Paradise Lost and Found
TOBIAS RUPPRECHT
It was midnight when the Peruvian journalist and self-professed poeta del pueblo Gustavo Valcárcel entered his Moscow hotel room in the autumn of 1963. As the hotel music system started playing “The Internationale,” he stepped on the balcony, looked upon “the capital of world socialism, illuminated by lights and the future” and was overwhelmed with emotion. Bathed in tears, Valcárcel shared this epiphany with his wife: “With one of the many hammers and sickles with which the firmament is studded, I have engraved a letter: Violeta, we have not fought in vain! I have seen the accomplished reality of all our dreams!” Back in his room, he wrote—on paper—several emphatic poems about the USSR and the future of a socialist Latin America that would emulate the Soviet example. Upon his return to Peru, Valcárcel extolled the superiority of the Soviet model of modern society in successive publications throughout the 1960s. The apparent feats of this socialist utopia included its state-led economic and technological development, its free education and health care systems, women’s rights, family values, architecture, and “progressive” arts. For his homeland to prosper, Valcárcel, in a chapter titled “Kasajstan: Un ejemplo para América Latina,”1 suggested necessary reforms that would take their cue from Soviet Central Asia.
Not only in Peru, but all over Latin America, the ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was reflected in intellectual debates over how to organize modern societies. Most traditional Latin American elites continued to perceive Communism as a serious threat to the political, ethical, and cultural foundations of their societies. For many intellectuals, however, Marxism in the 1950s still constituted a valid model for understanding the continent’s many problems. The increasing feeling of insurmountable backwardness and old resentments against the “Yankees” in the North led many to develop an anti-imperialist identification with (post-)colonial nations and socialist movements in Asia and Africa. The 1960s came to be the decade of tercermundismo (Third-Worldism) in Latin America. Tercermundistas all over the Americas reached out to like-minded fellows of the Global South, who had formed the loose Non-Aligned Movement in the wake of the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung. The struggle of nationalists in Algeria and Indochina radicalized leftists all over the Americas, and some of them eventually took up arms against the governments of their respective states.
It is usually assumed that this generation of Latin American intellectuals and political activists had lost all interest in the motherland of state socialism, the Soviet Union. According to Jorge Castañeda, it seemed too bureaucratic to them, too repressive, too grey, and, in the light of its invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, it appeared as one more northern imperialist power.2 “I put them all in the same bag,” Andre Gunder Frank recalled in his memoirs about Soviet and Western development models.3 This chapter, based on an analysis of Latin American travelogues and Soviet memoirs, will show that this generalization reflects a zeitgeist of the 1990s rather than the views of many Latin Americans during the Cold War.
Current scholarship on Latin American intellectuals during the Cold War is certainly correct in its claim that after the Cuban Revolution Havana became a more important point of reference than Moscow. And the revolutionary Left did find fault with the cautious Soviet concept of peaceful coexistence.4 But travel reports of tercermundistas who visited the USSR from the 1950s to the 1970s do not support the view that “Latin American intellectuals had lost all interest in the Soviet Union by the early 1960s.”5 This chapter will demonstrate that Latin Americans who developed an anti-Western sense of belonging with the Third World in the 1960s were still susceptible to the lure of certain features of the Soviet state and could even advocate the implementation of these policies in their home countries. Accounts of the history of the Cold War in Latin America, it will be argued, have too readily put aside the Soviet Union, as a political and intellectual point of reference.6 A look at non-Western historical sources on encounters between the Second World and the Third World from the 1940s to the 1980s supports this view and helps to avoid an anachronistic retro-projection of the failure of state socialism. In the process, it may also contribute to understanding the contemporary perception by intellectuals worldwide of this alternative path to modern society.
From early on, the Soviet Union had fascinated the Latin American intelligentsia. Communist parties in most Latin American countries were founded and dominated by poets and artists. Yet only a few of them had the chance to see the first socialist state with their own eyes before Stalin’s death. The Mexican muralist painters Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros had made short visits in 1927. Others, mostly Mexicans and Brazilians, went in the course of the 1930s.7 They were very much part of a community of Western “fellow travelers”8 to the Soviet Union, and, like many Europeans, most of them hailed Stalin and his ostensible achievements. The Mexican novelist José Revueltas proclaimed after a 1935 trip to a Comintern congress: “I adore Stalin more than anything else on earth.” His compatriots Vicente Toledano, Víctor Manuel Villaseñor, José Muñoz Cota, and José Mancisidor labeled their pilgrimages to Stalinist Moscow “travels to the future of the world.” Octavio Paz, later an ardent critic of totalitarianism, wrote letters full of admiration for the Soviet project. And Siqueiros was even involved in one of the attempts on the life of Stalin’s arch enemy, Leon Trotsky, in Mexico City in 1940.9
During the early Cold War, many Latin American leftist intellectuals maintained their admiration for the dictator and his realm. The Argentine novelist and journalist Alfredo Varela wrote a four-hundred-page ode on the Soviet Union after his 1948 trip, praising Stalin as “the greatest man of our epoch.”10 The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda made his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1949, which inspired him to write many rightfully forgotten poems (“Pushkin, you were the angel / of the Central Committee”11). In his 1973 memoirs, Neruda reflected on his metaphysical experience of the Soviet state: “Nature seemed to finally form a victorious unity with the human being.”12 The Ecuadorian author Enrique Gil Gilbert, the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, the Puerto Rican-Mexican novelist José Luis Gonzales, and the Uruguayan Jesualdo Sosa traveled together through Eastern Europe during late Stalinism and held forth about the transcendent metaphysical significance of what they saw happening in the Soviet Union, contrasting ostensibly free life under socialism with the sad state of serfdom in their home countries.13
Jorge Amado, Brazil’s most famous and cherished author of the twentieth century, went to the USSR for the first time in 1951, when he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. His extensive travelogue, O mundo do paz, was yet another paean on every aspect of the Soviet system, including its policies in Eastern Europe.14 His Cuban friend Nicolás Guillén, another Stalin Prize winner, summed up in his memoirs his impressions from his first of at least ten trips to the USSR.15 Like Amado, most other Latin American visitors to the Stalinist Soviet Union went to see the utopia they expected to find. Their ideas and expectations were similar to those of their Western European and Mexican colleagues in the 1930s; in a rhetoric of redemption and utopianism, they took as real the world that was staged for them. With the notable exception of the Peruvian Víctor Haya de la Torre, whose early fascination with the USSR faded after a 1931 visit, the majority of Latin American visitors to the USSR under Stalin hailed the dictator and his apparent economic and political achievements for the Soviet Union and the world.
