The Limits of Nationalism, 1960–1964
THOMAS C. FIELD JR.
In 1961, Bolivia’s national revolution entered its ninth year. Bankrolled since 1952 with hundreds of millions of aid dollars from the United States government, the country’s governing Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR, Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) had skillfully avoided Washington’s antipathy as it nationalized the largest tin mines in the world and unleashed Latin America’s most radical agrarian reform project since the Mexican revolution. Despite occasional State Department outbursts that denigrated the “dictatorship of the Marxist-oriented MNR party,” and vitriolic rightwing attacks, such as Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign pledge to oppose the MNR’s “candy-coated despotism,” revolutionary Bolivia remained the darling of U.S. foreign policy elites.1 Hailed by developmentalists in both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations as a nationalist bulwark against the encroachment of orthodox Communism in the heart of South America, the middle-class leadership of Bolivia’s governing MNR was showered with over $370 million in U.S. financial assistance between 1954 and 1964.2 Taking stock of Washington’s alliance with “revolutionary nationalism” in Bolivia, the U.S. ambassador to La Paz boasted in 1962 that Washington had demonstrated flexibility by tolerating “a good deal of the non-Bolshevik Marxism of a socialist brand,” which had gained “such wide currency in the intellectual life of the country” since the MNR’s 1952 revolution.3
What did a financial alliance with the United States mean for Bolivia’s self-styled revolutionary nationalists, who meanwhile courted economic assistance from the socialist countries of Eastern Europe? Was this the consummate Third World ploy, or was Washington’s noblesse oblige an imperial kiss of death for Bolivian nationalism? Put another way: How much room for maneuver did revolutionary Bolivia enjoy (or even seek) under the U.S.-backed MNR? Was Bolivia’s nationalist party a Third World fraud, wrapping itself in the banner of nonalignment but ultimately selling out to Washington out of economic dependency? Or was its Third Worldism sincere, tempered only by a bourgeois allergy to Communism and a recognition of the geopolitical realities of being a small Latin American country in the polarizing age of Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy? More broadly, what does the story of Bolivia’s dalliance with Third Worldism reveal about the evolution of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the early 1960s, particularly Latin America’s halting role within it?
The extant literature, based on Bolivian and U.S. sources, has provided tentative responses to a few of these questions. We know, for example, that Bolivia’s MNR maintained relations with Czechoslovakia and Cuba until just before it was ousted from power by the country’s military in 1964, and that MNR leaders even briefly collaborated with Cuban-sponsored guerrilla operations against the military dictatorship in neighboring Peru. We also know that the MNR engaged in extensive economic negotiations with the Soviet bloc and that revolutionary Bolivia’s nonaligned pretenses fueled protestations of a right to accept foreign aid from any source.4 At the same time, Bolivian and U.S. sources reveal the rapid abandonment of these nonaligned postures as U.S. aid reached heroic proportions during President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. Turning completely against Bolivia’s left wing for the first time in 1963, the MNR alienated its most fervent labor supporters and pushed them into armed opposition, in alliance with anti-MNR conservatives and restless military officers who stepped in to restore order in late 1964.5
Drawing on newly declassified material from the archives of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the Cuban Foreign Ministry, complemented by newly available diplomatic records from Bolivia and the United States, this chapter adds a global perspective to the story of revolutionary Bolivia’s ill-fated Third World gambit in the early 1960s. More than just revealing the impact of U.S. intervention in the Global South, the narrative sheds new light on the evolution of the NAM during the early 1960s and raises fundamental questions about Latin America’s fraught position as a region that identified as much with the Third World as with the Cold War West. On a more particular level, this chapter explores the subtle differences in socialist world approaches to Latin American nationalism, particularly the paradoxical relationship between the foreign policies of Prague and Havana, which shared sympathy for the region’s growing radicalization but adopted ground-level approaches that differed in both form and substance.
Writing the history of Latin America in a global context leads scholars to three overlapping dilemmas. First, how does one internationalize Latin American history without ending up in bilateral dead-ends, replicating both the promises and limits of traditional diplomatic history, whose archival and ideological foundations occasionally overemphasize the staid duality of U.S. hegemony and Latin American victimhood?6 Second, what does “global” mean in a region whose elites have long claimed themselves a world apart, in a system encompassing shared values that has taken great pains to quarantine itself from extra-hemispheric influences?7 Finally, is it possible to resolve these dilemmas without simply writing the United States out of Latin American history, a cure worse than the disease, which can produce narratives of Latin American relations with the extra-hemispheric world that bear little resemblance to the lived experiences of the region’s U.S.-centric struggles for social, political, and economic independence?8 As this chapter demonstrates, a global history of Latin America calls for multiarchival, multinational research that complements (rather than replaces) the documentary record of individual Latin American countries and the superpower to the region’s immediate north. In doing so, it reveals the benefits of tracing the loose threads of Latin American attempts to transcend the Inter-American System, even while acknowledging that most of these gambits were partial, halting, and even occasionally deceitful.
One of the best ways to identify Latin America’s interest in Third World nonalignment is to explore its relations with the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Cuba. As the historian Michal Zourek demonstrates in a recent book on Czechoslovak relations with the Latin America, the region’s overtures to Eastern Europe mapped neatly onto each country’s ties with the related project of Third World neutralism.9 This phenomenon included Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador, which attended the 1961 NAM meeting in Belgrade, followed by Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela, which joined Bolivia and Brazil as observers at Cairo in 1964. None of these countries followed Cuba’s example by formally joining the NAM, but their participation as observers reflected concrete interest in expanding diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations beyond the Western Hemisphere and across the so-called Iron Curtain. Historian Tobias Rupprecht agrees with this connection, describing in this volume and in his recent book how Latin American intellectuals’ interest in the Soviet bloc waxed and waned in direct proportion with their self-identification as part of the Third World.10
Cuba’s role in the revolutionary politics of its neighbors is well known, but less has been written about Czechoslovakia, which long had “the most active” network of Eastern European missions in Latin America, according to a 1962 report by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA went on to describe Prague as the Soviet bloc’s “chief commercial contact with the area” due to “the respect the Czechoslovaks continue to enjoy as businessmen … viewed with less suspicion than those from other bloc countries, who are thought to be more preoccupied with propaganda and subversive activities.”11 It is important to note that this 1962 assessment runs contrary to the secret unfolding of Operación Manuel (1962–ca. 1970), which was a covert program in which the intelligence services of Prague and Havana cooperated to break the Washington-led blockade of Cuba by secretly shuttling Latin American leftists between their home countries and Cuba via the Soviet bloc. The fundamental paradox of Manuel was that Eastern European governments continued their fervent outreach to non-Communist governments in Latin America, a tactic that coexisted uneasily alongside Czechoslovakia’s indirect support for Cuban-sponsored armed movements to overthrow the established hemispheric order. This contradiction intensified debates about Latin America’s role within the Third World movement, particularly in a revolutionary nationalist milieu such as Bolivia under the middle-class MNR.12
As the only Latin American country to officially join the NAM, Cuba, with its advocacy for armed struggle, produced varying levels of elite apprehension about the Third World movement, even among Latin American nationalists whose desire to deepen economic relations with the Soviet bloc remained important manifestations of their adherence to NAM principles. These two approaches to Latin American nonalignment—strict, eastward-leaning diplomatic neutrality pushed by Czechoslovakia, on the one hand, and insurgent anti-imperialism emanating from Cuba, on the other—combined to keep most of Latin America out of the NAM for two decades, thus hamstringing the Third World movement’s full geographic potential well into the 1970s. Meanwhile, debates over Cuba and its allies in the East aggravated domestic tensions over the very meaning of Third Worldism, particularly in nationalist countries such as Brazil and Bolivia, where conservative military leaders intervened in 1964 to stamp out their countries’ tenuous programs of outreach to the socialist world.
