Latin America and the Communist World in the early 1950s: The Networks of Soviet Pacifism and Latin American Anti-imperialism

Abstract

In the first half of the 1950s, a substantial number of Latin American intellectuals formed a political-cultural activist network in line with the pacifist and noninterventionist politics that the Soviet Union promoted through the world peace movement. In the context of the peak years of the first Cold War and “Late Stalinism”, writers, artists, and scientists from across the continent embraced a reborn anti-imperialism. They participated in a transnational circuit of trips, publications, and gatherings that linked Latin American capitals with Moscow, Prague, and Beijing. They combined their long-standing hemispheric anti-imperialist goals and values with those of like-minded peoples in Asia, particularly in China but also in Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus. Communism had achieved popular support among prominent cultural figures, ranging from progressive liberals to nationalists and from famous individuals to lesser-known ones. Together, they contributed to the legitimization and advancement of intellectual alternatives that the communist world offered, even with the ups and downs the heteronomus nature of the parties inevitably engendered. In this chapter, I analyze this “anti-imperialist moment.” By “moment,” I refer to the contingent and temporary nature of this network as well as the sense of opportunity it presented. I take as a starting point the figure of María Rosa Oliver (1898-1977), an Argentine writer who was one of the pillars of this network that spread across all five continents and was most active from 1950 to 1955. Although the world peace movement included world-renowned Latin Americans such as the poet Pablo Neruda and the painter Diego Rivera, Oliver was not a familiar figure to many. Yet although she was not a central figure in either the literary or the scientific world, she possessed certain social and cultural qualities that enabled her to mediate and organize exceptionally well. These skills explain why she played an essential role in building and maintaining the network.