This week’s readings all look at, in various ways, the modernization and socio-economic efforts and ideals of the United States, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and numerous local actors in how they informed the Cold War in Latin America.
Fernando Purcell argues that modernization was the umbrella under which new “North-South” intimacies grew, in particular, the use of the Peace Corps in Latin America was one intervention in which this played out in local communities. Tanya Harmer makes the claim in ‘Brazil’s Cold War in the Southern Cone, 1970–1975’ that Brazil’s involvement in other Latin American countries fighting against left wing movements and encouraging the United States to play a greater role is overlooked and an important piece to consider in terms of understanding the various actors of the cultural Cold War. Felipe Pereira Loureiro’s article delves into specifics of American intervention in Cold War Latin America by looking at the Alliance for Progress in Brazil, which sought modernization of economics in Brazil in exchange for political concessions and how when what was offered was considerably less than what President Goulart had asked for, he threatened a turn to the Soviets for support.
Benjamin Cowan argues that by examining the ideologies, motivations, and understandings of morality and subversion of Brazil’s right, we can better understand the nuances the Cold War in Latin America beyond simple right versus left politics, replacing it instead with insights around modernization.

This week’s readings all look at, in various ways, the modernization and socio-economic efforts and ideals of the United States, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and numerous local actors in how they informed the Cold War in Latin America. The theme carried through all of the pieces is to untangle the motivations and agency of actors in the bid for a more nuanced understanding of the Cold War as beyond North-South/left-right binaries that involves re-readings, new sources, and problematizing of understandings of these motivations. While largely centered around Brazil, the readings all flesh out the significance that Brazil had across Latin America, while not a traditionally studied entity in terms of being a major influencer during the Cold War. For me, this brings new questions about how we read (or don’t) both the well studied nations (Cuba, Nicaragua), as well as the less studied, or considered. What can be learned by shifting focus to particular motivations, politics, and cultural “pulls” when not just considering Brazil, but Latin America as a whole? I believe the majority of these readings set out and accomplish this nuancing of the cultural Cold War.

Fernando Purcell argues that modernization was the umbrella under which new “North-South” intimacies grew, in particular, the use of the Peace Corps in Latin America was one intervention in which this played out in local communities. Purcell’s aim here is to look at the various visions of community development and modernization to better understand the ways in which the Soviet Union and United States tried to impose their views and projects on Latin America. It’s interesting that Purcell does not bring in arguments around how this really is a colonial struggle, at least in how he presents it and I can’t help but wonder how Grandin might have read this. Especially considering Purcell’s early invocation of the Truman Doctrine. Importantly, however, Purcell does discuss the ways in which the Peace Corps numerous and at times, conflicting views on how community development should play out, also collided with the Peruvian, Bolivian, Chilean, etc methods of fighting poverty, which Purcell rightly points out has been overlooked. Ultimately, Purcell argues that understanding that the Peace Corps was not a unilateral intervention in Latin America, which helps us understand the specifics and diversity of motivations.

Tanya Harmer makes the claim in ‘Brazil’s Cold War in the Southern Cone, 1970–1975’ that Brazil’s involvement in other Latin American countries fighting against left wing movements and encouraging the United States to play a greater role is overlooked and an important piece to consider in terms of understanding the various actors of the cultural Cold War. Specifically looking at Brazil’s influence in Chile, Harmer repositions the significance of Brazil’s own “diplomatic offensive in Latin America. Far from being “disinterested,” Brazil was profoundly involved in seeking to undermine leftist progress in surrounding countries. Harmer posits that the motivation for this interventionism was to quell threats to Brazil’s particularly oppressive and paranoid military government; gains being made in Chile and Cuba were direct and ideological threats to the social order of Brazil’s political apparatus. If we reconsider Brazil as actually being one of the main drivers of counter-revolutionary violence in Latin America, we essentially rewrite the trajectory of the entire cultural Cold War. While the period of violence in Brazil may have been relatively short, I agree with Harmer that Brazil fundamentally shifted the tone and tactics of violence in Latin America, well beyond its borders.

Felipe Pereira Loureiro’s article delves into specifics of American intervention in Cold War Latin America by looking at the Alliance for Progress in Brazil, which sought modernization of economics in Brazil in exchange for political concessions and how when what was offered was considerably less than what President Goulart had asked for, he threatened a turn to the Soviets for support. Loureiro sheds light on the specific needs of Brazil in the early 60s to reduce poverty with foreign investment. This in turn helps us better understand that specific local and national concerns actually overrode any predilection towards Soviet or Western philosophies or approaches but rather opportunism and agency of nations where Cold War ideologies were at times being layered over those needs and motivations but also exploited, as we have seen in Grandin, Iber, Montoya, etc. In terms of weighing each of these sources as cultural history or as something else, I see Loureiro’s piece as decidedly not cultural history and certainly not the New Cultural History. It remains however an important contribution in overturning misreadings of the broader political motivations of Brazil in the 60s and also in understanding how American paranoia of the spread of Communism in Latin America might have been manifested during this time.

Benjamin Cowan argues that by examining the ideologies, motivations, and understandings of morality and subversion of Brazil’s right, we can better understand the nuances the Cold War in Latin America beyond simple right versus left politics, replacing it instead with insights around modernization. Cowan links the convolution of sex, bodies, and youth with socialist subversion and being anti-modern. Taking this approach of understanding the nuances and tactics of the right, Cowan is able to move well beyond the tendency to examine only polemics of left-right but the specifics and longer threads of morality and sexuality in Brazil and how those found new readings during the Cold War. The anxieties of “moral disaster” and anti-modernization played out in the Cold War in new realms, with new tactics of oppression, despite having been socially and culturally embedded for a much longer time frame. Cowan brings in specific sources that examine these anxieties that have been previously un-discussed, which I believe helps us better understand the disproportionate and violent response of Brazil’s right, and more broadly, counter-revolutionary moral/modernist panic throughout the Cold War. Sexuality, birth control, gendered movements all came to symbolize a threat to a hard fought moral order established by governments like Brazil’s but also mirror the moral panic used to justify McCarthyism in the United States, although of course existing within specific Brazilian and Latin American contexts.