Nikita Khrushchev’s revelation of some of Stalin’s crimes in 1956, the Soviet invasion of Hungary the same year, and the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 are usually presented as the cornerstones of a loss of faith in the Soviet alternative by the international Left, but this chronology is more accurate regarding Western intellectuals than the Latin Americans. Jorge Amado was one of the few who developed a more critical stance towards the Soviet Union in 1956. Disappointed by the news from Moscow and by the lack of reaction amongst his Brazilian comrades, he left the Communist Party that year. He also protested against the treatment of the disgraced Soviet author Boris Pasternak in 1960 (“even though I did not like the novel [Doctor Zhivago]”) and, many years later in his memoirs, showed deep regret for his earlier naïve praise of Stalin. Nevertheless, he still felt “linked to the Soviet Union like through an umbilical cord.” He returned there many times and remained in close contact with Soviet writers while politically supporting Fidel Castro’s Cuba and campaigning for Third World interests instead of the USSR.16
However, the admiration of most other Latin American intellectuals of that generation for the Soviet Union remained unshaken. With Khrushchev’s reforms, some of them, who had been excluded under Stalin, were accepted back into the ranks of the Communist movement. José Revueltas, readmitted into the Mexican Communist Party at the beginning of 1956, dutifully supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary and made a second trip to the USSR in 1957. “With the death of Stalin in 1953, socialism took on new dimensions of hope,” he remembered. “There was a newly recaptured glamour of international communism as a political strategy.”17 Diego Rivera, too, was readmitted to the party, from which he had been excluded since 1929 under the somewhat obscure reproach of being a “Trotskyite.” His memoirs, written shortly after his readmission in 1954, included all-encompassing praise of the Soviet Union.18 His lifelong rival, Siqueiros, who had visited Rivera’s Moscow sickbed during a Soviet trip in 1956, had been a Stalinist from the very beginning and remained a loyal friend of the Soviet Union until the end of his life: “I reiterate, for what remains of my life,” he declared shortly before his death in 1974, “my intention of fidelity to the party and to proletarian internationalism.”19
Indeed, the shockwaves of 1956 hardly affected most Sovietophile Latin Americans. The Argentine essayist María Rosa Oliver, who was in Moscow a year later to receive the Lenin Peace Prize, rehashed the flimsy Soviet explanations of a Hungarian fascist counterrevolution supported by the capitalists through Radio Free Europe.20 For the Ecuadorian writer Pedro Jorge Vera, who was personally received by Khrushchev when he visited the USSR in the early 1960s, Moscow was still “the symbol of our ideals of justice.”21 Joaquín Gutiérrez, a Costa Rican story-teller, novelist, and author of a famous book for children, defended Stalin—“thirty per cent bad, seventy per cent good”22—even after a 1967 trip to Moscow; in Brezhnev he saw the man to solve some of the problems that Khrushchev had been unable to fix. Whatever new directions its leaders took, Neruda remained a faithful friend of the Soviet Union until the end of his life. He refused to comment on the invasion of Czechoslovakia and did not stand up for the threatened dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.23 Vera Kutejščikova, a Soviet Latin Americanist and official Soviet guide for many Latin American visitors, noted in late 1956 that “most of my Mexican friends [are] glowing with socialist ideas; in me, they saw the representative of a state that had implemented these ideas. Soviet society was in their eyes a paradise, and I was their guide to this paradise.”24 Neither the official revelation and acknowledgment of some of Stalin’s crimes nor the invasion of Hungary chipped away at the fascination that most leftists of that generation had for the Soviet Union.
In contrast, a younger generation of socialist intellectuals of international fame from the late 1950s were much more critical of the USSR (although they initially displayed the same kind of blind enthusiasm for revolutionary Cuba). This was the generation of the “Latin American Boom,” internationally influential and commercially successful authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. Fuentes had great hopes in Khrushchev’s “Thaw” policies as he perceived them during a 1963 visit—but, he no longer saw the USSR as a source of inspiration for Latin America. In 1968, when the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, Fuentes traveled to Prague, together with García Márquez and the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar; all of them wanted to show their support for the Czech reformist socialists. García Márquez, although affiliated with the Colombian Communist Party from 1955, was indeed very critical of the Soviet Union from the beginning of his political activism. In 1957, after some failed attempts to procure a visa, he finally managed to get to Moscow under the pretext of being an accordion player in a Colombian folklore band. In his travelogue, he acknowledged some improvements of living conditions in the Soviet Union, but described the country overall as a rather drab and uninspiring place.25 Márquez and other Latin American leftist intellectuals of his generation and background no longer saw the Soviet Union as a utopian paradise or a source of solutions for Latin American concerns. Their upbringing in their countries’ upper or upper middle classes connected them closely to Western Europe and its literary traditions; Western views of Latin American intellectual life thus became focused on them. But many other Latin American writers and political activists, who were from less privileged backgrounds and less connected to Western Europe and North America and who were spiritually oriented toward the Third World, still saw the USSR model as a viable alternative to Western modernity well into the 1970s.
