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

by Patrick Iber

  Keith Botsford (left), the roving fixer for the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Latin America during the 1960s, with Jorge Luis Borges in West Berlin in 1965. In the 1960s the CCF tried to promote Borges in Europe as a Nobel Prize candidate to rival Pablo Neruda, but Borges never won. Photo courtesy Keith Botsford.

  The CCF’s whispering campaign against Neruda was perfectly consistent with the understanding of literature as combat possessed by the cultural institutions of the Cold War. The Chilean Communist press tried to discredit the anti-Neruda campaign by attributing it to the CCF; “Almost a tribute to the influence of the Congress,” wrote one of its employees. If the campaign had any effect, it certainly did not elevate any of the CCF’s preferred candidates: the prize that year went to Jean-Paul Sartre, who declined it. In any case, the CCF was hardly the only politically minded lobby on the scene. Neruda’s defender and translator in Sweden, the poet Artur Lundkvist, counterbalanced the negative campaign from the CCF and was hardly a Cold War neutral. He was Neruda’s friend, was a member of the World Peace Council, and had received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1958. A decade later Lundkvist was selected for a seat on the eighteen-member Swedish Academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Neruda was awarded the prize in 1971. Lundkvist never forgave Borges, whose deep anti-Peronism had led him to a dark place politically, for his endorsements of the Argentine and Chilean military dictatorships of the 1970s. Borges, famously, never won.37

  In addition to its work with writers, the CCF in the early 1960s sought greater engagement with social scientists. There, its most intellectually prestigious collaborator was the Italo-Argentine sociologist Gino Germani. Germani had been born in Italy in 1911 and had been imprisoned as a young man for distributing antifascist literature. He described his dislike of Mussolini’s fascism as stemming from its “uniformity of ideas and … fear of freedom” and took his liberal preferences with him across the Atlantic to Argentina in 1931. But trouble seemed to follow. When Juan Domingo Perón came to power in 1946, many of his critics compared him to Mussolini. Germani, having lived under both leaders, noted the different composition of their social bases and did not equate the two, but the suppression of the anti-Peronist opposition and of intellectual and cultural life in general nevertheless left him scrambling for work.38

  After Perón was overthrown by the military in 1955, Germani became the director of the Institute of Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires and worked to modernize social scientific training in Argentina. To that end, he traveled to the United States, visiting major universities and speaking with scholars working in the modernization tradition. To build his program and sponsor research, he took grants from the Ford Foundation and UNESCO, among other international organizations. Most of the first generation of students in his sociology programs were socialists, and the study of society—Germani was interested in class structure and social stratification, among other things—was politically appealing to them. But Germani’s analysis in his classic work Política y sociedad en una época de transición, first published in 1962, described Argentine modernization as having been distorted by Perón. Like other scholars in the modernization tradition, he wanted the rational study of society to be used to ease conflict and guide the political process toward better outcomes, reflecting his hopes that non-Peronist social integration could occur in a free, democratic context.

  Modernization theorists like Germani hoped that social justice could be achieved by liberal democracy. University of Chicago sociologist Edward Shils, for example, another affiliate of the CCF, wrote in 1959 that the modern world would resemble a fully articulated welfare state. It would display concern for the condition of the poorest and feature democracy, advanced industry, and scientific progress. “No country could be modern without being economically advanced or progressive,” Shils argued. “To be advanced economically means to have an economy based on modern technology, to be industrialized and to have a high standard of living. All this requires planning and the employment of economists and statisticians … It is the model of the West detached in some way from its geographical origins and locus.” His hopes resembled, not by accident, a kind of utopian global New Deal. Planning required technocrats and scientists; those elites required training that the United States could provide. The CCF had produced the “end of ideology” thesis, the idea that welfare-state democracy was the endpoint of political struggle, having undermined the extreme ideologies of fascism and Communism. Modernization theory worked as a kind of “end of ideology” thesis in action and became the primary ideology that justified the U.S. effort to remake the world in its non-Communist image during the Cold War, not only in Latin America but also through the war in Vietnam. But it also reflected the hopes and anxieties of what liberals thought the United States and other countries had yet to achieve: more equal societies, economic growth, and political democracy existing together in ways that were supposed to be mutually reinforcing.39