Reading response:

I started reading Montoya’s ‘Gendered Scenarios of Revolution’ last week, which felt a little removed for me as her introduction talks so much of what constitutes a scenario, how communities being examined, viewed, analyzed, produces new scenarios both within and without the community, and the how land and place collide with these factors to produce new scenarios. Why did I feel removed? Because I was reading it on one of Latin America’s busiest beaches, which is purposely reserved to exclude local communities. Montoya’s introduction, and indeed much of the book, conjures up these moments (or scenarios) when she is confronted with her own subjectivity and assumptions. This has been one of those serendipitous readings as it’s mirrored much of my own experience doing research in Cuba. Many of the questions I am asking have shifted away from “oh, look at this really interesting moment and time in this place” to needing to step back and view things with a wider frame of reference, as well as try to try to go deeper into specifics of experience rather than exhuming events to plop neatly on a timeline or relegate to yet another study (imposed) on Latin America. Montoya’s experience in El Tule and initially balking at the village’s request to be named as researchers, serves as a good reminder of the ever present trap that historians especially are susceptible to: going in, extricating research, and taking it away to type it up. That literally mirrors what my research notes say for this week: go into institutions, extract knowledge, go sit in a colonial hotel, and type them up. Once again, I am being forced to confront what utility, if any, my own research will have to Cubans. I finished Montoya’s book sitting in bed in the casa I am staying in during a brownout in Havana this morning. Mary, the matriarch of the house, shrugs off the lack of power: “es normal.” What choices do we make when we are confronted by our subjectivities as researchers, in many ways looking for what is “abnormal?” But who is it abnormal for and who is it normal for? Do we, as Montoya initially felt, look for the abnormal and interesting stories that satisfy our own political and professional desires? Additionally, looking for fractures within narratives, particularly of political and ideological cultures allows for the nuance that has been at times absent from the large scale histories we have read. I still get muddied on what constitutes social versus cultural history but Montoya’s work, based in anthropology and history, to me is where histories can come to life: on the ground as lived through people’s experiences. For the Spanish readings, I decided to set the mood for Guerra Fria by completing them at the bunker and tunnels built during the middle crisis, at the back lookout of the Hotel Nacional. Reading the Spanish pieces was disorienting as much of my last few days has been listening carefully and when I read, I’m often not totally clear on exactly what I’m reading until I’m at the end, and then need to go back and reread the article. Which in some ways mirrors reading and history. This makes me think about our practice as historians to constantly re-examine and reinterpret what we have read.

Moving through the Garcia piece, I’m admittedly a little distracted by form- as I’ve seen a very similar set up in almost every Spanish academic piece I’ve read on this trip, the two column approach, with very clear demarcations of themes and topics, often framed with questions. I’m also trying to figure out <>. Garcia breaks down the key moments of the Cold War from around Latin America and uses the through line of revolutionary (but primarily counter revolutionary) justifications of violence and cultural warfare as legitimatized by the Truman Doctrine. There’s an awful lot of load tourists watching me as I read this article out loud to myself in a makeshift trench and I’m becoming self conscious about how much I really understand. A woman just walked by and proclaimed loudly “this was from back when Cuba was Communist.” I guess she’s not wrong. But it reminds me of how skewed histories displaced from the land in which they took place create historical affectations. Garcia’s approach comes out a little on the side of the revolutionaries but why shouldn’t it? I want to go on a rant about neoliberalism and historiographies of capitalism but will just get on with finishing this article. It seems to mention the battle for ideas and the various ways in which ideology and state imaginations targeted young people and poor people- both left and right claiming the moral high ground but Garcia recognizes the conditions created prior to and during the Cold War that did not significantly improve the fortunes of most people. And of course for many, things got much much worse. The embargo has so little practical use beyond punishing Cuba for remaining socialist. I don’t suspect if free and open the elections were to occur tomorrow, the embargo would be lifted. The readings this week do a good job of illuminating, from various angles and local to pan- Latin American perspectives, how ideological battles played out. For the interview with Maria Mudrovcic, I sat out on the steps of the university to reread it. The first time I struggled with it because I have two modes of reading Spanish: 1. Letting it wash over me and thinking in Spanish instead of translating and 2. Going through translating word for word and it’s frustrating how little control I have over which mode I’m in. Mudrovcic, I believe, is arguing that cultural Cold War meant that control of flow of information, ideas, and cultural messages are was paramount and while in certain times and places books were scarce, the Cold War also provided new platforms and created something of a cultural/artistic boom, albeit one that was sponsored at times by the CIA and other groups. It’s odd I feel more self conscious about my Spanish comprehension the more I am around Spanish. It’s as if reading these articles is like asking for directions. I receive a response, nod to myself, then wander off confidently hoping that I am headed in the right direction. And eventually I get to where I’m going but I definitely misinterpret things and make unscheduled stops along the way. Like yesterday when I asked for directions back to the street I’m staying on and as I walked past a tower at the bottom of the street I had to go “Ohhh, they meant a tower!” I had been looking for a bull. Part of the readings for me now has become incorporating the walking element and letting what I read settle into my head to see if new ideas emerge or new things are illuminated through rumination. I suppose pondering meanings in Spanish is not all that different than pondering historical meanings in texts.