Tercermundismo, the self-identification of Latin American intellectuals with the Third World, coincided with the Soviet discovery of what was then commonly called “the underdeveloped countries” in the mid-1950s. The early Cold War saw not only the gradual loss of Western leftists’ hopes in the Soviet Union, but also more intense, and rather successful, Soviet attempts to present their country in a positive light to the Third World. Policymakers and internationalist-minded pundits tried to forge bonds based on a shared sense of anti-imperialism, rather than on the struggle for Communist world revolution. As part of a huge charm offensive toward Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, Soviet (front) organizations invited Third World intellectuals to the USSR.26 The upper crust of Latin American leftist intelligentsia met in Moscow for a 1957 World Youth Festival: Nicolás Guillén, the novelist Carlos Augusto León, and the poet Pedro Dona from Venezuela were official guests, as were the playwright Saulo Benavente, the composer Gilardo Gilardi, the pupeteer and poet Javier Villafañe, and the authors Juan Gelman and María Rosa Oliver from Argentina. Jorge Amado was there along with his Guatemalan friend Miguel Angel Asturias. From Mexico came the playwright Emilio Carballido, from Chile the poet Praxedes Urrutia, from Bolivia the poet Jorge Calvimontes.27 And, for the then internationally unknown Gabriel García Márquez, the festival provided a pretext to sneak in as an accordion player in a folklore combo.
This influx of Latin American cultural figures visiting the Soviet Union at the same time was an exception, but many more were officially invited, or went on their own initiative, throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Moreover, twenty-three Latin Americans were awarded the Stalin/Lenin Peace Prize between 1950 and 1985, usually receiving it during a ceremony in Moscow.28 Conspicuously, even more writers and artists from less developed and smaller countries of the Americas were invited to the Soviet Union. Professional guides took care of them—among them, some three thousand Spaniards, refugees of the Spanish Civil War, who still lived in Moscow in the 1950s and provided a great pool of native speakers. Additionally, an increasing number of specially trained staff in internationalist organizations could speak fluent Portuguese or Castilian and showed their guests all around Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and other regions and republics of the Soviet Union.29 Some of the visitors’ travel expenses were paid; some made considerable (albeit not exportable) Soviet money selling the translation rights of their works to Soviet publishers. Others came out of their own interest and on their own budget. They met with Soviet cultural figures and went on tour programs that often led them on long journeys through the entire USSR. They visited city administrations, schools, universities, ministries, sanatoriums, hydroelectric power plants, or whatever they asked to be shown, without being subjected to Soviet access restrictions for foreigners.
A common feature of these visits were trips to the Central Asian and Caucasian republics. The Moscow-led modernization of this “domestic Third World” indeed dominated Soviet self-representation toward Latin Americans. Journals, radio broadcasts, and large exhibitions in Latin America reported broadly on the progress, under Soviet tutelage, of these former agrarian, “backward,” and “feudal” regions. The chief officers of Soviet internationalist organizations were usually from these republics: a group of the Supreme Soviet that traveled to Bolivia in 1960 was led by the Kazakh Communist Party boss; a group that went to Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, and Cuba was led by the head of the Supreme Soviet, a Georgian. The Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian headed the Soviet-Latin American Friendship Society, the Azeri Raúf Gadžiev the Cuban-Soviet Institute. Khrushchev himself pointed out the role model of Soviet republics for developing countries. He also motivated his choice of Anastas Mikoyan as his “agent for Cuba”: he was a native-born Armenian and he had experience in the “modernization” of the Caucasus.30 The model of a non-Western, state-led path to industrial modernity had replaced proletarian world revolution as Moscow’s main ideological export to the Third World.
