by Patrick Iber
The division on the left, coupled with hostility from the Right, the armed forces, the regional dictatorships, and the United States, culminated in the coup of 11 September 1973. Allende, defending himself in the presidential palace as it was bombed, ended his life by committing suicide with a gun that had been a gift from Fidel Castro. Pablo Neruda, sick with both cancer and heartbreak, died less than two weeks later. The hopes of a socialism that came to power by election, worked by constitutional procedure, and had never resorted to suppression of its opponents had ended in violence. Thousands were tortured and murdered by the military government of Augusto Pinochet, who tried to remake Chile as a utopian model of capitalist productivity.
The book that Jorge Edwards had been writing about his experiences in Cuba, Persona non grata a Cuba, was completed in 1973. Many considered it the first book by a solidly left-wing intellectual to openly criticize the Cuban model for its dictatorial characteristics, and the resulting disagreement reinforced the intellectual divides in the Left. Like Serge and Gide in the 1930s, Edwards was accused of criticizing a model society at a time of vulnerability for the Left, with Pinochet and other right-wing dictators in power. But others, like Mario Vargas Llosa and Emir Rodríguez Monegal, defended the work. The point was not to defeat one dictatorship with another, they argued; it was to end the repression of them all. For that group of thinkers, Cuba had betrayed its ideals by joining the “McCarthyites of the Left” after all.
The message of opposition to dictatorship, whether of the Left or of the Right, sounded as if it could have come from the CCF, but now it came from independent sources. Octavio Paz, at one time taught by Victor Serge and Julián Gorkin, and who shared many of the CCF’s causes and tastes, had nonetheless always declined to participate in it. Like Neruda, he was a poet of both love and politics and had spent a number of years in diplomatic service. He resigned his position as the ambassador to India after the Mexican government’s massacre of students in 1968, calling it a ritual sacrifice. Paz came to see a common problem across much of Latin America: Mexico, Cuba, and the dictatorships of the Southern Cone all featured concentrated state power and a lack of democratic competition and control.
Paz, together with Carlos Fuentes and the Spanish poet Juan Goytisolo, sought a new magazine that would replicate the task of Mundo Nuevo without the complications of its patron. Their short-lived Libre failed as Mundo Nuevo had. Its attempt at dialogue with Cuba immediately ran aground when the first issue was devoted to the Padilla affair. Its alternative to CIA funding was to accept the support of the marginally less problematic left-wing granddaughter of a Bolivian tin magnate. With more caution, after Libre, Paz launched a monthly cultural magazine called Plural that ran from 1971 to 1976. Plural largely avoided discussing either Cuba or the United States. Paz wrote there against both the violence of the state and the violence of left-wing guerrilla movements. Although neither Paz nor his magazine ever had anything to do with the CCF, it featured some of the CCF’s authors and the organization’s central preoccupation: how the name of socialism in the twentieth century had been usurped by Soviet Communism. Plural was not antisocialist: Paz insisted that socialism was the “only rational solution” to the problems of the century. For him, the question was how to restore to it a respect for democracy and liberty. After the Mexican government engineered to have the leaders of the independent newspaper that published Plural replaced, Paz continued the project anew with Vuelta in late 1976. Its frequent contributors included Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriel Zaid, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Isaiah Berlin, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Leszek Kolakowski. It might as well have been Mexico’s version of Encounter.31
Relationships between the antitotalitarian Vuelta and the insurrectionary Left were bound to be strained. By the late 1970s and early 1980s the greatest point of conflict was Central America, the latest hope of the Latin American Left. Vuelta was not impressed with the politics or the composition of the Marxist guerrilla groups fighting in the region. In 1980 Gabriel Zaid, a poet and essayist of great depth who had trained as an engineer, wrote a disillusioned portrait of the Salvadoran guerrillas, noting that their leaders were drawn from the same elite they were fighting. One of the highest leaders of the guerillas, aided in Mexico by the solidarity organization known as the Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, after the revolutionary Salvadoran poet, was in fact the man who had killed Dalton in 1975, executing him after a staged trial justified with the hackneyed accusation that he was a CIA agent. But the Salvadoran guerillas only fought the U.S.-backed army to a stalemate; in nearby Nicaragua the guerrillas triumphed.32
Nicaragua’s revolution succeeded in 1979 when it overthrew the decades-long dictatorship of the Somoza family. Nicaragua’s Sandinistas triumphed on the Cuban model: boosted by the broad-based multiclass opposition of the actual Cuban Revolution, not of the myth of the guerrilla foco. Like the postrevolutionary states of Mexico and Cuba before it, Nicaragua’s leadership considered cultural change an integral part of the revolutionary process. Its efforts prompted familiar worries from the antitotalitarian camp that their efforts would be nothing more than an attempt to turn culture into dogma.