  One of the analytical vulnerabilities of modernization theory was its fear of the crowd: social justice was supposed to be planned calmly and technocratically, not fought for in the streets. The rational transformation of society would avoid the perils of mob rule; economic development would take place through state-guided market economies, and so modernization theory objected to populist “distortions.” In the Argentine context, this manifested in Germani’s anti-Peronism. But Germani found that his work received a chilly reception from multiple audiences. His equation of modernization with secularization placed him under attack from the Catholic Right, which saw his studies as dissolving traditional values. At the same time, his collaboration with North American foundations and the methods he modified from abroad caused the empirical study of society to be associated with anti-Peronist critique, and many young students, who were both left-wing and pro-Perón, saw in him a tool of Yankee cultural penetration.40

  It was perfectly true that the frameworks used by modernization scholars held that social problems grew out of institutional failures—especially by universities and bureaucracies—to meet the needs of a modern world. Marxism as a tool of analysis was ignored, and blame for social problems was not directed abroad at foreign imperialism. The key task for the engaged modernization scholars was to see that a middle-class elite got proper training and then took responsibility for national problems. “The non-Communist literate elites in … transitional societies bear a heavy responsibility for the future of their peoples,” wrote Walt Rostow in The Stages of Economic Growth. “It is they who must focus their minds on the tasks of development … as they complete the preconditions and launch themselves into self-sustained growth.” The alternative was frustration, stagnation, and insurgency. The elitist and technocratic aspects of modernization theory assigned important roles to the social scientists and technicians who could help the state achieve modernity, and this focus on growth by an educated and elite middle class—certainly not via a revolution from below—also conformed to the expectations and the mission of the CCF. In this, modernization theory was a kind of truncated Leninism: social change was to be delivered by an intellectual vanguard, but with a capitalist welfare state, not socialism, as the desired end product of history.41

  Working in that vein, in 1965 the CCF cosponsored its largest international gathering in Latin America since Mexico City’s troubled reunion of 1956. Held in Uruguay, the conference “The Formation of Elites in Latin America” was cosponsored by Aldo Solari, a sociologist and socialist working at the University of Montevideo, and Seymour Martin Lipset of Berkeley’s Institute for International Studies, a sociologist working in the modernization tradition. In contrast to the anti-Communist manifestos of earlier gatherings, the meeting offered scholarship that embodied the activist promise of an engaged anti-Communism. Germani was one of the prominent contributors. The theme of the Montevideo conference, the formation of Latin American elites, was conceptualized in a developmentalist rather than explicitly anti-Communist framework. “We are interested in elit
es,” the organizers of the conference wrote in their introduction to its compiled papers, “because of our larger concern with social, economic, and political development. And while there are many factors which affect the propensity of a nation to develop, it is clear that regardless of differences in social systems, one of the requisites for development is a competent elite, motivated to modernize their society.” The idea that the elites would change Latin American societies and bring them closer to a modernity modeled on Europe and the United States was fully intended to contrast with concepts of transformation that assigned the agency for change to popular action.42

  This was not lost on thinkers to the left of the CCF. Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama observed with trepidation the expanding interest in Latin American affairs in the United States and the growing number of sponsored conferences and workshops for workers, businesspeople, and educators. As the CCF’s conference approached, Rama wondered whether the United States was truly interested in a dialogue on “education” or whether it was instead preparing the “training” of Latin American political elites. If not the latter, he wondered, then why allow the conference to be cosponsored by the CCF, an organization “whose political militancy is more than well-known”? Rama was convinced (correctly) that the CIA had financed the CCF and wondered whether the conference on the formation of Latin American elites was, like Project Camelot, another example of “scholarship” behind which lurked the interests of empire.43