Valcárcel’s reflections on Kazakhstan as a role model for Latin America reveal that these Soviet images of development could still have an impact on Latin Americans in the 1960s. None of the Latin American visitors saw this Soviet modernization of the periphery critically, as an act of “imperialism” in its own right. On the contrary, many of them readily adopted this rather colonial attitude: after his trip to Central Asia, the Argentine writer Rodolfo Ghioldi, in a book that he called Uzbekistan. El espejo,31 described the recent history of Central Asia as a perfect model of what needed to happen in his homeland. When the Paraguayan Communist activist Efraín Morel was taken on a trip to the Caucasus, the ancient advanced civilizations that had fallen victim to (tsarist) imperialism reminded him of his own people, and the ostensibly anti-imperialist Soviet alternative met with his unconditional approval.32 Many other lesser-known Latin American visitors to the Soviet Union throughout the 1960s were still taken in by the country they were presented with. The fast and egalitarian modernization of formerly backward agrarian societies, the education, health care, and public transport systems impressed many visitors from less privileged backgrounds and with a tercermundista outlook. Emphasizing the appreciation of intellectuals in the Soviet Union and common anti-Western cultural values, the guides from Soviet internationalist organizations did an excellent job of instilling a pro-Soviet stance among the visitors. The tenor of travelogues by Latin Americans to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was predominantly positive. Many who came with neutral views went back home with a rather positive opinion of the USSR. Conflicts and problems did nevertheless occur during the guided visits. Translators reported arrogant and bumptious behavior on the part of their protégés as well as embarrassing situations when terrible service in restaurants and hotels threatened to destroy the positive impressions carefully built up.33
Still, well into the 1970s, Valcárcel’s enthusiastic reports from the Soviet Union were representative of most Latin American travelers’ accounts. Following contemporary Soviet party doctrine, Valcárcel denounced the past “excesses of Stalin’s personality cult.” Beyond that, however, he drew an over-optimistic picture of the Soviet model as the future of mankind. In the perception of some tercermundistas, industry, agriculture, and education were blossoming in the USSR. Rents were low, income high, the women free, all children healthy and happy. Schools and universities, as well as health care and sanatoriums, were free. Soviet youth, they reported, patriotically loved their national cultures. Valcárcel was amazed by the spirit of resistance to “decadent formalism” that prevailed in Soviet art. Unlike Amado, he approved the treatment of Pasternak; he denounced the Hungarian insurgents as a bunch of fascists, and praised Soviet support for the Third World. At a parade for the cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and German Titov, Valcárcel sat next to Pablo Neruda on Red Square, together with the Chilean feminist activist Olga Poblete de Espinosa, the Haitian poet René Depestre, and the Costa Rican writer Joaquín Gutiérrez. In this illustrious company, he experienced another epiphany and eventually summed up his trip, the first of several, as “one of the most intensive emotional experiences of [his] life.”34
The tercermundista fascination with the Soviet Union continued even after the reformer Khrushchev was ousted in 1964 and despite the fact that his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, reduced the generous Soviet engagement with Third World countries and activists. In 1965, Valcárcel returned to Moscow to see his son, whom he had sent to study in the Soviet Union. After all his writings in praise of Khrushchev’s accomplishments on the occasion of his first two trips, Valcárcel was initially a bit skeptical about the new Soviet leadership, but quickly bought into the official explanation that Khrushchev had stepped down for health reasons. In yet another lengthy book, Valcárcel went on about the exemplary character of the Soviet state—including the above-mentioned chapter on Kazakhstan as a role model for Peru: both countries, Valcárcel argued, had a population of around eleven million, among them “large masses of indigenous people” who had long lived in poverty. Thanks to the Soviet modernization of the 1930s, Valcárcel continued, an end had been put to the backwardness of the Kazakhs, their economic underdevelopment, and their illiteracy, without going through the painful phase of capitalism. Now, ten thousand schools and thirty-eight universities provided free education in several languages. The agricultural output, exploitation of minerals, and industrial production had multiplied hundredfold. Art and culture allegedly blossomed in the modern cities. Unlike Peru, Kazakhstan had made huge progress from the same starting level. In this unfavorable comparison, Valcárcel saw the reason why Peru banned travel to the Soviet Union.35
Any criticism of Soviet internal repression and aggressive foreign policy was just “massive counterpropaganda against the USSR,” explained Carlos Fonseca, another Latin American visitor, who had grown up under extremely poor conditions in his native Nicaragua. Fonseca, the future founder and leader of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), had been awarded a travel grant to the World Youth Festival in Moscow when he was leader of a Marxist student group in Managua. Years later, full of nostalgia, he would remember his first stay in the Soviet Union in a book called Un Nicaragüense en Moscú.36 “I thought I was dreaming,” he wrote of Moscow. All the Soviet citizens he met were highly educated and well-dressed, Fonseca claimed; students were paid, and no one was unemployed. Even in villages, libraries were better than the biggest one in Managua, he reported, and religion and the press were ostensibly completely free. Defending Stalin against international blame, the Nicaraguan explained Khrushchev’s position in one of his speeches as an erroneous translation: criticism, he lectured his readers, actually meant critical acknowledgment in Russian! The events in Hungary, he added, just as in the official Soviet depiction, were attempts at a fascist putsch. Upon returning to Nicaragua, Fonseca was arrested, interrogated, and eventually fled to Cuba. He underwent training as a guerrilla fighter but remained an ardent supporter of the Soviet Union until his death in the mountains of Nicaragua in 1976 during the violent struggle against the National Guard.
Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes, internationally known cultural figures linked to Western literary circles, may no longer have had such a positive opinion of the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s. But those “fellow travelers” who identified with the Third World and indigenous groups continued the old leftist tradition of embracing the Soviet Union as an anti-Western socialist utopia. Several other reports by Latin American tercermundista visitors to the post-Stalinist Soviet state confirm this observation. The Bolivian novelist, poet, and indigenous activist Jesús Lara wrote most of his literary work in Quechua, his native language; much of it was translated and circulated in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He hailed the Soviet Union as the “land of the new man” in a travelogue by this title.37 His compatriot, the writer Fausto Reinaga, reported from the “red utopia” in a similar vein. From a poor campesino family, he had not learned to read and write until the age of sixteen, but later became Bolivia’s most influential indigenous intellectual. On the brink of losing his faith in Marxism due to the extreme sectarianism of the Bolivian workers’ movement, he had long felt the need to see the Soviet Union to refresh his ideals. “Even if I risk to die on the way, I have to get to Russia,” he said. He could not afford the travel costs of a trip to Moscow for the World Youth Festival of 1957, but eventually, the Bolivian president himself, Hernán Siles Zuazo, of the ruling Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), contributed to the financing of his trip.