“Culture must be democratized,” insisted the radical priest Ernesto Cardenal, who became the revolutionary government’s minister of culture, “so that our people will not only be consumers of culture […] but also producers of culture.” Before the Sandinista victory Cardenal had been the leader of an artists’ collective on the island of Solentiname that had taught primitivist painting and poetry to peasants. The Somoza dictatorship had destroyed the Solentiname community, but it became a kind of model for cultural diffusion after Cardenal became minister of culture. Centers were set up throughout the country to teach poetry. Nicaragua’s revolution was dubbed a “revolution of poets.” Even Daniel Ortega, its most powerful political leader, had published verse, and he told the visiting Salman Rushdie in 1986 that “in Nicaragua, everybody is considered to be a poet until he proves to the contrary.”33
Rushdie, however, found that his admiration for what was taking place in Nicaragua was constantly checked by concern. The state newspaper, Barricada, was the worst he had seen. “It disturbed me that a government of writers had turned into a government of censors,” Rushdie wrote. Barricada published “rules for poetry” drawn up by Cardenal, who called for free verse and concrete poetry of things rather than ideas. In painting, he favored the primitivist style that had been taught at Solentiname. At a speech in Finland, Cardenal was proud to say that Nicaragua was the “first nation on earth to have nationalized poetry.” But whatever role the state was playing in directing and encouraging cultural output, it was hardly totalitarian. Public debates about attempts of the state to mechanically impose artistic language were frequent. There had been no publishers in the entire country during the Somoza dictatorship; under the Sandinistas the state publisher released even the works of the only major poet to oppose the revolution. Yet as the semicovert war mounted by the Reagan administration escalated, and the anti-Sandinista forces known as the Contras imposed warlike conditions, budgetary austerity shifted the focus from popular production of art to its popular consumption in forms such as muralism.34
At the same time, although censorship of the press was considered a wartime necessity, the government went beyond what was required. The opposition paper La Prensa, which had been a pillar of opposition to the dictatorship of Somoza, was sometimes occupied by Sandinista forces and shut down. It was accused, naturally, of working for the CIA; it responded that its foreign funding came from the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-governmental body established by the United States in 1983 to do, with a greater measure of transparency, precisely the sort of thing that the CIA had once done: support newspapers, unions, and the other institutions of civil society, especially in states that the United States judged dictatorial and unfriendly. The Sandinistas lost elections in 1990 to the publisher of La Prensa, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, and looted as they left office.
“They had acted,” Rushdie concluded, “simultaneously, like people committed to democracy and also like harsh censors of free expression.”35
More moderate than Cuba, Nicaragua had tried to preserve a mixed economy, had held elections, and had treated dissidents less harshly. Even so, it had not solved the problems of democratic socialism; its government’s many mistakes frequently stemmed from the cultivation of a worldview that treated disagreement as illegitimate, and its leaders had a hard time trusting its citizens when they described the problems its policies had created. When Octavio Paz criticized both U.S. policy toward Nicaragua and the Sandinista alliance with the Soviet Union and its attitude toward democracy, he was burned in effigy by the Mexican Left. Many of the intellectuals and writers who had been members of the Sandinista front, including its vice president, experienced growing doubts about the party and distanced themselves from it over time.36
The greater moderation of Nicaragua when compared with its Cuban predecessor granted it no further latitude from the United States during the Reagan years; the Cold War instead provided a justification for the illegal war waged by the United States and its allies against Nicaragua’s government. Yet by 1990, the year the Sandinistas were defeated at the ballot box, the Cold War was closer to its final end than anyone realized at the time. Opposition political movements in Soviet-bloc Eastern Europe were putting pressure on their governments to move toward more open political and civil societies. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Within a year the Soviet Union would crack apart, bringing a symbolic end to the struggle between Communism and anti-Communism that had provided the most obvious way to divide up the world for at least half a century. In Mexico City an antitotalitarian group of intellectuals, led by Octavio Paz, gathered to discuss global developments. They called their conference “El Siglo XX: La Experiencia de la Libertad” (The twentieth century: The experience of freedom) and hardly needed to explain that by freedom they meant anti-Communism.
