Paraíso de espías (Paradise of Spies: Mexico City in the Cold War)

A new text of mine has appeared in Nexos. It updates and extends my academic paper about Vicente Lombardo Toledano, placing Mexico's relative nonchalance about the Snowden revelations in historical context. I argue that Mexico, unusually among Latin American countries during the Cold War, turned the espionage of foreign powers into an asset. It seems to have allowed foreign spies to operate with relative impunity, and therefore gave erstwhile enemies--the U.S., the U.S.S.R., Cuba--a stake in the continuation of the regime in Mexico.

Un ensayo mío acaba de aparecer en Nexos. Aquí los párrafos últimos, que resumen los argumentos principales:

Las redes eran complicadas y seguramente mucho sigue sin saberse. Lo que sí queda claro es que había peligro en la Casablanca mexicana, pero que a la vez —siempre y cuando estuviera bien administrado— también había oportunidad. Para bien y para mal, en América Latina probablemente sólo Costa Rica fue tan “estable” como el PRI en los años que le siguieron a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Buena parte de aquella estabilidad provenía del autoritarismo suave practicado por el PRI en sus asuntos domésticos. No obstante, casi una excepción en el concierto de naciones, México no tenía enemigo externo. Tolerar los juegos de espionaje de las potencias extranjeras en rivalidad puso a México en una posición de poder: ni Cuba, ni la Unión Soviética o Estados Unidos estuvieron interesados en promover un cambio de régimen en México que pusiera en riesgo el arreglo existente. Lo mismo que sus subsidios a la cuasioposición local que barrían desde la derecha hasta la izquierda (sin significar ningún apoyo), la tolerancia mexicana al espionaje extranjero constituyó una suerte de “subsidio” dirigido a las fuerzas con más potencial desestabilizador en el mundo con el fin de mantenerlas interesadas en preservar al gobierno de México en el poder. La policía secreta mexicana llegó a ser, especialmente en los años sesenta y setenta, un agente de represión en su propio país. Pero, en el ámbito internacional, ayudó a canalizar la intervención extranjera y a administrar los riesgos que aquella era tuvo para México.

A aquellos días de la Casablanca mexicana ya se los llevó el tiempo. El viejo equipo de espionaje fue vendido en los años 1990, la década en que muchas otras cosas se pusieron a la venta. Durante la Guerra Fría, México pareció haber cedido apenas suficiente soberanía a los espías extranjeros que, a fin de cuentas, terminó perdiendo muy poco. Hoy en día los retos a la soberanía estatal vienen desde dentro y son considerablemente más siniestros. La política del espionaje de la Guerra Fría era sucia y corrupta, pero al menos tuvo una chispa de glamour y un ocasional toque de comedia. Fueron malos tiempos aquellos, pero hoy parecen haber sido, quizá paradójicamente, demasiado buenos para durar.

Juan Rulfo, the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, and the Cold War in the press

So what is Juan Bosch, chopped liver? He got meaningful CIA support, but no one has taken notice. However, the apparent oddity of Juan Rulfo having received CIA dollars, revealed in the essay I recently published with S-USIH, has been making the rounds in the Mexican and international press. Here were some of the early stories.

Then Alejo Schapire of Radio Francia Internacional sent me some interesting follow-up questions, and the interview was published here.

Geney Beltrán Félix did another interview for Confabulario de El Universal, which appeared alongside a translation of the S-USIH essay.

If anyone else in the press wants to talk to me about this, please get in touch through twitter or one of my email addresses, such as [firstname] . [lastname] @ gmail.

How the CIA bought Juan Rulfo some land in the country

An essay of mine is being featured at the blog of the Society of U.S. Intellectual History. The piece came about as a response to Eric Bennett's fascinating "How Iowa Flattened Literature." I had a few things to say in response, and then a few more, and a few more, and I ended up with this rather long reply. [Update 3/13/2015: This essay has reached the finalist stage of the 3 Quarks Daily politics and social science prize for online writing.]  