Reinaga’s odyssey to Moscow, his views on the Western colonial empires, his encounters with other Latin Americans, and his assessment of the Soviet Union illustrate the tercermundistas’ anti-imperialist and anti-Western outlook on the world at the time. In Brazil, Reinaga was appalled by the racist attitudes he perceived against the black population. Stuck without money in Buenos Aires, he was supported by Argentine intellectuals for weeks before they finally bought him a ticket to Europe. He crossed the Atlantic and on his way had a glimpse of the “French imperial system” in Senegal as well as “fascism in power” in Spain. “It caused nausea and I was completely disillusioned with Europe,” Reinaga recalled.38 From Spain, he took a ship to Genoa, a train to Stuttgart and Leipzig, and finally arrived in Moscow after a week-long journey. The title of his book on the Soviet Union, El sentimiento mesiánco del pueblo ruso, might sound like a condemnation of Red imperialism, but in fact, it was the opposite: Reinaga applauded to every aspect of Soviet life he was presented with. He was deeply impressed by the technological feats, atomic energy, and factories, the health care and education systems, and the ubiquitous rhetoric of peace. Like his hosts, Reinaga excoriated the United States on every occasion—and returned to Bolivia confident again in his Marxist ideals: “I came with some petit bourgeois doubts, but I left enthusiastically with an assignment and a clear worldview.”39
This lingering idealistic view of the USSR during the Cold War as a flawless utopian society was typical of a group of Latin American visitors who shared certain features: they all came from humble backgrounds, mostly from the poorest countries of the Americas, as did the Bolivians Lara and Reinaga and the Nicaraguan Fonseca. They identified strongly with the indigenous people of their home countries, or more broadly with what Frantz Fanon called the “wretched of the earth,” much as the Peruvian Valcárcel and the socialist writer Fernando Benítez did. The latter traveled many times to the Soviet Union, where he shared his knowledge as a renowned expert on the indigenous tribes in his native Mexico.40 Due to the circumstances in which they had grown up, these visitors were often impressed by Soviet self-representation: Soviet living standards around the 1960s were indeed better than those of the average person in their home countries. The fact that Latin American critics of the Soviet system were usually white upper-middle-class men made their allegations unreliable to some of the mestizo authors, who often explicitly penned their praise of the Soviet Union against more critical assessments of Soviet Communism by the white middle-class novelists of the “Latin American Boom” generation.
In the long run, the admiration of the indigenistas and tercermundistas for the Soviet Union faded, too: like Haya de la Torre in the 1930s, many drifted away from Soviet-style Communism with its focus on industrialization and rational progress to a specific brand of Latin American indigenous socialism. Lara left his Communist Party because it followed the Moscow party line of a nonviolent path to socialism and for that reason had not supported Che Guevara in the armed struggle in the Bolivian jungle. Reinaga was arrested right after his return to Bolivia, where the local Communists made no move to help him. After his release, he went on a pilgrimage to Machu Picchu, the mountain site of an ancient Inca town, and, as originator and mentor of indianismo, founded the first indigenous party, the Partido de Indios Aymaras y Keswas (PIAK), later renamed the Partido Indio de Bolivia (PIB). Benítez and many other indigenous writers eventually classified the Soviet Union as belonging to what they considered the camp of European imperialists. Manuel Scorza, a guerrilla fighter in Chile and Peru and an indigenista writer, dedicated a chapter of his last novel, La danza inmóvil, to the disillusion of Peruvian Communists with the Soviet Union. But these views emerged only in the 1980s. They should not be projected on the mindsets of the 1960s and 1970s, when a fascination for the Soviet Union was still widespread amongst tercermundistas all across the Americas.
The common denominator of Soviet and Latin American tercermundistas was not so much Communism as embodied in the party, but a shared sense of anti-imperialism or anti-Westernism. This is why a group that is not usually included in accounts of foreign visitors to the Soviet Union joined their ranks: conservative Catholics. In fact, the groups overlapped. Fausto Reinaga, for instance, was not only a militant indigenista Marxist, but also a pious, anticlerical Christian who hailed Moscow as “the new Jerusalem” and felt “like Lazarus after Jesus’ healing” when he saw Lenin in his mausoleum.41 The poet Roque Dalton, a future guerrilla fighter in his native El Salvador, was a devout Christian when he went to Moscow for the 1957 World Youth Festival, attracted to the Soviet Union for its “redemptive promise of a just society.”42 The “messianic sentiment of the Russian people,” as Reinaga put it, attracted more than just socialists. Many conservative Catholics saw their own traditional values better preserved in the Soviet Union than in their own societies, which were undergoing rapid changes under the influence of the United States. Failing to grasp the reality of ongoing antireligion campaigns in the USSR of the 1950s and 1960s, most of these Latin American visitors affirmed that freedom of faith prevailed in the country and that the persecutions of believers in earlier periods of Soviet Communism, acknowledged by some, were long over.