It would be a mistake, nonetheless, to interpret these two approaches as fundamentally opposed to one another. Despite contradictions between the regional tactics employed by Prague and Havana, these major socialist players in Latin America considered themselves to be steadfast allies in the struggle for the region’s political and economic independence from the United States. Operación Manuel contained a fundamental paradox, but declassified documents reveal that Prague and Havana interpreted Latin American nationalists such as Bolivia’s MNR in a similar manner. The result was an overlapping set of debates over the Latin American middle class, debates that are more thoroughly illuminated through the global lens of the Third World rather than the bipolar, East-West confines of the Cold War.
By bringing in the voices of Czechoslovak and Cuban officials, struggling side by side to maintain a narrow socialist foothold in South America, this chapter points the way to further research on Latin America’s sincere efforts to stake out a more independent approach to global politics, with the eventual goal of transcending an Inter-American System that contributed to the region’s restricted room for diplomatic maneuver. Watching from the wings as Bolivia’s governing MNR party sold out its Third World ideals and threw in its lot with liberal internationalists in Washington and development-oriented generals in La Paz, officials in Prague and Havana expressed varying levels of shock, frustration, and eventually outright hostility (particularly in the case of Cuba) toward the bourgeois nationalism of Bolivia’s middle-class leadership.
Nonalignment came naturally to the middle-class nationalists who rose to the top of Bolivia’s revolutionary coalition in 1952. Formed in the midst of world war in 1942, the MNR gained a strong following in the organized labor movement by ruthlessly criticizing what it viewed as the Bolivian oligarchy’s subservient relationship to British and U.S. capitalists. Throughout the war, the MNR and its most outspoken middle-class orator, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, advocated in Parliament for selling tin to the Axis Powers (or threatening to do so) in order to obtain higher prices to fund Bolivia’s internal development.13 The official MNR newspaper, La Calle, even peddled in right-wing anti-Semitic nationalism, characterizing the Allied cause as a cosmopolitan, banker, and Jewish conspiracy in league with international Communism.14 Bolivian Trotksyists similarly condemned the Allies, minus the MNR’s bigotry and xenophobia, and eventually forged a revolutionary coalition with MNR politicians and trade unionists, which successfully overthrew the oligarchy in a bloody uprising in April 1952.15
The MNR’s history of extreme nationalism and anti-Bolshevism helps to explain its subsequent approach to foreign policy as a governing party in the 1950s and 1960s. This included the party’s strong opposition to the leftist Guatemalan revolution, its utilitarian approaches to the Third World project and the Communist Second World, its halfhearted tolerance for revolutionary Cuba, and its willing embrace of development assistance from the anti-Communist United States. This meant that, even as the MNR dismantled British capitalist control of Bolivia’s tin-mining sector, its bourgeois leadership spurned early 1950s entreaties from the Communist world in favor of its tactical alliance with Washington. Concessions to U.S. capitalists began in the late 1950s, when rampant inflation led President Paz Estenssoro and his successor, Hernán Siles Suazo (1956–60), to open the country’s hydrocarbon sector to foreign investors and invite the International Monetary Fund to draw up an austerity plan for stabilizing the country’s currency.16 These measures not only alienated nationalist and leftist workers; they also produced a noticeable distance between Bolivia and ongoing events in revolutionary Cuba.
Tensions were readily apparent between Bolivia’s nationalist experiment and more thoroughgoing transformations in Cuba. About a year after the triumph of the 1959 Cuban revolution, Havana’s Foreign Ministry complained about “pressure that the Bolivian government has exercised toward certain persons and institutions with the goal of ending their collaboration with our mission and impeding them from organizing events in support of Cuba.” In May 1960, the Bolivian foreign minister went so far as to remind the Cuban ambassador in La Paz that while the two country’s revolutionary processes “were the same, they take on distinct forms … due to the fact that the Cuban revolution has impacted powerful U.S. interests, while the Bolivian process has not.” Bolivia’s MNR government complained about the circulation of Cuban revolutionary materials in La Paz, saying that the pamphlets and fliers “violate the spirit and letter of Pan-Americanism since they constitute propaganda against a country [the U.S.], and even against the Hemisphere itself.” The Cuban government lamented the MNR’s cold shoulder, noting that “while there has not been a hostile or aggressive attitude toward the Cuban revolution on the part of the Bolivian government, due largely to pressure from the enormous trade unions, especially the miners,” it was still clear that “the government’s economic dependency on the United States results in a vacillating attitude with respect to the Cuban revolution.”17
The return of Víctor Paz Estenssoro to the presidency in late 1960 led many on the Bolivian Left to presume that “a revolution within the revolution was possible.” Paz had visited Prague and Belgrade during his interregnal ambassadorship to London (1956–60), and one of his first post-inaugural acts of diplomacy was to dispatch a permanent envoy to Czechoslovakia to finalize agreements for Soviet-bloc economic assistance.18 To represent revolutionary Bolivia in Prague, Paz Estenssoro selected MNR leftist poet Jorge Calvimontes, who privately revealed to Czechoslovak officials his “full sympathy for Cuba and strong opposition to the United States.”19 In January 1961, this initial MNR foray into Second World diplomacy resulted in a series of economic and cultural agreements, including a tentative offer of an antimony smelter, which were unveiled during a weeklong visit to La Paz by Prague’s vice minister of foreign affairs. As the Czechoslovak mission departed, the Bolivian Foreign Ministry privately boasted that Prague viewed this agreement as “just a single aspect of the broad commercial channel that could be established” between the two countries, adding that it had no reason to doubt Prague’s assurances that it “did not try to obtain any commitment of a political nature and that [its] proposals were motivated by [its] government’s necessity to sell machinery produced by Czechoslovak heavy industry, as well as its desire to cooperate with Bolivia’s economic growth.”20
The CIA was obviously less enamored by revolutionary Bolivia’s newfound diplomatic promiscuity, reporting that President Paz was “under heavy domestic pressure” from MNR leftists and trade unions to accept Prague’s credit offer as well as a separate aid package of $150 million, which had been announced by a Soviet parliamentary delegation visit to the Bolivian mining camps in December of the previous year. Noting that Paz Estenssoro was simultaneously “seeking an emergency increase in American aid,” the CIA suspected that the MNR leader’s Second World gambit was aimed at “dramatizing Bolivia’s interest in foreign economic help.”21 According to more alarmist agency sources in La Paz, however, President Paz Estenssoro “conveyed the impression that he considers American grant aid … a part of ordinary revenues on which his administration can count,” and he was thus giving the Second World an “opportunity for political penetration” by “reserving” high-profile extraction projects for the Soviet bloc.22 The State Department therefore recommended an immediate increase in U.S. aid to Bolivia, fretting that “the Soviets are genuinely interested in establishing a foothold in Latin America” alongside Moscow’s burgeoning alliance with Cuba.23
If Bolivia’s middle-class revolutionaries sought to employ the threat of Second World economic relations to score an increase in U.S. financial assistance, this appeared to be working. In private conversations with White House aide Arthur Schlesinger in February 1961, President Paz Estenssoro distanced his revolution from Cuba’s, arguing that the latter “puts land in the hands of the state,” while the MNR process “puts land into the hands of the peasants.” After Paz Estenssoro offered his view that Cuban leader Fidel Castro “must be eliminated,” Schlesinger recorded in his diary the good news—“his words are excellent”—along with the bad—“his actions belie his words”—particularly Paz Estenssoro’s lack of interest in taking public his views on Cuba and his continued economic flirtation with the Soviet bloc. Warning President Kennedy that “the loss of Bolivia would be a catastrophe,” Schlesinger added his voice in support of an emergency aid package. After three months of negotiations with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Bolivia signed a $13.5 million aid package for the state-controlled tin- mining sector. Immediately leaked to the public was a list of “Accepted Points of View,” harsh conditions imposed by USAID and the IDB that committed the MNR government to abolishing worker representation in mine management, firing 20 percent of the mine workforce, and physically removing Communist Party members from trade union leadership.24
