Patrick Iber. Neither Peace nor Freedom

Patrick Iber’s Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America moves from Joseph Stalin’s Moscow to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Washington, D.C., from Lázaro Cardenas’s Mexico City to Fidel Castro’s Havana. The leading protagonists in this Cold War story are two government front groups, the Soviet-backed World Peace Council (WPC) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s Congress on Cultural Freedom (CCF). The WPC championed a peace that could oppose the atomic-bomb-dropping capitalist West and its standard-bearer, the U.S.; meanwhile, the CCF promoted the idea, if not the practice, that freedom of thought without government interference was essential to any just society. The author shows how scholars, poets, and painters seeking economic sovereignty and political self-determination reworked the efforts at cultural diplomacy of the great powers. Then, in the wake of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, a genuinely Latin American institution for projecting soft power was born: la Casa de las Américas.

Cold war · Diplomacy · Economic history · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sovereignty · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies