Mexico City, Capital of the Twentieth Century Cultural Congresses: Soviet and U.S. Interests in Latin America's Cultural Cold War

During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States sought to enlist intellectuals and artists in support of political and cultural agendas favorable to their international interests.  In this paper, I compare two congresses held in Mexico City: the Continental Congress for Peace in September 1949 and Inter-American Conference for Cultural Freedom of September 1956, associated with Soviet and U.S. front groups, respectively.  The Peace conference marked the major introduction of the worldwide Peace movement to Latin America, while the Cultural Freedom conference was the result of years of organizational work by the CIA and liberal intellectuals to counteract the influence of the Peace movement.

Both congresses were able to mobilize significant and remarkable talent: the Peace movement counted on the support of the great Mexican muralists and in Pablo Neruda, who put on a cultural performance reflecting his turn towards experimentation with socialist realism inflected with indigenist themes.  The Cultural Freedom group—including Norman Thomas, Ralph Ellison, José Luis Romero, Jaime Castillo Velasco, and Luis Alberto Sánchez—promoted an aesthetic sensibility of liberal cosmopolitanism and an emphasis on the “European” aspects of Latin American culture, hoping that this would lead indirectly to a rapprochement between North American and Latin American intellectuals.

I argue that, taken as major propaganda undertakings, both congresses were failures.  Each exposed major fissures within the camps they sought to mobilize, leading to breaks within the organizations within months.  I further argue that while both received considerable attention from the wider intellectual public in Mexico, they were generally received skeptically.  The hypocritical elements of the arguments they advanced were readily recognized.  In this as in other propaganda efforts of the Cold War, propaganda itself was insufficient to conceal unattractive policies.