Juan Rulfo: mountaineer, author, unwitting recipient of CIA funds

Did the CIA fund creative writing in Mexico? The answer is “yes.” In the second half of the twentieth-century, Mexico’s most prestigious creative writing center, Mexico City’s Centro Mexicano de Escritores, gave writers year-long grants to devote themselves exclusively to writing. Senior authors taught technique and supervised workshops based on the model of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Beginning in the late 1950s the CME began to receive funding from the Farfield Foundation, a CIA front, for its publications. Later, more money that was likely from the CIA arrived via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, facilitated by John Hunt, a novelist and CIA case officer who had once taught courses at Iowa. The Farfield Foundation, in the late 1960s, even helped Juan Rulfo, the CME’s prize graduate and teacher, purchase a parcel of land in the countryside.

This February, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a dynamic and engaging essay, “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” by Eric Bennett, offering both an early look at the findings of his forthcoming book, and a story of how that work came to be.[1] The hook at the beginning of his article is structurally the same as the one used here: “Did the CIA fund creative writing in America?” and the answer is also the same: it is “yes.” The mechanisms and timing were also identical: the Farfield Foundation, John Hunt, mid-to-late 1960s. But in spite of their similarities, putting the two cases side-by-side seems to me not to suggest a reading of the evidence that speaks to the power of the CIA over culture at the height of the Cold War, but rather of the successful mobilization of Cold War politics by program directors seeking to fund necessarily unprofitable work. Put differently, it suggests that institutional writing programs used the CIA more than the other way around.

Before turning to an examination of the evidence, let me begin with an elaborate set of personal disclaimers, for Eric Bennett’s essay arrived at my virtual doorstep like an unexpected gift. The great majority of my childhood was spent in Iowa City, the home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As a young man surrounded largely by cornfields, in a state with many more pigs than people, the Writers’ Workshop provided a serviceable illusion of cosmopolitanism. Important things happened elsewhere, but important writing happened there. I still remember the feeling of embeddedness in a larger cultural universe that came when, at age 14 or 15, I read Iowa teacher Kurt Vonnegut mention the local Sears Roebuck in Slaughterhouse-Five. (Though Bennett’s essay makes one wonder whether this might have been some sort of canny product placement.) Though I left Iowa City some fifteen years ago, as with Bennett, it remains one of my favorite places on earth. But there is more: I have since become a scholar of the cultural Cold War. Bennett’s book, forthcoming with the University of Iowa (!) press—is one that I have been hoping desperately that someone would write. As soon as it is published, it will immediately move to the front of my reading list. If the book in any way resembles the essay to which we now have access, it will be almost everything that we can ask of a book: thoughtful, bold, and entertaining.

But will it also be right? Bennett’s essay is occasionally difficult to pin down; like an anxious bug, its argument seems to change direction just as it is about to be caught. If I have understood it correctly, there are two related central claims. The most important is that something is amiss in the world of literary fiction: a universe that now produces an excess of technically sound work without producing anything that meets the highest standards of what Bennett thinks fiction should be—a literature of ideas. The second claim is that this is not some accident, but that the field of fiction programs was given shape by the politics of the Cold War, including in direct contributions by the CIA to Iowa, the standard-bearer of the MFA army.

These arguments need to be addressed in reverse order, so let me begin with the claim that the hegemony of Iowa in the creative writing ecosystem is responsible for certain deformities in the environment of literary fiction. Bennett’s essay is, in part, a memoir of frustration. Before he did his Ph.D.—where he did the research from which his recent essay was drawn—he too was a student at the Writers’ Workshop. There, he says, there were three types of writing that were possible: 1) modernist fiction à la Eliot, Hemingway, or Munro; 2) “winningly loquacious” writing like Fitzgerald or Cheever; and 3) magical realism. What was discouraged was “postmodernism”; the starting point of fiction was not supposed to be in the world of ideas but in the realms of sense and emotion. This attitude then cascaded throughout the country, for Iowa’s program influenced the formation of all the others: Stanford created the second by hiring Wallace Stegner, one of Iowa’s first graduates, to replicate the model. (And, as Bennett notes, Stegner shared similar impulses, believing that a novelist was “a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life […] not a dealer in concepts.”) The proliferation of MFA programs that came in the years to come bore the Iowa imprint as well, making our era of fiction The Program Era, to borrow the title of Mark McGurl’s book about it.[2] And that landscape resembles the cornfields from which it sprung: pleasantly rolling—not flat—but certainly not dramatically changeable.