The Colombian educationist Agustín Nieto Caballero was a practicing Catholic who traveled to the Soviet Union in 1959. After hearing the news of the successful flight of the Sputnik, he wanted to study the education system that had made possible that “historic leap of the Russian people.” His report El secreto de Rusia was published as a series of articles in the newspaper El Tiempo and as a book that had several print runs. High-ranking Soviet officials had introduced Nieto Caballero to the Soviet educational system, to schools, universities and libraries, and organized visits to research institutes. Nieto Caballero had been deeply impressed. He considered education in the Soviet Union “excellent”—and found interesting reasons for its success: Soviet students were so bright, Nieto Caballero claimed, because they were not exposed to sexual lures, as everything even mildly erotic was prohibited. There were hardly any taverns, bars, and restaurants, he noted with puritanical delight, and newspapers did not feature gossip and scandal. The Catholic Nieto Caballero believed he had found “a new religion [in the Soviet Union], the religion of work,” and he concluded: “The materialist ideology of the Soviet man is intimately impregnated with bourgeois Christian morality.” He found plenty of parallels between his ora et labora attitude and Soviet policies: “Soviet ideals and goals are like our Christian ones, this is something capitalism is lacking,” he felt, and he approved certain limitations on freedom of expression in the USSR: “Ugly degenerations of modern art should not be tolerated!”43 The pious Colombian Catholic summed up his impressions of the Soviet Union: “The Russian people, whom we find so remote from us physically and spiritually, are nevertheless, even if we would never have believed that this could be possible, giving lessons to us, lessons of purity, of honesty, of love of study, of tenaciousness in the most difficult endeavors and humble conduct.”44
Nieto Caballero was not the only Latin American Catholic who nourished these peculiar sympathies for the Soviet Union. Ironically, while white middle-class leftists turned their back on the USSR in the 1960s, some of their political adversaries at home took an interest in what they perceived as a genuinely conservative state. Alberto Dangond was a man of many vocations, a trained lawyer and a producer of television shows. He was also a practicing Catholic and represented the Partido Conservador in the Colombian parliament. In early 1967, he toured the Soviet Union and wrote a book about his experience, Mi diario en la Unión Soviética. Un conservador en la U.R.S.S., in which the staunch Catholic conservative praised the motherland of atheist socialism to the skies. Dangond, who was a beneficiary of the standard tour program through the Soviet Union, was impressed, like many others before him, by hydroelectric power plants, railway stations, and universities. During his stay in Leningrad, he found the breadth and quality of cultural life fantastic, saying, “I am ashamed of Bogotá compared to it. This is a great conservative system. There is no lack of order, no anarchy, no lack of discipline! … Everyone respects the authorities, order and discipline! These hierarchies in the Soviet Union correspond perfectly with the nature of man, it is authoritarian and at the same time wonderfully dynamic and vital within a jurisdictional order and universal consent.”45
What makes Dangon’s report particularly interesting is the list of similarities he found between Soviet Communism and his understanding of Catholic values. During a stint in Minsk, he was invited to debate population policies and birth control—and found only like-minded people: “I am radically anti-communist, this is the truth,” Dangond warned, “but, being a Catholic and patriotic Colombian conservative from a small underdeveloped tropical nation, I have met here, in the capital of communist Belorussia, a government official who says exactly the same things and thinks the same as myself, with the same human warmth!” Dangond explained he had always thought that Marxism wanted to destroy the family, but now in the USSR he saw precisely the opposite: “The application of Marxism in the Soviet Union has produced … a practice of morals, social life and a development of the human being which are easily identifiable with our best and most valued Christian, Catholic ideals.” In the late 1960s, some Latin American conservatives thus found Soviet puritanism and authoritarianism more appealing than what they saw as the West’s moral and cultural decline.46 While proponents of Liberation Theology attempted to reconcile Christianity and socialism, these other Latin American Catholics praised the anti-liberal conservatism of the Soviet state.
Gonzalo Canal Ramírez, a Colombian novelist, professor of sociology, and a Christian politician, wrote a rather similar account of his 1968 trip to Moscow, where he was received as a guest of the Soviet state press agency. While Canal Ramírez conceded that religion had been suppressed in the early days of the revolution, he defended these measures as a somewhat overzealous anticipation of the Second Vatican Council. Now in the late 1960s, according to him, religion was completely tolerated, but the real faith of the people was the belief in the Soviet state and its ideology. Art was considered a religion now, he explained, and the Russians prayed in countless museums, orchestra halls, cinemas, and on the radio. Canal Ramírez saw close parallels between Christian catechism and the values of Soviet society: a strong belief in an idea and a high esteem for work, collectivism, intolerance towards enemies of the faith and parasitical behavior, and appreciation of the family allegedly characterized both Soviet Communism and Latin American Catholicism. Canal Ramírez saw Lenin as a modern Redeemer and compared his April Theses to the gospel. Thanks to their political and moral order, he believed, all Russians were cheerful and optimistic, highly educated and yet modest. “What impressed me most,” he summed up, “was not the technological achievements, the hydropower, the spaceships, but the new man as Lenin created [sic] him.… This new man, his cultural, and moral values, is the great strength of the Soviet Union.”47
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many Latin American visitors perceived the Soviet Union under Brezhnev to be a successful conservative state, without the moral debauchery they thought was undermining the West. While the uncritical celebration of the USSR in the style of Nieto Caballero, Dangond, and Canal Ramírez was not representative of Colombian or Latin American Christians, mystical Catholicism, the hope of redemption, and anti-Western sentiments led some conservative Catholics to believe that the Soviet Union was, if not a perfect place, at least preferable to the soulless United States and Western Europe. All the travelogues described here share a deep contempt for the decadent and immoral West, its materialism, its incomprehensible modern art and music, its increasing sexual license, and its confused and disoriented youth, with their excesses, drug abuse, and superficial pastimes. The Soviet internationalist organizations, catering to this new interest and the concerns of their Christian visitors, occasionally included representatives of Soviet churches in their host programs. “The socialist regime is, above all, humanitarian,” they had a Georgian Orthodox priest tell the Brazilian journalist Nestor de Holanda, “We Christians and communists belong together.”48 Yet, judging by the impressions of Latin American Catholics in their travelogues, many of them were less interested in the churches of the Soviet Union than in the ideology of the state itself, an ideology in which many perceived Christian elements and a common dislike of modern Western moral values and cultural tastes.
