that the history of Neruda’s engagement with Stalinism was well known in Sweden, publishing pamphlets in French and English and articles in Swedish journals. They reproduced the works from the height of Neruda’s cultural Stalinism, especially the portions of Las uvas y el viento dedicated to Stalin. They tried to show the importance of political engagement to Neruda’s poetry while arguing for the “low quality” of that engagement, supposedly unbending even as the Soviet Union liberalized. They were also keen to remind the conservative Swedish academy of Neruda’s role in arranging for David Álfaro Siqueiros’s transfer to Chile from Mexico after his release on bail for the attempted murder of Trotsky.35

  As alternatives, the CCF pushed the candidacies of the pro-Western socialist president of Senegal, Leopold Senghor, an accomplished poet and essayist, and the Argentine metaphysica
l obscurantist Jorge Luis Borges, whose short stories and essays were often difficult to distinguish from one another and who was best known in politics as one of the liberal, anti-Peronist members of Victoria Ocampo’s Sur group. (Borges was a member of the Argentine Association for Cultural Freedom.) The CCF’s London-based magazine, Encounter, had published Borges’s work, and the CCF also supported his trips to Europe with the goal of raising his profile in Scandinavia. Hunt had hoped to get Borges to Sweden in 1963, at the same time at which it was preparing files to damage Neruda’s Nobel candidacy, but Borges was unable to travel to Stockholm until the following year.36