This argument has a level of plausibility to it that is hard to dismiss. It seems to have struck a chord with many of my friends with MFAs in creative writing, and it reminded me of a conversation that I had many years ago with my friend and teacher John L’Heureux, who taught writing and English at Stanford, and who warned me years ago against the “puzzle literature” of David Foster Wallace that I found exciting in those days. But there is a slippage in Bennett’s essay that I can’t follow: from a dislike of “cute” postmodern literature at Iowa to an absence of a literature of ideas. The authors that Bennett’s teacher Frank Conroy at Iowa discouraged from serving as models were the “postmodernists” like Barth and Pynchon: “Meaning, Sense, and Clarity” was the mantra. Bennett seems to be arguing that imposing these structural and stylistic constraints make it difficult to write Something Very Important. In a Bourdeauian sense, the “field” of literary fiction has been structured in a way that excludes the kind of work that would be foundational to a literature of ideas. “Texts worth reading,” Bennett writes in the final paragraph of the essay, “worth reading now, and worth reading 200 years from now—coordinate the personal with the national with the international; they embed the instant in the instant’s full context and history.” As an historian and not as a fiction writer, this seems to me perfectly reasonable. But the writers who Bennett signals are coming closest to that standard today, Jonathan Franzen and Marilynne Robinson, are working in a different tradition than Barth and Pynchon.[3] (And, for what it might be worth, Robinson teaches at Iowa.)

Additionally, speaking as a teacher, asking students to attempt to write something that will have value in two hundred years seems like an invitation to total disaster. Bennett wants us to work to produce a great work of ideas: the kind of thing that will come around every half century years or so, summoning the spirit of the age with one hand and asking it to wait with the other. But perhaps the work has already been written; what people fifty and a hundred years from now will find remarkable about our age may well not be what we think it is today. Though some miasmatic version of Bennett’s argument about the influence of Iowa seems plausible, I can’t help but think that even Iowa could not stand in the way of Something Very Important being written, at least over the long run.

But whatever my own doubts might be, this is world to which I cannot speak from experience. Many of my MFA-graduate friends seemed to find significance in Bennett’s piece, as if their exquisitely rendered career frustrations could be likened to a hollow novelty birthday cake out of which had just popped a man with dark glasses and an obvious record of human rights abuses. And to this second point, I can speak with more authority: what does it mean that the CIA funded creative writing at Iowa?

The “smoking gun” is a contribution to Paul Engle of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from the Farfield Foundation, dated 1967. As Bennett notes, the Farfield Foundation was not an ordinary charitable organization: it was a CIA front.  Its most important task was to provide the public face for the money that to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA’s major vehicle for the support of anti-Communist artistic and intellectual work during the Cold War. The Farfield Foundation was “in” on the whole thing. Julius “Junkie” Fleischmann, the head of the Foundation, saw himself as doing the CIA a favor. One of the CIA officials who arranged for the money to be transferred described him as one of the many “rich people who wanted to be of service to government…They were made to feel they were big shots because they were let in on this secret expedition to battle the Communists.”[4]

The full scope of CIA engagement with culture is beyond the scope of this essay, but let me be clear that it is not something that I want to defend. Indeed, around the time of Farfield’s contribution to Engel, such activities were becoming (appropriately, in my view), unacceptable. The Congress for Cultural Freedom had arranged to sever its financial relationship with the CIA in 1965; bailed out by a long-term grant from the Ford Foundation that substituted for it beginning in late 1966. The CIA was worried that its actions were close to being exposed (and they were, in newspaper articles in the New York Times in 1966 and in more detail in the magazine Ramparts in 1967). Subsequent actions required that these CIA contributions to cultural and “civil society” groups be wound down; a few of the most valuable properties, like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, were maintained, and most were not and such functions were eventually passed over to quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy, created in the 1983. The contribution to Iowa in 1967 comes at the very end of possibility for such a transaction from the CIA.