Gustavo Valcárcel’s dream of a socialist America, and of a Peru that would follow the path of Kazakhstan, never materialized. While several populist nationalists, and even military dictatorships built good political and military relations with Moscow, the view of the USSR as a redeeming utopia was mostly limited to intellectual and artistic circles. Some changed their minds during the Cold War, but most Latin American visitors to the USSR were still susceptible to the lure of certain characteristics of the Soviet state and advocated their implementation in their home countries, but the internationally known writers of the “Boom” generation, mostly white middle-class men who dominated the Western perception of Latin American intellectual life, were no longer particularly interested in the Soviet Union as a role model to emulate. The revelation of Stalin’s crimes, the persecution of intellectuals within the Soviet Union, and the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 put an end to the remaining idealist illusions about the Soviet state for most Latin Americans of their generation and background, as it had done for their European counterparts. For the radical minority in Central and South America who supported guerrilla warfare, the Soviet Union and its concept of peaceful path to socialism were no longer a valid point of reference either.
Soviet efforts to win Latin Americans over during the Cold War were not all in vain, however. The anti-Western tercermundistas were still very interested in certain achievements and features of the Soviet state. Two main lines of interest are salient in the travelogues of Latin American visitors to the Cold War Soviet Union. One was their interest in a non-Western development pattern. Travelers were impressed by the state-led build-up of Soviet infrastructure, especially in the “domestic Third World” of Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as by the education and health systems and by industrial output and technological achievements. These successes were particularly impressive for visitors from less developed countries, or from less privileged personal backgrounds. The oft-noted absence of dire poverty and starvation, or the supply of running hot water in all buildings hardly impressed any Western visitor in the 1960s—but, for someone from rural Bolivia or Central America, these were signs of a successful, egalitarian type of modernization. Unlike Western visitors, who usually came to see the Soviet Union out of sheer curiosity, the tercermundistas usually sought inspiration for the improvement of living conditions in the countries they came from. The second line of interest was directed against the West as well, but with an antimodern angle. From the 1960s, conservative and indigenous Latin American Catholic authors identified more and more with what they perceived as an antimaterialist spirit in the Soviet Union. Latin American conservatives with an anti-Western bias felt close to what they saw as traditional family values and laws in the USSR, and praised its resistance against debilitating cultural influences from the United States.
As opposed to most Western “fellow travelers,” Latin American visitors to the Soviet Union constantly drew parallels with and pondered on the differences between the Soviet Union and their home countries. The Colombian poet María Mercedes Carranza called this “the secret appeal of socialism.” She was well aware of the many downsides of life in the Soviet Union, but argued in a conversation with a French diplomat, who bitterly complained about life in the sad and grim country in 1977: “I see all this with very different eyes—the eyes of an underdeveloped country that gyrates in an orbit of influence which dominates it economically. Ours is a very different case from Europe.… I recommend you always write two letters back to Paris, one from your perspective, and one that corresponds to our point of view. We do not care about the spies and the grain trade. Our problems are of a very different nature.… In the Soviet Union, at least, no one suffers from hunger, they have enough doctors and they have erased illiteracy and prostitution.”49
The overwhelmingly positive perception of the Soviet Union by its Latin American visitors until the late 1970s does not justify sweeping conclusions about a generally naïve view of the USSR in Latin America. This chapter has only presented the views of those who actually traveled to the USSR in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and wrote about their experience. Writers with a more critical view of the Soviet Union tended not to go there in the first place. However, what the travelogues of Latin American visitors to the Cold War Soviet Union do make clear is that, at least for an influential minority of writers, artists, and political activists from all over the Americas, the Soviet Union remained an important intellectual and political point of reference for much of the Cold War period. Their positive perception of the country resulted, in part, from lavishly funded and well-conducted programs for foreigners, but it was also based on their respect for a state without the huge social inequalities the visitors knew in their home countries—a state with a sound infrastructure, free health care, free and good education, functional public transport, and the apparently peaceful coexistence of people of different ethnic backgrounds. Finally, and this was perhaps the most important criterion for the tercermundistas, the Soviet Union stood for a successful non-Western, ostensibly anti-imperialist type of state that, for a while, managed to cope with the challenges of a modern society while defying the influence of the United States.
1. Gustavo Valcárcel, Medio siglo de revolución invencible: Segunda parte de “Reportaje al futuro” (Lima: Ediciones Unidad, 1967), 50–64; Gustavo Valcarcel, Reportaje al futuro: Crónicas de un viaje a la U.R.S.S. (Lima: Perú Nuevo, 1963), http://
2. Jorge Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (New York: Vintage, 1994), 177.
3. Andre Gunder Frank, “The Underdevelopment of Development,” in The Underdevelopment of Development. Essays in Honor of Andre Gunder Frank, ed. Sing Chew and Robert Denemark (New York: Sage, 1996), 26.
4. Patrick Iber, Neither Peace Nor Freedom. The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), esp. 116–43; Renata Keller, “Don Lázaro Rises Again: Heated Rhetoric, Cold Warfare, and the 1961 Latin American Peace Conference,” in Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow: New Histories of Latin America’s Cold War, ed. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Lawrence, and Julio Moreno (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 129–49.
5. Claudia Gilman, Entre la pluma y el fusil: Debates y dilemas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2003), 68.
6. Among the few exceptions are: Germán Alburquerque, La trinchera letrada. Intelectuales latinoamericanos y Guerra Fría (Santiago de Chile: Ariadna, 2011); Sylvia Saítta, Hacia la revolución: Viajeros argentinos de izquierda (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007).
7. L. Chejfec, “ ‘Čtoby rasskazat’ pravdu o SSSR’: Pervye latinoamerikanskie delegacii v Sovetskom Sojuze,” Latinskaja Amerika, no. 12 (1982): 73–83.
8. David Caute, The Fellow Travelers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
9. Vera Kutejščikova, Moskva-Meksiko-Moskva: Doroga dlinoju v žizn’ (Moskva: AkademProekt, 2000), 89–90, 115, 134; David Siqueiros, Me llamaban el Coronelazo: Memorias (México DF: Grijalbo, 1977), 369; José Mancisidor, Ciento veinte días (México DF: Editorial México Nuevo, 1937); Vicente Lombardo Toledano and Victor Manuel Villaseñor, Un viaje al mundo del porvenir (México DF: Publicaciones de la Universidad obrera de México, 1936).