Socialist diplomats in faraway Prague and Moscow might have resolved to watch Bolivia fall deeper into a dependent relationship with the United States, but revolutionaries in Havana could ill afford to lose ground among their diminishing cadre of nationalist and leftist friends in the Western Hemisphere. Throughout May and June a fierce debate over USAID’s antilabor conditions roiled the country, and there was a sharp uptick in U.S. military and police assistance to facilitate the impending roundup of dozens of labor leaders opposed to the USAID plan.25 Refusing to stand idly by while the Bolivian Left faced annihilation, the Cuban Foreign Ministry reevaluated its previous policy of treading carefully in Bolivia so as to “lessen friction with the [Bolivian] Foreign Ministry” and avoid being “accused of intervening in Bolivian domestic politics.”26 Interpreting Bolivia’s consideration of USAID’s labor conditions as evidence of the MNR Right’s “submission to imperialism, its unpopularity, and its actions contrary to the revolutionary process,” Cuban diplomats prepared to support “more democratic elements,” who “feel a certain sympathy with our process and can be utilized” to resist further concessions to the United States. By providing an unspecified level of “economic support” to MNR leftists and Communist Party members, particularly in the trade union movement, the Cuban Foreign Ministry believed revolutionary Bolivia could once again be encouraged to adopt policies “in favor of the masses.” Havana’s ultimate goal was to help coordinate Bolivia’s domestic resistance to Paz Estenssoro’s deepening reliance on the United States, thus encouraging those local leftists who recognized that “the brotherly people of Bolivia have only one solution for their economic, political, and social problems: armed insurrection which will irrevocably lead the people toward their definitive triumph.”27
Cuba’s strategy of encouraging insurrection by local Communists and MNR leftists rested on the fact that “the majority of the miners and peasants happen to be armed”; many of them also believed their revolution to have been “betrayed” by bourgeois MNR leaders such as Paz Estenssoro. That said, Cuban diplomats recognized that “to move toward the taking of power, it is necessary to create a revolutionary consciousness among the working class and especially in the peasantry.” Its specific policies thus included rather moderate proposals to cultivate leftist members of the governing MNR through embassy events and sponsored visits to Cuba that would “improve relations” between the two revolutionary countries. Behind the scenes, Cuba also planned to work with Communist Party members, particularly in the youth and labor movements, who would “form a revolutionary group that would serve as an example of integrity and enterprise in contrast with the caudillos” of Paz Estenssoro’s MNR machine. According to Havana, it was “necessary to trust only in the Communist Party for the insurrectionary task, because aside from having a political line allied with the work that needs to be done, it is the party that boasts the best human material.”28
When dozens of Communist trade union leaders were arrested by President Paz’s secret police in mid-1961, for no other reason than their opposition to the harsh USAID conditions, Cuba was the only country to lend diplomatic support by hosting the families and allies of the detainees at its embassy in La Paz. In response, right-wing members of the MNR attacked Havana’s local installations, plastering their walls with placards that read, “Disgusting Castristas, get out of Bolivia, or you’ll end up hung by the lampposts,” “Death to Communism,” and “Center of the Communist conspiracy against national sovereignty.”29 The conservative press accused the Cuban embassy of intervening in the labor dispute by hosting meetings with striking Communist trade union leaders, leading the Cuban Foreign Ministry to fret that local rightist hostility “could damage Bolivian relations with our country.” Havana’s diplomats thus breathed a sigh of relief when Paz Estenssoro’s Foreign Ministry notified the press that, despite the controversy, his country’s “relations with the revolutionary government of Cuba would continue with absolute normalcy,” and Cuba privately praised the MNR government for “not accepting the opinion of [right-wing] outlets for a single minute.”30
By cracking down on the domestic Left while continuing to respect Bolivia’s relations with socialist nations, President Paz Estenssoro’s MNR was playing a game familiar to nonaligned Third World leaders. Indeed, throughout the crisis brought on by Bolivia’s acceptance of USAID’s antilabor conditions, the Paz government continued its high-profile economic diplomacy toward the Soviet bloc. An MNR parliamentary delegation visited Moscow in June 1961, proclaiming “emphatically,” for good measure, “that the sympathies of the workers and peasants of Bolivia is with the cause of the Cuban revolution.”31 Later that year, Paz Estenssoro’s envoy to Prague “expressed delight” to Czechoslovak officials “that economic relations between our two countries are developing quite well.”32 And in November, Spain’s anti-Communist ambassador in La Paz noted that “the Czechoslovak delegation here, blessed with funds and ample resources, carries out an active and effective job of Soviet recruitment, for its activity clearly exceeds its own interests, thus becoming an agent of the USSR.”33
Bolivian President Paz Estenssoro sought to provoke alarm in Washington through continued flirtation with the Soviet bloc, even as he dedicated his government domestically to President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. The U.S. State Department took the bait, noting that while Paz’s MNR was “basically still oriented toward the free world … strong Communist infiltration in the labor movement” meant that “we are faced with an immediate emergency.… Soviet pressure is strong [and] the Bolivian government is in a precarious situation.” Estimating that Bolivia was the “weakest of all the countries on the continent” and the “prime Soviet target in Latin America,” the State Department likened the revolutionary nation to an “under-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed individual who is exposed to tuberculosis.” Declaring that “we cannot regard Bolivia as a loss,” the Kennedy administration focused on its central goal of curtailing the country’s nonaligned pretenses. In short, Washington privately resolved to do “everything we can to prevent Soviet access to the internal affairs of Bolivia.”34
For Latin American countries receiving U.S. funds under Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, the issue of Cuba was even thornier than that of Eastern Europe. Bolivia’s MNR leaders fervently attempted to frame their continuing relations with Cuba as an issue of Third World nonalignment similar to Latin American ties to the socialist states of Eastern Europe. Washington rejected these arguments and instead labored to separate the Cuban issue from the global Third World and to frame it through an inflexible mélange of Pan-American solidarity and Cold War anti-Communism. Revolutionary Bolivia’s steadfastness in its relations with Castro’s Cuba would soon complicate Paz Estenssoro’s Third World game, prompting a level of anxiety in Washington far beyond what he had hoped.
Based on extensive interviews with friends and family of the father of Bolivia’s national revolution, I have argued elsewhere that Víctor Paz Estenssoro was a “sincere if flawed nationalist” and a genuine adherent of Third World nonalignment. His son confided that Paz’s “points of reference” were nonaligned leaders such as Indonesian President Sukarno, India’s Jawalharlal Nehru, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. A journalist close to the Paz Estenssoro wing of the MNR added that President Paz “loved [Yugoslav leader Josep Broz] Tito. He wanted to be a Latin American Tito, to play both sides of the Cold War.”35 For a short period in 1961 and 1962, Paz Estenssoro seemed to be succeeding in his Third World gambit: he had successfully secured a prime place in President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress without breaking off economic negotiations with the Soviet bloc or even considering a diplomatic rupture with Cuba.
In October 1961, Bolivia was one of only four Latin American countries to send delegations to observe the inaugural meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Heading the Bolivian delegation was Education Minister José Fellman Velarde, an MNR nationalist who was subsequently appointed to lead the Bolivian Foreign Ministry beginning in January 1962. Cuban diplomats, the only Latin Americans to actually sign up to the NAM at Belgrade, had previously disparaged Fellman as a middle-class “enemy of Cuba,” but Havana was intrigued by the minister’s recent political evolution. Just prior to visiting Belgrade, Fellman had canceled a trip to the United States when his wife (who lacked a visa) was refused boarding by the U.S. airline in La Paz.36 Fellman subsequently toured Eastern Europe and began work as a correspondent for Havana’s Prensa Latina, leading the U.S. embassy to fret that the new foreign minister was becoming a “close friend of the Cuban Chargé” and would likely spell difficulty for Washington’s plan to erect a hemisphere-wide economic and diplomatic blockade of socialist Cuba.37
Throughout early 1962, the U.S. embassy in La Paz leveled fierce pressure against nationalist Bolivia, trying to convince the MNR to join the majority of the hemisphere in breaking relations with Havana. In February, the embassy wrote privately to Foreign Minister Fellman that Cuba’s Marxist-Leninism was “incompatible with the Inter-American System,” adding that “the government of the United States hopes other countries will join in the effort to achieve, without delay” a decision by the Organization of American States (OAS) “that the present Cuban regime be excluded from participation.”38 U.S. diplomats scoffed at Fellman’s public proclamation that relations between Bolivia and Cuba would have nothing to do with “Castro regime, but rather with what the Cubans do or do not do in Bolivia.” According to the foreign minister, “Our attitude is not subordinated to other countries, but is always a product of our own decisions arising from national politics.”39 Washington groused that “governments which apparently regard themselves unaffected or less seriously threatened by the Cuban alignment with an extra-continental system and power bloc” should act with “a sense of urgency equal to that which they would feel if they themselves were directly affected.” In another private communiqué to the foreign minister, U.S. diplomats returned to alarmist Pan-Americanism, depicting the OAS debate on Cuba sanctions as “perhaps decisive for Inter-American security,” thus launching a mostly futile campaign to recruit nationalist Bolivia to join its anti-Castro crusade.40
As one of only three postrevolutionary states in Latin America, aside from Mexico and Cuba, Bolivia’s neutralist position on the latter soon became the site of an intense proxy war within the country, one that threatened to derail Paz Estenssoro’s tenuous Third Worldism by injecting into the country the unwelcome binaries of the Cold War. The Cuban Foreign Ministry, anxious to shore up support for a continuation of normal diplomatic relations, rushed to offer generous scholarships and travel grants to sympathetic Bolivians, particularly members of the left, labor, and youth sectors of the governing nationalist party, along with the much smaller (and decidedly pro-Cuba) Partido Comunista de Bolivia (PCB, Communist Party of Bolivia).41 Nationalist and Communist Bolivian trade union leaders who visited Cuba in early 1962 returned to deliver emotional vows to defend the socialist island, the first truly “free territory of the Americas.” In trade union halls and at national conferences, labor leaders mocked “the imperialists” and their “puppet governments … of oligarchic bourgeois creoles, landowners, and traffickers,” who characterized Cuba as a “threat to the hemisphere,” quipping that it was “considered a threat simply because in Cuba there is progress, honesty, hospitality, and freedom.”42 At the Eleventh Congress of the Bolivian Mine Workers Federation in mid-1961, one executive committee member launched into a strident apology for revolutionary Cuba, declaring that “we will defend the Cuban Revolution, because to do so means defending the Bolivian Revolution.… All those peoples who suffer from the scourge of imperialism pin their hopes on the definitive consolidation of the Cuban Revolution.”43
Perhaps the most strident pro-Cuba voice in Bolivia was that of the MNR’s youth faction, which in early 1962 pledged “popular solidarity with the historic cause of an entire people rising up in arms against Yankee imperialism” and called for insurrections throughout the region to abolish “the same chains and misery that weigh on the shoulders of all the inhabitants of the Americas.” Vowing to put pressure on its governing nationalist party to deepen the Bolivian revolutionary process, the MNR youth declared that Cuba’s experiences since 1959 “had objectively demonstrated that oppressed and exploited peoples can obtain their liberation, as long as they struggle in a way that is valiant, resolved, and constant.”44 Offering its full support for Bolivian workers’ struggle against the antilabor conditions required by U.S. aid funds under the Alliance for Progress, the MNR youth wrote to Paz Estenssoro in 1961 that his rightward shift “fills us with shame.” Rejecting the infusion of Bolivian politics with Cold War binaries, the nationalist youth declared that “Communism is in the just demands of the workers who cannot live on starvation wages,” and its members asked rhetorically, “When will the true revolution arrive?”45
Havana’s local allies seemed to favor replicating Cuba’s radical global approach to liberate Bolivia from U.S.-led Pan-Americanism, but the Cubans themselves sought to reassure MNR leadership as to their benevolent local intentions. Aside from quietly providing assistance to the workers and students on the MNR Left and in the PCB who might eventually take up arms, the Cuban Foreign Ministry also instructed its embassy to adopt a soft public profile, to “attend all official and diplomatic functions” of the MNR government, and to “carry out the task of getting close [acercamiento] to Víctor Paz Estenssoro.”46 In February 1962, Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa wrote to his counterpart, José Fellman, expressing that Havana was “keenly interested in increasing and strengthening the relations of cooperation and friendship between Bolivia and Cuba.” Revealing that his ministry was transferring the head of its Latin America division to lead the Cuban delegation in Bolivia, Roa expressed the “profound desire of the [Cuban] revolutionary government that Bolivia accredit an ambassador in Havana,” and he concluded by thanking the MNR government for its “gallant position” in defense of Cuba at the OAS.47
Given the extent of U.S. aid flowing into revolutionary Bolivia in the early 1960s, it is intriguing to note the subtle contradiction between middle-class MNR leaders’ official tolerance of Havana’s high-level diplomacy and the persistently more radical pro-Cuba posture of grassroots MNR youth and labor activists. A 22 February 1962 “Manifesto of Solidarity with Cuba” boasted the signatures of a vast majority of MNR trade union and youth leaders and was formally presented to the Cuban embassy by a parliamentary delegation of the governing party. The document, which was also endorsed by the PCB, condemned Washington’s treatment of Cuba as “aggression,” which reflected First World ignorance of the “fundamental change in the balance of forces in the international scene that is increasingly favorable to National Liberation for colonies and semi-colonies and makes it inevitable that they will achieve their true independence.” According to the manifesto, the MNR rank and file would continue to stand up for Bolivia’s “interests, dignity, and national honor” by holding fast in defense of the Cuban revolution, a process that “invoked a historical obligation which unites us in the common homeland of Indo-America with Murillo, Martí, Zapata, Juárez, and Albizu Campos.”48
This growing tension between the MNR government’s foreign policy neutralism and its party’s radical youth and labor sectors was temporarily papered over by President Paz Estenssoro’s strategic penchant for diplomatic theater. Aside from standing by Cuba at the OAS, this also included keeping his party’s Left occupied with dramatic displays of outreach to Eastern Europe—showy entreaties that the MNR leader never planned to consummate. In late February, Bolivia’s leftist chargé in Prague, Jorge Calvimontes, pleaded with the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry that “we finally do something in order to see tangible results” in drawn-out trade negotiations between the two countries. Prague’s diplomats ruefully observed that “it is a great pity that solid economic relations are yet to be established since we have been waiting for over a year now for the Bolivian economic delegation, already announced many times.”49 In a secret report, Czechoslovakia chalked up “Bolivia’s inability to accept loans offered by the USSR and the socialist camp” to the MNR’s “more pronounced dependence on the United States of America,” particularly under President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress development program. Noting that negotiations over USAID’s harsh antilabor conditions “continue to drag on,” however, Prague resolved to “advance very carefully, while still aggressively exploiting every opportunity to deepen divisions between Bolivia and the capitalist states led by the USA.” According to Prague, Eastern European trade offers to Bolivia should “not be considered so significant from a commercial aspect as much as from the economic aid offered to an underdeveloped country.”50
In early June 1962, the long-awaited Bolivian parliamentary delegation arrived in Prague, tasked with seeking ways to “achieve a certain degree of independence” in Bolivia’s economic relations and (more important from Paz Estenssoro’s perspective) to provoke a new wave of fear among Washington negotiators continuing to demand harsh reforms in exchange for U.S. aid funding. Noting “the political importance” of the MNR mission to Prague, the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry sought to “take appropriate steps … [to] maximize the benefit of the Bolivian delegation.” The mission succeeded in finalizing its long-stalled offer of an antimony smelter, which Prague believed would galvanize the left sector of the governing MNR and deliver in the process a “bold bite [tučným soustem] against the Bolivian reaction.”51 The CIA agreed that “the smelter, which is the Bloc’s first developmental assistance to Bolivia, is expected to have considerable political impact.”52
For nationalist Bolivia, Czechoslovakia’s willingness to play the role of Washington’s bogeyman was a welcome plot twist. Just days after dispatching his parliamentary delegation to Prague, President Paz Estenssoro sent a parallel mission to Washington, led by two cabinet ministers who shared his Third World vision. Planning to seek U.S. approval for an $80 million Bolivian request under the Alliance for Progress, the mission members told the local press that they were really going to Washington to “find out whether the Alliance was fact or fiction.” Unlike the smelter negotiations in Prague, which culminated in five short days, Bolivia’s mission to Washington remained mired for eight weeks in disagreements over the USAID conditions. This mostly stemmed from U.S. demands that the governing MNR implement the remainder of the 1961 anti-Communist labor reforms prior to additional funds being approved.53 With Alliance for Progress aid funding stalled, the CIA suggested that the White House take close account of the fact that Eastern European aid “has great appeal in Bolivia,” due to the country’s “desperate economic need.” Consummation of development agreements from the socialist world had previously been “delayed primarily by President Paz,” but the CIA warned that these Soviet bloc offers were now being “hotly debated” in Bolivia’s trade union halls and Parliament, and that the MNR government was coming “under increasing pressure” to call Washington’s hand and prove to the world that its Second World gambit was more than mere bluster.54
When the head of Bolivia’s mission, Economic Minister Alfonso Gumucio, finally met with White House officials on 18 July, it was clear to Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger that the mission leader “bears all the aspects of a man tried beyond endurance until his spirit is substantially broken.” Schlesinger begged the Washington bureaucracy to put aside its conditions and approve the $80 million aid package “for the sake of our future relations with Bolivia” and to ensure that Gumucio did not “return to Bolivia a most irritated and discouraged man at the end of the week.” The following day, after nearly eight weeks in Washington, Gumucio’s mission received word that USAID had approved the entire $80 million request, along with a warning that the new aid package was merely a “test case” that would not be repeated until the Paz Estenssoro government moved forward with the anti-Communist “realignments and reforms that he professes to seek” in the Bolivian trade union movement.55
With the Czechoslovak smelter deal in June and the U.S. financial aid package in July, Paz Estenssoro’s diplomatic Third Worldism reached its high-water mark. Just as the nationalist leader had hoped, the MNR government’s entreaties to Eastern Europe fueled geopolitical anxiety in Washington, which translated into looser purse strings under Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. Meanwhile, Paz Estenssoro continued to defend his country’s normal diplomatic relations with revolutionary Cuba, and MNR leftists traveled in droves to the socialist island, where they declared loyalty to Third World principles and shared with Cuban diplomats their recommendations on how to deepen Bolivia’s revolutionary process. In Washington, the Cuba issue was radioactive, and U.S. diplomats chafed at their apparent lack of leverage over the governing MNR. Throughout late 1962 and early 1963, Washington redoubled its efforts to convince Paz Estenssoro that his government’s toleration of Cuba and its continued flirtations with Eastern Europe combined to represent a “disturbing political issue,” sharply incongruent with Bolivia’s acceptance of large-scale development assistance under Kennedy’s anti-Communist Alliance for Progress.56
In mid-1962, an internal CIA assessment took stock of revolutionary Bolivia’s Third World game. Acknowledging that “the government of President Paz favored postponing acceptance of [Soviet bloc] aid in the hope that Bolivia’s aspirations might be realized through the Alliance for Progress,” the CIA lamented that “pressure on the government from leftist labor groups” had forced through the Czechoslovak smelter project two months earlier. Worse yet, Bolivia’s initial success with Eastern Europe had reopened domestic debate in Bolivia regarding aid from the Soviet Union itself, with MNR leftists now concentrating their efforts on a $150 million offer that had been made by Moscow eighteen months earlier.57 MNR leftists in parliament wrote to President Paz Estenssoro in August, wondering aloud if “anti-national and anti-revolutionary agreements with foreign signatories” in Washington had been conditioned on Bolivia rejecting further aid offers from socialist nations. Asking their party leader, “How can you explain that the offer made by Nikita Khrushchev in 1960 … has not yet been accepted?” the MNR politicians added rhetorically: “What powerful forces have prevented, and apparently continue to prevent, the dispatch of a commercial mission to the Soviet Union?”58
The left sector of Bolivia’s governing MNR had clearly been emboldened by the signing of the Czechoslovak smelter project, but it was U.S. duplicity over the coming weeks that threatened to push Bolivia over the brink to radicalization. The ink had barely dried on Washington’s new $80 million aid agreement when the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it would begin selling large quantities of tin from the strategic stockpile held by its General Services Administration. The U.S. ambassador in La Paz complained that the selloff would “probably be construed here as ‘dumping,’ ” and he warned that many Bolivians would see this as an “example of U.S. hypocrisy.” According to the U.S. embassy, the scandal put President Paz Estenssoro’s “head in [a] political noose,” particularly since Paz Estenssoro was scheduled to visit the White House in late September. A trip to Washington in the midst of U.S. tin-dumping could lead to a crisis in which President Paz “could fall or be forced [to] take [a] strongly antagonistic attitude” toward the United States. When the State Department refused to offer Paz Estenssoro any assurance that his visit would lead to an agreement to halt U.S. sales of stockpiled tin, the Bolivian president canceled his trip and even temporarily pulled his country out of future meetings of the OAS.59
As if on cue, five members of Moscow’s Supreme Soviet arrived in La Paz in September, having been invited by leftist MNR parliamentarians to finalize the long-stalled economic aid offer. When a group of anti-Communist protesters arrived to denounce the Soviet mission, MNR youth cadres attacked them and were soon backed up by Paz Estenssoro’s security services operating under the command of MNR labor unions. According to the U.S. embassy, “The brutal actions of the police were undoubtedly ordered to insure that the anticommunist marchers would feel the full weight of police repression and discourage future anticommunist demonstrations.”60 A week later, the U.S. embassy warned Washington that “a crisis in Bolivia’s political orientation is near at hand.… Evidence [is] piling up that we may well be in the process [of a] complete [MNR] left sector takeover with large-scale Soviet aid.” Due to the fact that MNR leftists were pushing rapidly for “advanced stage socialism with greater ties to [the] Soviet Union and at least partial collaboration with the Communist Party,” the U.S. embassy called for “serious consideration [of] contingency alternatives” to split Paz Estenssoro from the left sector of his own party and to halt Bolivia’s sharp turn to the Left.61
President Kennedy responded to these events by placing Bolivia on his Counterinsurgency (CI) Watch List, requiring the U.S. embassy to drum up an “Internal Defense Plan,” posthaste. According to the White House committee in charge of coordinating interagency and covert approaches to counterinsurgency in the Third World, Bolivian neutralism had permitted local Marxists to “operate so freely and openly” that “few, if any agencies” of the MNR government were “free of communist influence.” The White House agreed that contingency alternatives were necessary to support Paz Estenssoro and split him away from the MNR Left, principally because it worried that “it may not be possible to achieve” the politico-developmental goals of the Alliance for Progress “in time to be effective against the communist threat.”62 The stakes had suddenly been raised in nationalist Bolivia’s Third World game. Over the coming months, leftist ascendancy would be matched by a rapid uptick in U.S. covert operations to shore up the Paz Estenssoro government, convince him to abandon his party’s left sector, and pressure him to adopt a foreign policy attitude more favorable to his benefactors in Washington.63
In October 1962, the Cuban Foreign Ministry noted “the enormous pressure that U.S. imperialism continues to carry out” in Bolivia, lamenting that the MNR government had “practically negated acceptance of socialist camp offers,” including potential aid agreements that were Bolivia’s only viable hope for “facing up to and resolving its economic crisis.” Characterizing Washington’s hardline position on Eastern European aid as “blackmail,” the Foreign Ministry added that U.S. “imperialism is operating in a violent way to obtain a break with Cuba.” According to Havana, the only thing stopping Paz Estenssoro from throwing in his lot completely with the United States was Washington’s tin-dumping scandal, coupled with President Paz’s realization that outright rejection of Eastern European aid or a break with Cuba would cause his government to “suffer further discrediting among the popular sectors” of the MNR youth and labor left.64
As U.S. foreign policy shifted from courting President Paz with economic aid to more militant covert political programs to break him away from the MNR Left, the Bolivian president appeared to manifest fresh interest in deepening his country’s relations with Cuba. In early 1963, Paz Estenssoro announced the assignment of an official envoy to Havana, and in February he hosted a meeting at the presidential palace with the head of Cuba’s mission in La Paz, Ramón Aja Castro, whom U.S. diplomats disparaged as “the center and coordinating figure in [the] entire Cuban intelligence operations set-up in South America.”65 More risky still, Bolivian Communist Party members recall that their general secretary, Mario Monje, began boasting in March that the PCB’s coordination of Cuban-sponsored armed liberation movements now enjoyed a “direct contact to the Presidency.” The largest of these covert guerrilla operations was Operación Matraca, in which dozens of Cuban-trained Peruvians received PCB support as they crossed Bolivia on their way to attack the military regime in neighboring Peru. In March, PCB General Secretary Monje told Czechoslovak Communist Party leaders that “Paz Estenssoro was heavily involved, including financial support” for Matraca to the tune of $20,000.66 These funds were apparently given to Paz Estenssoro’s Marxist friend, Víctor Zannier, a newspaper editor and Cuban contact who hosted several would-be Peruvian guerrillas at his home in Cochabamba before they were rounded up by unwitting, low-level Bolivian police. One of the Peruvian guerrilla leaders later declared assuredly that the Paz government was “aware of the operation and supported it.”67
This would have represented a striking shift in MNR policy, which a Cuban intelligence officer chalked up to the rise of “good relations between the Bolivian and Cuban governments” since the U.S. tin-dumping fracas of late 1962.68 A few weeks after Operación Matraca failed disastrously at Peru’s Puerto Maldonado a few miles across the border, Bolivia’s Foreign Ministry infuriated the U.S. State Department in mid-June by giving its highest diplomatic decoration, the Condor of the Andes, to Cuban Chargé Aja Castro.69 For Bolivia’s nationalist leader, prone to taking risks in the name of Third World nonalignment, collaboration with Cuban revolutionary operations seems to have been an especially dangerous gamble.