But what are we to make of it? Here, I think the contrast with the Mexican Writing Center is instructive. The Centro Mexicano de Escritores was founded in fits and starts during the early 1950s; its prime mover was a North American novelist named Margaret Shedd. She was a semi-permanent resident of the Bay Area, and had witnessed Stegner building the program at Stanford, where she sometimes taught extension courses. (In that sense, the Mexican Center is probably the first attempt to internationalize the Iowa model, at two steps of remove.) Shedd’s husband had worked in the U.S. embassy in Mexico, and her boredom led her to formulate plans for a binational writing workshop. As with Iowa, a lot of money in the 1950s came from the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided year-long grants, mostly for Mexican writers but occasionally for some from the U.S. or elsewhere in Latin America, to devote themselves exclusively to their craft. Shedd and others taught much-ridiculed courses in technique, while students met in frequent workshops. The record of selecting promising writers was extraordinary: over its life, graduates of the CME included Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Rosario Castellanos, Carlos Monsiváis, and many others that number among Mexico’s best novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists.

National security concerns were always present in the motivations of the CME’s foreign funders. The Rockefeller Foundation believed that exchange between North American and Mexican writers would improve relations between the two countries at an important node, making the (implausible) assumption that writers “spoke for their countries.” In 1959, the CIA-front Farfield Foundation began contributing a small percentage of the annual budget—something like 2% of the total. In the early 1960s, the Congress for Cultural Freedom itself grew interested, and paid the salary of Juan Rulfo for at least a couple of years. Rulfo’s lifetime literary output consisted of a celebrated short novel, Pedro Páramo, and a book of short stories, El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain), both finished on CME grants in the early 1950s. He would never publish anything else again. Money from the Congress for Cultural Freedom paid for Rulfo’s salary in the mid-1960s, hoping that he would become a more prominent author to rival famous Communist writers like Pablo Neruda. In the late 1960s, the Farfield Foundation seems to have been persuaded to buy him that plot of land in the country—to give him the peace and quiet to write, of course—something he never did again.

It would be easy, at this juncture, to decry the CIA’s influence over Mexican culture. And indeed, the CME does seem to have had a policy of not admitting Communists in the 1950s. In turn, some on the literary left insulted the “Gringo-Mexican Institute” for its Rockefeller funding, and imagined that Shedd was writing a novel called the Subterranean Penetration of the USA in Mexico. But in the 1960s, when the CIA was providing some of the budget, there were actually several Communist students. Plenty of others who passed through the Center, such as Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, and Carlos Monsiváis, remained associated with one variety or another of left-wing politics and certainly did not shy from criticism of U.S. imperialism. The CIA’s manipulations seem entirely wasted: it is very difficult to see any clear relationship between the politics of the Center’s funders and what its literary output. The Rockefeller Foundation wanted Mexico and the U.S. to “understand” each other better; the CIA wanted to boost the profiles of anti-Communist writers. But the naïve Pan-Americanism and anti-Communist both went unfulfilled. After the 1960s, when the Mexican government and private corporations supplied most of the budget, they wanted the Center to produce great writers that would redound to the glory of Mexico. But this too was a failure: it was the years of most compromised foreign funding that produced the best graduates. It seems to me that the CME was a remarkable failure as an instrument of cultural diplomacy, but was, all the same, one of the most important and successful writing centers in the world during its best years. It closed in 2005, and looks to me like a noble monument to success through failure.

What is striking, then, given the parallels to Iowa—where many of the same features were present—is not the influence of the CIA over culture, but the ability of cultural producers to use the politics of the Cold War to further their own endeavors. “[Iowa’s Paul] Engle constantly invoked the need to bring foreign writers to Iowa so they could learn to love America,” writes Bennett. “That was the key to raising money. If intellectuals from Seoul and Manila and Bangladesh could write and be read and live well-housed with full stomachs amid beautiful cornfields and unrivaled civil liberties, they would return home fighting for our side. This was what Engle told Midwestern businessmen, and Midwestern businessmen wrote big checks.” Yes, Paul Engle at Iowa was a Cold Warrior. He accepted money from the CIA, and used the language of the Cold War to earn sponsorship from both local businesses and the state bureaucracy. Just as in Mexico, creative writing in the United States depended on shining the boots of the capitalist class and the state bureaucracy that defended it. But if the effects of this on what was written were minimal, then who, exactly, was using whom?