10. Alfredo Varela, Un periodista argentino en la Unión Soviética (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Viento, 1950), 167.
11. Pablo Neruda, “En la Unión Soviética,” Cuadernos de la Fundación Pablo Neruda 37 (1999): 29–37.
12. Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido, Biblioteca Pablo Neruda (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 2001), 237.
13. Neruda, Confieso, 285–87.
14. Jorge Amado, O mundo da paz: União Soviética e democracias populares (Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Vitória, 1951).
15. Nicolás Guillén, Páginas vueltas: Memorias (La Habana: Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 1982), 348–50.
16. Jorge Amado, Navegação de cabotagem: Apontamentos para um livro de memórias que jamais escreverei (Lisboa: Editora Record, 1992).
17. Kutejščikova, Moskva-Meksiko-Moskva, 123; Sam L. Slick, José Revueltas (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 169. With his 1964 novel Los errores (The Mistakes), however, Revueltas renounced Soviet-style communism finally and for good. Dedicated to the memory of the executed Hungarian reform Communist Imre Nagy, it contraposed idealistic militants to party dogmatists in 1930s and 1940s Mexico and described the mirror images of the Moscow purges in the ranks of the Mexican party. José Revueltas, Los errores (Mexico DF: Fondo De Cultura Economica, 1964).
18. Diego Rivera and Gladys March, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Citadel, 1960).
19. Philip Stein, Siqueiros: His Life and Works (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 322; 373; Siqueiros, Me llamaban el Coronelazo, 458.
20. Hebe Clementi, María Rosa Oliver, Mujeres Argentinas (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1992).
21. Pedro Jorge Vera, Gracias a la vida: Memorias (Quito: Editorial Voluntad, 1993).
22. Joaquin Gutiérrez, La URSS tal cual (Santiago de Chile: Nascimento, 1967), 17.
23. Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search for the Good Society (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 72.
24. Kutejščikova, Moskva-Meksiko-Moskva, 29f.
25. Gabriel García Márquez, De viaje por los países socialistas: 90 días en la “Cortina de Hierro” (Bogotá: La Oveja Negra, 1982). The book edition came out only after a year-long struggle with the publishing house, but later became a bestseller, with at least seven editions during the decade. See Dasso Saldívar, García Márquez: El viaje a la semilla, la biografía, ABC, biografías vivas (Barcelona: Folio, 2005), 354–58.
26. Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin, 22–72.
27. N. N., “ ‘Prekrasnaja vosmožnost’: Beseda s kubinskim poetom Gil’enom,” Molodež’ mira 4 (1957): 15.
28. They were Heriberto Jara Corona (1950), Jorge Amado (1951), Eliza Branco (1952), Pablo Neruda (1953), Baldomero Sanin Cano (1954), Nicolás Guillén (1954), Lázaro Cárdenas (1955), Maria Rosa Oliver (1957), Fidel Castro (1961), Olga Poblete de Espinosa (1962), Oscar Niemeyer (1963), Miguel Ángel Asturias (1965), David Alfaro Siqueiros (1966), Jorge Zalamea (1967), Alfredo Varela (1970–71), Salvador Allende (1972), Enrique Pastorino (1972), Luis Corvalán (1973–74), Hortensia Bussi de Allende (1975–76), Vilma Espín Guillois (1977–78), Miguel Otero Silva (1979–80), Líber Seregni (1980–82), Luis Vidales (1983–84), and Miguel d’Escoto (1985–86).
29. Kutejščikova, Moskva-Meksiko-Moskva, 260–64.
30. Aleksandr Fursenko, Prezidium CK KPSS: 1954–1964, Archivy Kremlja (Moskva: Rossijskaja Političeskaja Enciklopedija, 2003), 884–903.
31. Rodolfo Ghioldi, Uzbekistan: El espejo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Fundamentos, 1956).
32. Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin, 65.
33. Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin, 188.
34. Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin, 161
35. Valcárcel, Medio siglo, 50–64, 182–87.
36. Carlos Fonseca, Un nicaragüense en Moscú (Managua: FSLN, 1980).
37. Mario Lara, “Jesús Lara (1898–1980): Homenaje,” Marxismo Militante 24 (1998): 79–83.
38. Fausto Reinaga, El sentimiento mesiánico del pueblo ruso (La Paz: Ediciones SER, 1960), 38.
39. Reinaga, El sentimiento mesiánico, 137–38.
40. Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin, 164–65.
41. Reinaga, El sentimiento mesiánico, 29.
42. Luis Alvarenga, El ciervo perseguido (San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, 2002), 40–44
43. Agustín Nieto, El secreto de Rusia (Bogotá: Antares, 1960), 16, 32, 58–64.
44. Nieto, El secreto de Rusia, 64–65.
45. Alberto Dangond, Mi diario en la Unión Soviética: Un conservador en la U.R.S.S. (Bogotá, 1968), 41, 139.
46. Dangond, Mi diario en la Unión Soviética, 156, 179.
47. Gonzalo Canal Ramírez, La Unión Soviética: Reto Moral (Bogotá: Imprenta y Rotograbado, 1969), 11, 38, 69, 76–77, 140, 175.
48. Nestor de Holanda, O mundo vermelho: Notas de um Repórter na URSS (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Pongetti, 1962), 26.
49. Marìa Mercedes Carranza, “El discreto encanto del socialismo,” Nueva Frontera 127 (1977): 23–24.