  Solari, as one of the conference’s sponsors, objected to the notion that it might have been put in the service of imperialism, saying that if the CCF were financed by the CIA (which he doubted), he would stop collaborating with it. But, he countered, “The systematic campaign to represent sociologists as spies and potential spies of imperialism tends to increase the difficulty that sociology encounters in every under- or semideveloped country. Its surest effect is to impede research, because everything which is asked in a survey, for example, could be argued to serve imperialism … [The effect of such an attitude] is to help maintain the status quo.”44 Solari and Rama were engaged in a debate about who was the real scholarly defender of present injustice; Rama responded that attempts to stimulate disinterested and objective sociology sought to purge values from scholarship, leading to conservative thought and the maintenance of the status quo. The doctrine of the “end of ideologies,” which argued that future problems would be solved through the growth of prosperity within a mixed capitalist economy, promised that future conflicts would be technocratic, not ideological. This was the sort of scholarship that the CCF was trying to promote, and in this context, he wrote, it did not matter whether the CIA paid for the CCF, for “one way or another, the [conference] will serve its ends.” It was the achievement of the Latin American department of the CCF to have politicized its own depoliticization, Rama argued. “The ideal of ‘neutralization,’ ” responded Rama, “is the new form of imperialistic action in the cultural front.” Rama’s views show how the CCF, in its efforts to reform itself, had succeeded mostly in tying a position it understood as neutral scholarship to the politics of empire. As if to reinforce the point, in 1966 Germani himself had been given control over a special issue of the CCF’s new magazine, Mundo Nuevo, which was to be dedicated to an empirical analysis of the Latin American Left. When it was in production, the New York Times published articles showing that the CCF had been a recipient of CIA funds.45

  At the time those articles appeared in 1966, the CCF and the CIA had for a couple of years been endeavoring to sever their financial relationship. Those efforts began with urgency in 1964, when a congressional investigation into the tax-exempt status of U.S. foundations exposed the CIA’s relationship with the J. M. Kaplan Fund of New York, which was being used to fund training institutes for the anti-Communist Left in Latin America, though not the CCF. Although the investigators were persuaded to keep the operation secret after meeting with officials from the Internal Revenue Service and the CIA, Michael Josselson became more determined to spin off the CCF’s best assets to inoculate them as much as possible from harm done by any future revelation of CIA support of the CCF. In mid-1966 the CCF’s leaders sought to preserve their organization by negotiating an agreement with the Ford Foundation that provided $6 million over six years on the condition that financial ties with the CIA were broken.46

  On 1 January 1966 the Latin American department split off from the CCF to form an independent affiliate called the Instituto Latinoamericano de Relaciones Internacionales (ILARI), still under Mercier Vega’s direction. ILARI was an obfuscation; little changed other than the name. It kept the same Paris office and maintained its relationship with other parts of the CCF family. Still, it was an opportunity to start fresh and secure some new names for an advisory committee that would be displayed on ILARI letterhead. Octavio Paz, among others, declined an invitation to be involved, but one big name did accept: Mexico’s preeminent liberal historian, Daniel Cosío Villegas. At the end of that year, Cosío Villegas was flown to Paris to participate in a discussion and advise the International Secretariat about problems and prospects in its Latin American work, and he became an important consultant on ILARI’s initiatives and magazines. Incorporated in Geneva, ILARI presented itself and its mission as a more cosmopolitan version of the old CCF, “to organize and utilize the intellectual resources of Latin America in such a way as to secure their full participation in the sphere of international cultural exchanges.” Culturally, it presented itself as a more fashionable version of its old self, noting that it had sponsored the first concert of electronic music in Argentina and had introduced Uruguay and Peru to the 1960s art event known as the “happening.” It maintained a close relationship with the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, the leading institution for the promulgation of modern and experimental art in the Argentine 1960s.47

  ILARI strengthened its efforts to facilitate Latin American sociological research. Mercier Vega saw ILARI, somewhat simplistically, as the vital center of a consciousness-raising project between two antithetical extremes in Latin American society. The first pole adhered rigidly to the status quo and feared any change, while the second was convinced that a violent revolution was the only path to development. In between lay the “no-man’s land” of “concrete economic and sociological processes that [constitute] the terrain for which both sides are contending, but which neither side appears willing to investigate objectively.” He had ILARI sponsor work groups at major Latin American universities in order to fill this perceived gap, addressing his sociological concerns: the social composition of political parties, the social composition and civic role of the armed forces, the university and society, censorship in Latin America, and problems of the Latin American novel. At the end of 1966 he launched a journal called Aportes to publish scholarly papers.48

  But the most important journal linked to the CCF in Latin America was the literary magazine Mundo Nuevo. “It was,” wrote the Chilean novelist José Donoso, “the voice of Latin American literature of its time.” The first issue, in July 1966, featured a long interview by its editor, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, of Carlos Fuentes. In the second, Rodríguez Monegal included an excerpt from Gabriel García Márquez’s as-yet-unpublished One Hundred Years of Solitude, which, when finished, would make its author the most famous of all the novelists of the boom. Mundo Nuevo published early pieces of Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche; it helped launch the careers of Cuban exiles like Severo Sarduy; and it raised the profile of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, formerly of the suppressed Lunes de Revolución. In the words of John King, the magazine offered Latin American intellectuals of the 1960s a “revolution in style.” It was surely one of the finest magazines that the CIA ever had a hand in creating, a diamond in the murk of most of the CCF’s work in the region.49

  Mundo Nuevo was the successor to the much-unloved Cuadernos. Its motive force was Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a biographer of Borges and a widely respected critic and editor. Born in Uruguay, he knew nearly everyone who was or would
become famous on the Latin American literary scene. In the 1940s he had been the editor of the literary pages of the left-wing Montevidean weekly Marcha and later the editor of a small magazine called Número. In the mid-1960s Rodríguez Monegal had an idea for another magazine. Marcha, his former employer, was the voice of Uruguayan tercerismo—a form of New Left third way between the Cold War powers of the United States and the Soviet Union—that had fallen hard for the Cuban Revolution. Rodríguez Monegal described himself as a socialist who drew cautionary lessons about Communism from the history of the Spanish Civil War. By the late 1960s he was not so sure that Cuba deserved uncritical support, and he imagined a magazine that would publish dialogue among different political views, including those of Cubans. He planned to call the magazine Diálogos, but a Mexican magazine was already using that name, so Rodríguez Monegal’s project was christened Mundo Nuevo.50

  Because the Ford Foundation financed Mundo Nuevo for most of its existence, Rodríguez Monegal—defensive about his involvement with the CCF—would later say that the Ford Foundation had wanted a new magazine and selected him to edit it. (Even though he had never driven a car, he joked, he thought this one of Ford’s “better ideas.”) But this was a fiction: he was selected not by the Ford Foundation but by the CIA’s John Hunt, who had for years been casting about for someone who could direct a suitable replacement for Cuadernos. Benito Milla, the Uruguayan publisher, had recommended Rodríguez Monegal, and he had been Hunt’s top candidate to lead a new magazine as early as 1964, well within the CIA era of the CCF. As he prepared to publish the magazine, Rodríguez Monegal would soon find himself repeating endlessly that Mundo Nuevo was “linked to the Congress but not dependent on it.” When the first issue of Mundo Nuevo was released in July 1966, the CCF was still financed primarily with CIA money; the Ford Foundation took over completely only that November. From that point forward, Rodríguez Monegal negotiated a separate line of funding from the Ford Foundation for Mundo Nuevo and always had full editorial control over the magazine.51