---

[1] http://chronicle.com/article/How-Iowa-Flattened-Literature/144531/ The essay is adapted from a somewhat longer essay in a brand-new edited volume: Eric Bennett, “The Pyramid Scheme,” in MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, ed. by Chad Harbach (New York: n+1/Faber and Faber, 2014), 51–72.

[2] Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

[3] Additionally, there are clearly graduates of MFA programs who have worked in the “postmodern” tradition. I think, for example, of Chris Bachelder, a graduate of the University of Florida in 2002 and his satire Bear vs. Shark. And also his later U.S.!, a masterful novel of ideas that describes the world’s reaction to the resurrection of the undead corpse of Upton Sinclair—one of the smartest things about the left in the United States that I have ever read.

[4] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), 126.

Baby II

Did you find this page after reading a harrowing account of the last couple of months of my life? Welcome: your prize is this cute picture of my baby.

Refusing to quit academe

An essay I wrote about my experience on the academic job market, my children, and my mother's death, has been featured at Inside Higher Ed. The key sentences: "how do you ask a year to be the last one to die for a mistake?" and "The academic job market has taken so much from me over the last years; I don't want to let it take away my career as well."

Update: the piece was picked up by Slate.

Syllabus: Latin America and the World, Spring 2014

HISTORY 100E

Latin America and the World

Professor Patrick Iber

Spring 2014 / MWF 11AM-12  / 88 Dwinelle

If anything knits together the diverse region known as Latin America, it is a shared experience of imperialism and neo-imperialism on the world stage. This course will examine the ways in which the nations of Latin America have managed that fate: resisting it, embracing it, and trying to reform it. We will examine cases of clear interventions by foreign empires, from France in nineteenth-century Mexico to the U.S. in Central America and Chile in the late twentieth. But we will also look at more subtle forms of economic and cultural influence, and consider the ways that Latin American nations from Cuba to Costa Rica tried to limit the power of the U.S. and project their own influence. We will end with a discussion of transnational issues in contemporary Latin America, including the drugs trade. Class will feature frequent student-led debates.

Course texts:

Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Gobat, Michel.  Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule.  Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005, $27.

Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), $21.

Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala 1952-1954, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, $19.

Piero Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat, Chicago: Seagull Books, 2009, $15.

Ioan Grillo. El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012, $18.

Your grade will be based on the following:

20% reading journals. As you do the course readings, keep a running log of your reactions. Each week, you should write a couple of paragraphs in response (200-300 words), explaining reactions, responses, and questions raised by the readings. You can skip writing your reaction (but not the reading!) in two weeks out of the semester without penalty. Your journals will be collected twice: once in the middle of the term, and again at the end.

20% Debate brief. Once during the semester, each student will be responsible for writing an elaborate debate brief, of 5-7 pages, based on that week’s readings. The brief should have three parts: it should lay out the debate position you are defending, explain the most powerful rebuttals to your argument, and finally feature a counter-rebuttal in which you attempt to respond to those arguments. Students who prepare briefs will then lead teams during the in-class debate.

20% Debate participation.

20% Group WikiLeaks projects. The WikiLeaks document release contained interesting material about Latin America, and it has made possible a partial understanding of the techniques and limitations of U.S. diplomacy in the region in very recent years. You will sign up to analyze one country. With the other people signed up for the same country, you will develop a presentation for the class that excerpts the most important parts of leaked documents and explains the overall picture of U.S.-Latin American relations that emerges from them. Presentations will be given in class during week 13, and during RRR week if necessary.

20% final. As required in all “100” courses, there is an in-class final. Ours is scheduled for Tuesday May 13, from 7-10PM.

Course schedule:

Week 1: Introduction

W, Jan. 22: Introduction to the class, syllabus

F, Jan. 24: Discussion

Readings:

“Introduction,” 3-12 in George Lichtheim, Imperialism, (New York: Praeger, 1971).

“Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism,” in V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, (New York: International Publishers, 1939).

Rabe, Killing Zone, “Introduction”

Discussion: What is the most useful definition of imperialism for the purposes of thinking about the relationship of the U.S. to Latin America?

Week 2, Foreign Empire and the Creation of Latin America

M, Jan 27: The international system and Latin American independence; plus Mexican wars: U.S. & France

W, Jan 29: Class discussion of readings, led by instructor

F, Jan 31: NO CLASS

Readings:

John Leddy Phelan, “Pan-Latinism, French Intervention in Mexico (1861-1867) and the genesis of the idea of Latin America,” in Conciencia y autenticidad históricas: escritos en homenaje a Edmundo O’Gorman, J. Ortega y Medina, ed., Mexico City, UNAM, 1968.

Leslie Bethell, “Brazil and ‘Latin America,’” Journal of Latin American Studies 42, 457-485.

Discussion: How has empire shaped the concept of Latin America?

Week 3, The Rise of the United States

M, Feb 3: Video: The Gringo in Mañanaland

W, Feb 5: Primary document analysis: Latin America in Caricature

F, Feb 7: The Rise of the US: Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico

Readings:

Rabe, The Killing Zone, “Roots of Cold War Interventions,” pp. 1-20

Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, pp. 1-161

Week 4: New Strategies for Informal Empire

M, Feb. 10: The Good Neighbor Policy

W, Feb. 12: Debate

F, Feb. 14: Pan-Americanism in Wartime

Reading:

Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, 1-17, 150-280

Debate: U.S. intervention left a dictatorship in Nicaragua, not a democracy. Was this the result of intended or unintended consequences at work?

Week 5: Pan-Americanism

M, Feb. 17: NO CLASSES

W, Feb. 19: Movie: Saludos Amigos

F, Feb. 21: Debate

Readings:

Rabe, The Killing Zone, “The Kennan Corollary,” pp. 21-35

“The alliance for modernization,” pp. 109-136 and “Resistance communities,” 137-159 in Thomas O’Brien, The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900-1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, 162-234

Debate: Should the Good Neighbor Policy be a model for today’s inter-American relations?

Week 6: Guatemala

M, Feb. 24: The Origins of Latin America’s Cold War

W, Feb. 26: Bananas and Empire

F, Feb. 28: Debate

Rabe, Killing Zone, “Guatemala—The Mother of Interventions,” 36-58

Cullather, Secret History

Debate: What was the most important cause in the overthrowing of Jacobo Arbenz: U.S. government pressure or the actions and beliefs of conservatives in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America?

Week 7: Managing Empire for Fun and Profit

M, Mar. 3: The Country that Shouldn’t Exist: Costa Rica

W, Mar. 5: The Bolivian Revolution

F, Mar. 7: Debate

Readings:

Kyle Longley, “Peaceful Costa Rica, the first Battleground: The United States and the Costa Rican Revolution of 1948,” The Americas 50, no. 2 (October 1993): 149-175.

Steven Schwartzberg, “Romulo Betancourt: From a Communist Anti-Imperialist to a Social Democrat with US Support,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29, no. 3 (October 1997): 613-665.

Patrick Iber, “‘Who will impose democracy?’: Sacha Volman and the Contradictions of CIA Support for the Anticommunist Left in Latin America,” Diplomatic History.

Debate: Did the Anti-Communist Left represent a real opportunity during the Cold War, or did its alliance with the U.S. fatally compromise its ability to enact left-wing change?

Week 8: The making of Cuba

M, Mar 10: Film: Triumph of the Cuban Revolution

W, Mar. 12: The U.S., the Cuban Revolution, and the New Left

F, Mar. 14: Icons of Revolution

No reading this week: get together with your group to work on your WikiLeaks projects.

Week 9, Cuba at Home and Abroad

M, Mar. 17: Steven Soderbergh, Che [Part II]

W, Mar. 19: Steven Soderbergh, Che [Part II]

F, Mar. 21: Debate

Rabe, Killing Zone, “War Against Cuba,” pp. 59-84

Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat

Debate: Was U.S. diplomacy against Cuban interests more successful than Cuban diplomacy against U.S. interests, or the other way around?

March 24-28: SPRING BREAK

Week 10: Chile

M, Mar. 31: Cold War, internal and external

W, Apr. 2: Revisiting La Batalla de Chile

F, Apr. 4: Debate

Rabe, Killing Zone, “No More Cubas,” and “Military Dictators: Cold War Allies,” pp. 85-143

“Project FUBELT,” pp. 1-35, 47-48, 58-59 and “Destabilizing Democracy: The United States and the Allende Government,” pp. 79-115, 138-139, 146-149 in Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, (New York: New Press, 2003).

Fermandois, Joaquin.  “The persistence of a myth: Chile in the eye of the Cold War hurricane.”  World Affairs 167, no. 3 (Winter 2005), 101-112.

Tanya Harmer, “Brazil’s Cold War in the Southern Cone, 1970-1975,” Cold War History 12, no. 4 (2012): 659-681.

Debate: Should Henry Kissinger be prosecuted for crimes against humanity because of his role in destabilizing the Allende government?

Week 11: Central America

M, Apr. 7: Nicaragua

W, Apr. 9: Guatemala

F, Apr. 11: Debate

Rabe, Killing Zone, “Cold War Horrors—Central America,” pp. 144-174

Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 242-255, 271-304, 312-318, 353-358, 362-368

Oñate, Andrea. “The Red Affair: FMLN-Cuban Relations during the Salvadoran Civil War, 1981-1992,” Cold War History 11, no. 2 (2011): 133-154.

Debate: Would the outcomes of the Central American conflicts of the 1980s have been different in the absence of outside interference?

Week 12: Transnational Crime in Latin America

M, Apr. 14: Colombia

W, Apr. 16: Mexico

F, Apr. 18: Debate

Grillo, El Narco, pp. 109-291

Debate: Should the U.S. legalize drugs in order to lessen the suffering associated with cartelized trade?

Week 13: WikiLeaks Group Projects

M, Apr. 21: Group presentations

W, Apr. 23: Group presentations

F, Apr. 25: Group presentations

Week 14: Latin America and the World

M, Apr. 28: ALBA diplomacy

W, Apr. 30: Another BRIC in the Wall

F, May 2: Summing up

Rabe, Killing Zone, “Aftermath,” 175-195

More readings will be announced, based on current events

RRR Week, May 5-9, may feature group presentations if necessary.

Final Exam: Tuesday May 13, 7-10PM

Syllabus: Artists, Intellectuals, and Social Change in Latin America, Spring 2014

HISTORY 103E

Artists, Intellectuals, and Social Change in Latin America

Professor Patrick Iber

Spring 2014 / 2303 Dwinelle / F 2-4PM

Latin American history has featured horrific dictatorships and turbulent revolutions. In spite of this instability, or perhaps because of it, the region has also consistently produced one first-class export: the work of its artists, writers, and intellectuals. This course looks at the myth and reality of Latin American intellectuals—often said to be more influential politically than in any other region of the world—over the course of the region’s modern history. (Gabriel García Márquez once quipped that “In the history of power in Latin America, there are only military dictatorships or intellectuals.”) How have Latin American artists and writers used their cultural production to expose injustice?  When have those attempts made things better, and when worse?  By looking at the historical literature—supplemented with poetry, memoir, painting, and film—this course will examine the important role of Latin American intellectuals in creating social change in the region.

Course texts:

Angel Rama, The Lettered City, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996, ~$22.

Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, ~$27.

Jorge Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, New York: Vintage, 1998, ~$15. (Kindle edition available for $12.)

Jorge Edwards, Persona non grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, New York: Nation Books, 2004. Kindle edition is available for $10, and many used copies for $1 and up.)

David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910-1990, 2^nd edition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, $30.

Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, New York: Random House, 2008, $14.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil, New York: PublicAffairs, 2007, $12.

Presentation: Starting in week 3, our discussion will be led by a student who has prepared a short presentation of approximately10-15 minutes, drawing out the major questions raised by the week’s readings.  Presentations should be practiced and polished, and end by posing one or two central questions to begin discussion.

For the rest of your grade, you should write approximately 20 pages.  You can choose how to distribute those pages either as a) five short review papers; b) a mixture of review papers and a shorter final; or c) a long final.

Papers:

• Short review papers of approximately four pages are to be turned in before class in any week of the quarter.  You are free to write in the form that you choose, but each paper should be an essay that relates that week’s reading to at least one of the major themes of the course: intellectual responsibility, the relationship of events to the formation of political opinion, or the impact of the intellectual on politics, etc.
• Whether short or long, I suggest two formats for final papers but I am open to alternate plans.  The first suggestion is to find an intellectual or literary review and examine it in its most important year(s).  What was its project, politically and aesthetically?  What did it expect to achieve its goals?  Who contributed to it and why?  As a useful exercise, I would encourage you to do this without consulting the secondary literature. An alternative final paper structure would involve writing a short biography of an intellectual of interest to you.
• All writers who strive to write good prose would do well to read George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” at least once a year: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

Your grade will be calculated as 20% discussion; 20% presentation; 60% papers.

Week 1, January 24: The problems of Latin American intellectuals

To read and discuss in class:

Charles Kurzman and Lynn Owens, “The Sociology of Intellectuals,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 63-90.

Week 2, January 31: The Lettered City

Ángel Rama, The Lettered City

Week 3, February 7: The making of the modern

Nicola Miller, “Intellectuals and the Modernizing State in Spanish America,” and “From Ariel to Caliban: Anti-imperialism among Spanish-American Intellectual,” In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America, pp. 43-94, 174-209

José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, 31-32, 70-101

Mauricio Tenorio, “Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the United States, 1880s-1930s,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3, (Dec. 1999): 1156-1187.

Week 4, February 14: Nation, State, and Revolution

David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America, Introduction and The Mexican Revolution, pp. 1-73

Helen Delpar, “Mexican Culture, 1920-1945,” pp. 543-572 from The Oxford History of Mexico

Deborah Cohn, “The Mexican Intelligentsia, 1950-1968: Cosmopolitanism, National Identity, and the State,” Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos 21, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 141-182.

Week 5, February 21: Reinventing Marxism without a Proletariat

Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined

Week 6, February 28: Theories of Dependency

Joseph Love, “Economic ideas and ideologies in Latin America since 1930,” from Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth-Century Latin America, 207-274

Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Falletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, pp. vii-xxv

André Gunder Frank, “Foreign Investment in Latin American Underdevelopment,” in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, pp. 281-318

Week 7, March 7: The Cuban Dilemma

Film in class: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Memories of Underdevelopment

There is no reading this week, but next week’s book is long so get started.

Week 8, March 14: Making heroes into intellectuals

Jorge G. Castañeda, Compañero

March 24-28: SPRING BREAK

Week 9, March 21: The Culture of Solidarity

Craven, “The Cuban Revolution,” 75-116

Mario Vargas Llosa, “Literature is Fire”

Jean Franco, “Liberated Territories,” from The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 86-117 [available in electronic form through oskicat]

Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Calibán: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” in Caliban and Other Essays, 3-45

Week 10, April 4: The Pain of Solidarity

Jorge Edwards, Persona non grata

Heberto Padilla, Fuera del juego, “En tiempos difíciles,” “Los poetas cubanos ya no sueñan,” and “Fuera del juego”

Week 11, April 11: Theology of Liberation

Enrique Dussel, “A note on liberation theology,” from Ideas and Ideologies in Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, 275-285

David Craven, “The Nicaraguan Revolution,” 117-175

Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile

Week 12, April 18: Socialists for capitalism

Jean Franco, “Killing them Softly: The Cold War and Culture,” from The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 21-56 [available in electronic form through oskicat]

Efraín Kristal, The Temptation of the Word, pp. 69-112

Alma Guillermoprieto, “The Bitter Education of Vargas Llosa,” in Looking for History, 155-177

Week 13, April 25: Sociologists for capitalism

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil

Week 14, May 2: Conclusions

Jorge Ibargüengoitia, “La Ley de Herodes,” pp. 19-23

James Petras, “The Metamorphosis of Latin America’s Intellectuals,” Latin American Perspectives 17, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 102-112.

Jorge Castañeda, “Changing of the Guard: From Intellectuals to the Grass Roots,” from Utopia Unarmed, 175-202.