That is, of course, unless the intrigue surrounding Operación Matraca was nothing more than another one of Paz Estenssoro’s nationalist bluffs. “The Americans knew everything,” Paz’s private secretary told me, adding that the U.S. embassy “was informed at every step of the way.”70 The would-be Peruvian guerrillas who had been arrested in Cochabamba were quietly passed to their country’s military government “at an unnamed border point,” and Peruvian diplomats in La Paz privately praised the Bolivian government’s “cooperation” to U.S. embassy officials, pleading that Paz Estenssoro’s duplicity with Cuba be “held in strict confidence.” The CIA station chief, Tom Flores, was even permitted to participate in the interrogations of several Peruvian guerrillas in Bolivia’s Pando province.71 As PCB General Secretary Monje told the Czechoslovaks, his decision to include President Paz Estenssoro in Matraca “very likely did not sufficiently ensure the operation’s confidentiality,” principally since it had now appeared that “the American Embassy in La Paz has been informed.” PCB Central Committee members later lamented that their faith in Paz Estenssoro “appeared in hindsight to have been erroneous.”72
As Bolivia’s nationalist president betrayed his tenuous allies on the pro-Cuba Left, he meanwhile played similarly insincere games with Eastern Europe. In March 1963, the U.S. embassy reported that the “Czechs have been meeting day and night” with MNR officials in La Paz, who appeared “disposed to accept offer” of an antimony smelter, signed almost a year earlier in Prague but again delayed by President Paz Estenssoro. Privately, the Bolivian president vowed to the U.S. embassy that the “Czech antimony smelter would not go through while he is in office,” but U.S. officials worried nonetheless that the “attractiveness [of the] present offer and strong public sentiment for national smelter of any kind, plus his need to have an important showpiece project may compel [the] president to bow to political pressure.”73 In April, the U.S. embassy reported that the Paz government “will continue [to] stall on [the] Czech offer,” despite noting that the president would “suffer political setback” as a result.74 Noting that Prague had offered “substantial concessions” in its attempt to win Bolivian government approval, the U.S. embassy pinned its hopes on their estimation that Paz Estenssoro was letting negotiations proceed merely to “provide a façade of official enthusiasm for a project which has provoked much interest in Bolivia, and whose sudden abandonment might well cause domestic political problems.”75 Local USAID officials, recognizing that there was a lack of appetite in Washington for further funding of the badly behaving MNR, nonetheless did everything they could to “stiffen” Bolivian resistance to Czechoslovak aid projects and to “stall further progress.”76
The Paz Estenssoro government continued to come under incessant U.S. pressure to move its nationalist revolution “away from both communism and neutralism,” in the words of Washington’s embassy in La Paz.77 Throughout 1963, U.S. officials launched a host of overt and covert operations to bolster Paz Estenssoro’s repressive security apparatus, “induce [him] to run for a third presidential term,” and convince him to make a definitive break with the left sector of his party.78 According to the U.S. embassy, the stability of a third Paz government would mean a “harder line on Cuba, a harder line on the internal communist problem … [and] a harder line on Soviet bloc aid.”79 Indeed it did. Between the launch of his reelection campaign in late 1963 and his fall from power in November 1964, the father of the Bolivian revolution allied his secret police service firmly with the CIA station in La Paz, used USAID weapons to arm strike-breaking MNR peasant militias, dramatically broke with the left sector of the governing party, obtained a third term in the face of a mass abstention of the entire MNR labor movement and all opposition parties, reluctantly broke with Cuba, and sent CIA-armed militiamen to face off with rebellious students and workers seeking a reprise revolution that would return nationalist Bolivia to the Third World promise that once defined the now hollow MNR party.80
As Bolivia’s twelve-year experiment with middle-class nationalism took a sharp domestic turn to the right in 1963 and 1964, the country’s spurned socialist suitors anticipated the worst. In December 1963, the Czechoslovak embassy began to worry that President Paz Estenssoro’s local efforts to “weaken the left wing of the ruling MNR” were resulting in “provocations … against the trade unions and the PCB, as well as against the diplomatic representations of the socialist states.” Unwilling to give up on Bolivia’s nationalist workers, Prague resolved to carry out “greater activity” through its local embassy to shore up the embattled MNR trade unions (and indirectly the PCB, which “works through them”), in order to ensure that the labor movement continued to “play a positive role influencing the policy of the current government.”81 As the Czechoslovaks continued to limit their direct funding of local Communists, responding to a May 1964 PCB request with a curt “No way,” Prague meanwhile helped to coordinate an increase in Soviet aid to Bolivia’s national labor federation, which roughly doubled from $5,000 to $10,000 in 1963.82
At the heart of Czechoslovakia’s persisting courtship of progressive sectors of the governing MNR was its acceptance of private Bolivian government claims to Prague that Paz Estenssoro was merely “allowing the Right to mobilize and increase its influence” as a “temporary tactic” to win reelection and continue his flexible Third World foreign policy. Prague worried, nonetheless, that the hidden connection between domestic and foreign affairs could complicate Paz Estenssoro’s gamble, since his rightward shift was “moving rapidly toward a total alienation from the workers, who … are increasingly anti-imperialist and anti-Paz.” The Bolivian Left had begun to view Paz Estenssoro as the “White House favorite,” with U.S. diplomats publicly fawning over the MNR leader as “the type of ‘revolutionary’ who can break the momentum of ‘communism and Fidelism.’ ” To halt these developments, Prague hoped the Cuban embassy would join its efforts to support the waning MNR left sector, thus abandoning the “relative passivity” that had defined Havana’s foreign policy since the rightward shift began in mid-1963.83
If the Czechoslovaks continued to believe in nationalist Bolivia’s Third World promise, Cuba had already begun to write off the MNR as a bourgeois fraud, particularly in the wake of the Operación Matraca debacle. According to Havana, Paz Estenssoro’s acceptance of USAID’s antilabor conditions had “not only guaranteed Paz’s reelection” with Washington’s support, but also “br[ought] with it the conclusion that the popular forces have been roughly beaten throughout the country, leading to … a policy more sold out to the Yankee government.” In October 1963, the Cuban Foreign Ministry recognized the futility of Paz Estenssoro’s “attempt to balance” domestic anti-Communism with a Third World posture abroad, since “those same [rightist] forces that now support his reelection will maintain their future positions of influence,” from which they “will battle against this foreign policy … [of] nonalignment.” Instead of continuing to play footsie with the governing sectors of the MNR, Cuba’s consistent recommendation to its local allies was to begin “preparations for a general or national strike” that would bring about a true revolution in Bolivia, one that would cease to enable “the repressive designs against popular movements that had begun to be applied by the [U.S.] State Department throughout the continent.”84
Friends of Cuba on the MNR Left had begun to draw similar conclusions by mid-1964. Shortly after Paz’s reinauguration in August, leftist workers and students joined with the MNR’s traditional right-wing enemies to wage a nationwide insurrection that reached crisis proportions by late October. In the midst of the uprising, Havana’s Bohemia and Radio Progreso declared that Paz Estenssoro was “yesterday a nationalist, today Washington’s peon,” who had “sold out to imperialism” and now governed over “one of the most hostile regimes toward the Latin American people.”85 While the workers and students initially buckled under the weight of Paz Estenssoro’s CIA-supplied secret police, civilian rebels soon began to court military officials, who intervened on 3 November to restore order and depose the duplicitous MNR leader.86 Two weeks after the coup, the Cuban foreign ministry privately rejoiced at the overthrow of the “demagogic pseudo-revolutionary,” Víctor Paz Estenssoro, whose “elimination from the Bolivian political scene” meant that “one of the principle obstacles to the enlightenment and politicization of the Bolivian popular movement has disappeared.” President Paz Estenssoro had been “in practice an effective ally of imperialism in the exploitation of the people, contributing in a decisive manner to the stagnation of the revolutionary process in that country.”87 According to the Cubans and their local leftist allies, Paz Estenssoro’s vacuous Third World pretense had revealed itself to be a bourgeois dalliance, meant to conceal his domestic project of permitting the U.S.-backed ascendance of the MNR’s most reactionary elements.