Most of the conference’s participants had begun their professional lives on the political Left, but they had come to see the power of state tyranny and the constraints that it placed on the free exercise of personhood as the great obstacle that had to be overcome. Some, like Mario Vargas Llosa, fresh from his defeat in the Peruvian presidential elections, now happily identified with the political Right. (Vargas Llosa produced the most memorable moment of the conference when he impolitely declared Mexico’s government a “perfect dictatorship” because it replaced its president every six years without giving up political control.) Others, like Paz, still wanted an anti-Marxist socialism that embraced the historical contribution of liberalism to social justice. American sociologist Daniel Bell, one of the many foreign visitors at this Mexican conference, told the press in interviews that he was “socialist in economics, liberal in politics and conservative in culture.” Insofar as they identified with the political Left—which certainly no longer identified with them—it was because they thought that the Left needed to be remade with new values.37
The central lesson that the group gathered in Mexico City took away from the history of the twentieth century was the justness of antitotalitarianism. Yet this certitude left them curiously unequipped to think about the great transformation then under way in Latin American economies: the privatization of state-owned assets and deregulation known as “neoliberalism.” What had once been associated with the Pinochet dictatorship was implemented, in an era of budget crises and austerity, by virtually everyone in power. Vargas Llosa had lost his election in Peru after trying to convince its poor and unemployed of the merits of flexible labor markets and the evils of job security. In Brazil, the former socialist dependency theorist Fernando Henrique Cardoso was elected president at the head of Brazil’s Social Democratic Party and implemented a neoliberal agenda in most areas of economic policy. Although there were many reasons that neoliberal strategies were adopted in the 1980s and 1990s, the antitotalitarian tradition’s fear of state power made it possible rhetorically to imbue the “market” with a moral energy that still used the language of the Left. The failings of the revolutionary Left could still occupy the attention of intellectuals at a time when, outside Cuba, they had become almost totally irrelevant. Meanwhile, what passed for social democracy was increasingly concerned with making capitalism effective, not with transforming it.38
The Mexico City conference was, in a way, its own sign of the unfolding change. A meeting that might have received CIA support a few decades earlier was instead sponsored primarily by the television conglomerate Televisa: a sign that intellectual life too, like so many other state assets, would be increasingly privatized. After the Cold War, intellectuals were faced with two primary possibilities: relegation to low-stakes academic disputes or lives as overeducated media entertainers. But to be culture warriors for a moral ideal, supported by a state advancing claims about universal justice, was no longer an option. The “century of the intellectual” was at an end. It had been a time during which competing visions of achieving modernity had been expressed in political and cultural language, and so the actions of the arbiters of public morality—intellectuals—seemed to have something to contribute. The sin of Cold War intellectuals—their voluntary or quasi-voluntary allegiance to powerful empires—was possible only because states saw them as repositories of moral authority. The shame and the glory of the intellectuals in the twentieth century were fibers woven into the same fabric, which turned out to be, for everyone, dirty laundry.39
Three major routes to achieving a humane socialism had been advanced and given shape by the Cold War. The Cuban variety depended on violence to make an authentically transformative revolution. Military discipline and concentrated power were difficult to transform into political democracy. Popular participation in government was frequently cosmetic. Cultural freedoms and the right to dissent had to exist within channels declared by the revolution, and prisoners of conscience multiplied. Cuba had become more equal and had broken from the humiliations of a compromised national sovereignty that depended on the permission of the United States. But freedom from imperialism, a collective freedom rather than an individual one, was not really achieved in Cuba, both because of the dependence on the USSR that it invited and because Cuba’s hostile relationship with the United States continued to structure Cuban life in important ways. The many young intellectuals who wanted to be like Che often marched, like him, to tragic deaths with backpacks full of books.
The orthodox Communist alternative was beset by other problems. Its political and cultural force in Latin America waxed and waned with decisions about alliances and strategy that were often made many thousands of miles away in Moscow. The cultural project of “peace” had been dismissive of the value of liberty. Like its Cuban cousin, it adopted a language of opposition to the injustices of capitalism, which were very real. But its alternative was, in the early 1950s, a blind faith in Stalin that, especially when voluntarily adhered to rather than imposed, did not suggest good judgment. Some of Latin America’s Communist parties, like those of Chile and eventually Mexico, moved toward embracing an electoral strategy for achieving power, accepting that democracy was something more than a bourgeois fiction. But in doing so, they had to confront their status as small minorities within pluralistic societies, as well as the fact that U.S. hostility toward them would not automatically lessen simply because they sought democratic paths to power. Their Soviet model was no example of a humane socialism, but as a leftist opposition in a democratic system, they could sometimes be sharp critics of democracy’s inadequacies.
But if these two Marxist Lefts offered unlikely paths toward a humane socialism, the anti-Communist Left was a dubious alternative in the Latin American setting. It offered a strategy for surviving on the left without incurring the direct hostility of the United States, but it required repressing local Communism, frequently with force, in ways that were inimical to the personal freedoms that ostensibly distinguished it from its Marxist alternatives. Liberal ideologies did not
always produce liberal results. They required constant compromise and slow transformation. They required, as the intellectuals who endorsed this path discovered, becoming a part of the U.S. system for managing geopolitical risk in the region. Costa Rica, the country that dealt best with all these challenges and held on to a social democratic welfare state without cultural repression, found itself being used as a staging ground for anti-Marxist actions against its neighbors in the 1980s. Its idea of moderate, left-wing transformation that produced sustained reductions in poverty and inequality, with the U.S. government as an ally but with those further to the left excluded, was in some ways as utopian an idea as any offered by Cuba or the Soviet Union.
The Cultural Cold War had offered three visions of a progressive democratic socialism. All of them contained deep problems that were reflected in the contradictions of the organizations—the Casa de las Américas, the World Peace Council, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom—that had once underwritten them. Each had offered a vision of political and cultural life that it considered just, but each had silenced discussion of the problems of its patron. What could not be discussed, in every case, was deeply detrimental to its cause.
The utopias and counterutopias of the generation of the Cultural Cold War were dramatic and intense, but they would eventually be left behind. By the end of the 1990s the intellectuals who had come of age during the first decades of the Cold War were well advanced in years. The debates that had been central to the Cultural Cold War—of anti-imperialism and antitotalitarianism—were perhaps no less morally urgent but were, in practice, less necessary. In the years after the end of the Cold War, prominent voices called for a “democratization” of the values and culture of the Latin American Left. But outside intellectual spheres it had in many places happened already.40