The story of this Third World gambit and its eventual collapse in the face of Washington’s intolerance of true nonalignment in the Western Hemisphere help to elucidate the limits of bourgeois nationalism in the early 1960s. In conversations with the author, Paz Estenssoro’s private secretary conceded that the Bolivian president had “sacrificed a portion of his nationalism” to obtain U.S. development funding under Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. In private letters to his family, President Paz Estenssoro defended his decision as a temporary expediency, and he assured his confidants that the time would come when revolutionary Bolivia would “have more room for [international] maneuver.”88
The failure of revolutionary Bolivia to maintain a nonaligned posture further reveals the subtle differences between socialist foreign policies in Prague and Havana. Both states supported the more radical version of anti-U.S. neutralism emanating from the NAM at Belgrade. But whereas Czechoslovakia preferred to work within the official political structures of Latin American nationalism, Cuba held out hopes for more transformative changes in the Western Hemisphere through popular insurrections against duplicitous bourgeois regimes. Finally, this story points to the need for additional research into the evolution of the Third World movement as it shifted away from the goal of formal decolonization to more radical politico-economic critiques of neocolonialism.
1. U.S. State Department, “Guidelines for Policy and Operations,” 20 April 1962, and Barry Goldwater, 24 October 1963, both quoted in Thomas C. Field Jr., From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), xi, 47. For more on U.S. relations with revolutionary Bolivia, see Glenn J. Dorn, The Truman Administration and Bolivia: Making the World Safe for Liberal Constitutional Oligarchy (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011); James F. Siekmeier, The Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1952 to the Present (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011).
2. United States Agency for International Development, U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants (Greenbook), 2017, https://
3. U.S. Embassy (La Paz) to Department of State, 8 May 1962, quoted in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 48.
4. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 11–12, 68–74, and 160–64.
5. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, chapters 3 through 6.
6. For Latin Americanists rushing to “internationalize” their scholarship and thus break out of their subject countries’ nationalist historiographies, diplomatic history offers decades of examples that fuse multinational narrative planes. See Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin American Policy of the United States (San Diego: Harcourt, 1943); and David Green, The Containment of Latin America: A History of the Myths and Realities of the Good Neighbor Policy (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971). For more recent treatments, see Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York, 2007).
7. Greg Grandin, “The Liberal Traditions in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (2012): 68–91.
8. Regarding the former, see a critique by Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States and the World,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1380. For examples of the latter, see Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Julio E. Moreno, Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow: New Histories of Latin America’s Cold War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013); and Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
9. Michal Zourek, “Checoslovaquia y el Cono Sur 1945–1989,” PhD diss., Universita Karlova v Praze, 2014.
10. Tobias Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin: Interaction and Exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See also Rupprecht’s contribution to this volume (chapter 9).
11. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “Sino-Soviet Bloc Economic Activities in Underdeveloped Areas,” 28 February 1962, CIA Records Search Tool (hereafter CREST), U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA).
12. See Michal Zourek, “Operation MANUEL: When Prague Was a Key Transit Hub for International Terrorism,” Central European Journal of International and Security Studies 9, no. 3 (2015): 78–98; and Daniela Spenser, “Operation Manuel: Czechoslovakia and Cuba,” Cold War International History Project e-Dossier No. 7 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2011), https://
13. Jerry W. Knudson, “The Impact of the Catavi Mine Massacre of 1942 on Bolivian Politics and Public Opinion,” The Americas 26, no. 3 (1970): 254–76; and Eduardo Ascarrunz Rodríguez, La palabra de Paz: Un hombre, un siglo (La Paz: Plural, 2008), 40.
14. Jerry Knudson, Bolivia, Press and Revolution, 1932–1964 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986).
15. Herbert Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 178–208; James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952–1982 (London: Verso, 1984), 1–45; S. Sándor John, Bolivia’s Radical Tradition: Permanent Revolution in the Andes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), especially chapters 3 and 4.
16. Kevin Young, “Purging the Forces of Darkness: The United States, Monetary Stabilization, and the Containment of the Bolivian Revolution,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 1 (2013): 509–37.
17. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, n.d. [mid-1960], Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” Archivo Central del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores [Central Archive of the Foreign Ministry], Havana, Cuba (hereafter MINREX-Cuba).
18. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 6; quotation from Bolivian labor leader Juan Lechín Oquendo, on the same page.
19. Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry, Memorandum of Conversation, 20 September 1960, in “Relations, Czechoslovakia—Bolivia,” Inv. č 93, ka 74, Komunistická strana Československa, Ústřední výbor, Kancelář I, Tajemníka ÚV KSČ Antonína Novotného—II. Č, Národní archiv [Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, General Secretary Antonin Novotny, National Archives], Prague, Czech Republic (hereafter KSČ-Prague).
20. Bolivian Foreign Ministry, 13 January 1961, RV-4-E-53, 1961–1962, Archivo del Minsterio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto [Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Relations and Culture], La Paz, Bolivia (hereafter RREE-Bolivia).
21. CIA, Intelligence Bulletin, 13 January 1961, CREST, NARA.
22. CIA, Intelligence Bulletin, 3 February 1961, CREST, NARA.
23. Thomas Mann to George Ball, 14 February 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961,” Box 2, Lots 62D418 and 64D15, State Department Lot Files (hereafter SDLF), Record Group (hereafter RG) 59, NARA.
24. Arthur Schlesinger Journal Entry, 24 February 1961; and Schlesinger to Kennedy, 10 March 1961, both quoted in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 14. For more on the aid package and its anti-labor conditions, see page 21.
25. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 21–23.
26. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 22 March 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
27. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 10 May 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
28. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 10 May 1961.
29. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 1 August 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
30. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 9 June 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
31. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 11 October 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
32. Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry, Memorandum of Conversation, 2 November 1961, Inv. 93, ka 74, Central Committee (ústřední výbor; hereafter ÚV), Czech Communist Party (komunistická strana československa; hereafter KSČ-Prague).
33. Spanish Embassy to Madrid, 21 November 1961, IDD 177, Fondo 10, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares, Spain.
34. U.S. State Department, 10 August 1961, Folder 724.12/8-960, Box 1593, and 29 September 1961, Folder 724.5411/3-161, Box 1594, State Department Central Files (hereafter SDCF), RG59, NARA.
35. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 73; quotations from author interviews with Ramiro Paz Cerruto and Luis Antezana Ergueta, cited on 11.
36. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 31 August 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
37. Embassy to State, A-1032, 26 June 1963, Folder “POL BOL-CHILE,” Box 3831, SDCF, RG59, NARA.
38. U.S. Embassy Aide-Memoire, 6 February 1962, Folder LE-3-R-357, Collection “USEMB-RREE, Parte I,” RREE-Bolivia.
39. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 31 August 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
40. U.S. Embassy Aide-Memoire, 18 January 1962, Folder LE-3-R-357, Collection “USEMB-RREE, Parte I,” RREE-Bolivia.
41. For a list of Cuba’s friends, see Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 5 January 1962, Folder “Bolivia, 1962, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
42. José Ninavia to the Bolivian Mine Workers Federation, 14 February 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
43. Mario Torres, cited by Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 11 October 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
44. MNR Youth to Cuban Embassy, 1 January 1962, Folder “Bolivia, 1962, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
45. MNR Youth to President Paz, 21 July 1961, quoted in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 69.
46. Cuban Foreign Ministry, Department B, 10 May 1961, Folder “Bolivia, 1961, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
47. Raúl Roa to José Fellman, 22 February 1962, Folder “Bolivia, 1962, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
48. “Manifiesto de Solidaridad con Cuba,” 22 February 1962, Folder “Bolivia, 1962, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
49. Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry, Memorandum of Conversation, 28 February 1962, Inv. 93, ka 74, ÚV, KSČ-Prague.
50. Czechoslovak Embassy (La Paz) to Foreign Ministry, 24 July 1962, Inv. c 92, ka. 74, ÚV, KSČ-Prague.
51. Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry, Memorandum of Conversation, 5 June 1962, Inv. c 93, ka. 74, ÚV, KSČ-Prague.
52. CIA, “Sino-Soviet Bloc Economic Activities in Underdeveloped Areas,” 16 July 1962, CREST, NARA.
53. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 59–60; quotation from Bolivian Minister of Foreign Affairs Roberto Jordán Pando, cited on 59.
54. CIA, “Sino-Soviet Bloc Economic Activities in Underdeveloped Areas,” 28 February 1962, CREST, NARA; CIA, Intelligence Bulletin, 23 March 1962; and CIA, “Sino-Soviet Bloc Economic Activities in Underdeveloped Areas,” 16 July 1962, CREST, NARA.
55. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 60; quotations of Schlesinger to Dungan, 18 July 1962, and Hansen to Dungan, n.d. [July 1962], both cited on the same page.
56. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, 9 January 1963, Folder “Bolivia, General, 1/63-3/63,” Box 10A, National Security Files—Countries (hereafter NSF-CO), John F. Kennedy President Library, Columbia Point, MA (hereafter JFKL).
57. CIA, “Sino-Soviet Bloc Economic Activities in Underdeveloped Areas,” 31 August 1962, CREST, NARA.
58. MNR Parliamentarians to President Paz Estenssoro, 20 and 29 August 1962, Presidencia de la República 1009, Archivo y Biblioteca Nacional de Bolivia [National Archive and Library of Bolivia], Sucre, Bolivia.
59. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 61–64; quotations from Ambassador Stephansky to State Department, 13 and 28 August 1962, cited on 62–63.
60. Embassy to State, 22 September 1962, Folder “IPS-1/General/Bolivia, Jan 1962–June 1963,” Box 5, Office of Public Safety, Latin America Branch, Country File, USAID, RG286, NARA.
61. Ben Stephansky to Dean Rusk, 22 and 29 September 1962, Folder “Bolivia, General, 8/62-12/62,” Box 10, NSF-CO, JFKL.
62. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 65; quotations from Kennedy, National Security Action Memorandum 184, 4 September 1962, and Embassy to State, “Internal Defense Plan,” 31 August 1962, both cited on 65.
63. Covert action programs included antiriot police training, arming paramilitary strike breakers, and a panoply of political projects that sought to encourage a pro-MNR, middle-class consciousness among Bolivia’s youth, labor, and peasant sectors. See Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 76, 84–87, 91–92, 99, 109, 132, 136, and 240n11.
64. Cuban Foreign Ministry, 17 October 1962, Folder “Bolivia, 1962, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
65. Dean Rusk to Embassy, State 403, Folder “POL BOL-CHILE,” Box 3831, and Embassy to State, 22 February 1963, Folder “INCO BOL,” Box 3540, SDCF, RG59, NARA. Quotation regarding Aja Castro comes from U.S. Embassy (Santiago) to State Department, 25 March 1963, cited in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 71.
66. Author Interview with PCB leader José Luis Cueto, and Záznam o rozhovoru s prvním tajemníkim KS Bolívie Mario Monjem (Memorandum of conversation with First Secretary of the Bolivian CP Mario Monje), 21 May 1963, both cited in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 72.
67. Héctor Béjar interview with Humberto Vázquez Viaña, cited in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 72. For more on the arrests, see 71–72.
68. Juan Carretero interview with William Gálvez, cited in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 72.
69. Embassy to State, A-1032, 26 June 1963, Folder “POL BOL-CHILE,” Box 3831, SDCF, RG59, NARA.
70. Author interview with Carlos Serrate Reich, cited in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 72.
71. Embassy to State, La Paz 1176, 1 June 1963, Folder “CSM BOL,” Box 3687, SDCF, RG59, NARA.
72. Author interview with PCB leader José Luis Cueto; Záznam o rozhovoru, 21 May 1963.
73. Stephansky to State, 27 March 1963, Folder “INCO BOL,” Box 3540, SDCF, RG59, NARA.
74. Stephansky to State, 4 April 1963, Folder “INCO BOL,” Box 3540, SDCF, RG59, NARA.
75. Embassy to State, 23 July 1963, Folder “ECON BOL,” Box 3367, SDCF, RG59, NARA.
76. Stutesman to State, 6 June 1963, Folder “INCO BOL,” Box 3540, SDCF, RG59, NARA.
77. Stephansky to State, 16 August 1963, Folder “INCO BOL,” Box 3540, SDCF, RG59, NARA.
78. State Department, n.d. [1963], Folder “1963 AID Strategy Paper,” Box 10, Records Relating to Bolivia, 1961–1975, SDLF, RG59, NARA.
79. Ben Stephansky to Dean Rusk, 8 April 1963, Folder “Bolivia, General, 1/63-4/63,” Box 10A, NSF-CO, JFKL.
80. Field, From Development to Dictatorship, chapters 3 through 6.
81. Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs to First Secretary of the KSC, 2 December 1963, Inv. c. 93, ka. 74, ÚV, KSČ-Prague.
82. Czechoslovak Embassy (La Paz) to KSC (Prague), and written response, 11 May 1964, Inv. c. 93, ka. 74, ÚV, KSČ-Prague (emphasis in the original); and “Guide to the Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State Microfilm Collection,” December 1963 and January 1964, reel 1.1008, File 29, Fond 89, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
83. Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs to First Secretary of the KSC, 2 December 1963.
84. Ricardo Alarcón (MINREX) to Roberto Lassale (Cuban Embassy, La Paz), 7 October 1963, and MINREX Report, 21 October 1963, Folder “Bolivia, 1963, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
85. Bohemia, 16 and 30 October, and 6 November 1964, and Radio Progreso, 31 October 1964, cited in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 163–64.
86. See Field, From Development to Dictatorship, chapters 5 and 6.
87. Cuban Foreign Ministry, 18 November 1964, Folder “Bolivia, 1964, ORD,” MINREX-Cuba.
88. Author interview with Carlos Serrate Reich, and Paz to son Ramiro, 26 May 1961, both cited in Field, From Development to Dictatorship, 73.