“Ni Con Unos Ni Con Otros”: the anti-imperialist and anti-totalitarian movement for democracy in Latin America, 1940–1960

ABSTRACT

In 1950, exiles from all across Latin America met in Havana for a congress. The event’s purpose was to unite those striving for a democratic Latin America, free from US imperialism and Soviet totalitarianism. This current of opinion was not marginal: it was enthusiastically backed by millions of voters in largely free elections across the continent. However, very little has been written on democracy in Latin America, particularly during the period explored in this paper, 1940–1960. Recent scholarship on the period has instead focused on the ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism. In this paper, I highlight two democratic congresses held in Latin America in 1950 and 1960, under the title Conferencia Interamericana Pro Democracia y Libertad. The conferences served as a forum to delineate a common definition of democracy for the continent, and to explore how it could take hold in Latin America. This paper thus reveals an ideological current independent from the superpowers, which tried to democratise the region against what participants identified as the twin evils of imperialism and totalitarianism.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold war
• Latin America
• democracy
• dictatorship
• exiles

Introduction

Luis Alberto Sánchez, the Peruvian intellectual and member of the APRA party, took to the stage of Havana’s Inter-American Conference for Democracy and Freedom (IACDF), to proclaim: “We face, as many times before, two formidable external enemies; two implacable imperialisms: Wall Street’s and Moscow’s” (Conferencia Interamericana Pro Democracia y Libertad: Resoluciones y Otros Documentos 1950, 117). The “we” in Sanchez’s statement was a diverse congregation of “parliamentarians, writers, labour leaders, politicians and militants; from different positions in the ideological spectrum but united by a common denominator: the rejection of all forms of totalitarianism and imperialism,” as described by another attendee, the former (and future) Venezuelan President, Rómulo Betancourt (1950, 8).¹ The IACDF was taking place in May of 1950, and sought, above all, to address the “crisis of Democracy in America” (1950, 17). Just six years prior, a dictatorship had been overthrown in Guatemala; in Cuba, a long-time semi-authoritarian leader had peacefully stepped down after losing an election. The following year, a dictatorship was again overthrown in Venezuela. Pro-democratic protests rocked the remaining dictatorships in the Caribbean and Central America. New governments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Guatemala assumed the mantle of democracy with an internationalist projection: they coordinated a militant foreign policy in the region to undermine dictatorships and aid pro-democratic opposition in authoritarian countries. Between 1944 and 1950, the Dominican Republic was invaded twice by exiles, Nicaragua was targeted once, and Costa Rica became the site of an internationalized civil war where democratic regimes supported an insurgent guerrilla while the military dictatorships of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic sided with the incumbent government.² However, beginning in 1948, the pro-democratic side of this regional Cold War lost momentum.³ That year, the military overthrew the civilian governments of Venezuela and Peru. In 1949, Guatemalan democracy was shaken by a military uprising, suppressed with the help of Cuba’s democratic government.⁴ The following year, the personalistic regime of Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, and the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain, received multi-million loans from the United States government; this was perceived by the anti-dictatorial and pro-democratic parties of Latin America as another victory for the “neo-fascist” bloc (1950, 8). It was in this setting that the IACDF met in 1950 to analyze the causes of democracy’s downturn in Latin America and address the challenges that democratic rule was facing in a world context increasingly dominated by the Cold War.

In the literature, the years following World War II have been identified as a “democratic spring” in Latin America (Joseph 2019, 405). Bethell and Roxborough edited one of the most influential monographs on the period, identifying a “democratic opening” taking place between 1944–1946, followed by a “closure” in 1947–48. These years of democratization were caught, as the title of the volume suggested, “between the Second World War and the Cold War” (Bethell and Roxborough). Samuel Huntington defined this window in political science as a “short wave of democratization” that subsided by the early 1950s (Huntington 1991, 18). While the latter sources attempt to cover Latin America as a whole, there are many national studies predicated on the individual democratization processes undertaken in some states of the period.⁵ Another strand of literature, perhaps more prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, covered the political parties that drove or benefitted from this democratic sea change (Alexander and Porter 1961; Ameringer 1996; Kantor 1964; Martz 1966). In recent years, there has been a surge in scholarship focusing on Latin America’s position during the Cold War.⁶ However, many of these recent analyses have questioned the relevance of the 1940s as the starting point to Latin America’s Cold War and suggested either prior or later dates.⁷

In much of the scholarship, the period of democratization that began in the 1940s is detached, or sits uncomfortably, with literature on the Cold War. For authors such as Bethell and Roxborough, the Cold War was to blame for the demise of the democratic opening.⁸ Conflicts around democracy are “uncomfortable (…) categories of organization” within much of the recent Cold War historiography, which relies on a Capitalist-Socialist ideological axis between Communist parties and pro-United States governments or repressive institutions (Booth 2020, 20). While new scholarship on the Latin American Cold War seeks to uncover how Latin Americans themselves viewed the Cold War, much of this work continues to rely on a guiding axis for the Cold War, which is US-centric: research focuses on how Latin Americans either subscribed to the US’s categorization of the Cold War, or how they appropriated it to settle old scores. This article goes further by uncovering how a group of parties and trade unions challenged the binary of Socialism vs. Capitalism itself. In their view, the struggle against Communism was a US concern, while they saw the fight against dictatorship as the guiding principle for their political work. This article will attempt to bridge this seeming divide between the Second World War and the Cold War, in which the 1940s and 1950s are situated in the historiography.

The instability of dictatorships during the 1940s and 1950s, with watershed moments of liberalization in the mid-1940s and late 1950s, opened up the question of popular sovereignty, democracy, and social justice in a number of countries from Cuba to Argentina. The possibilities created by the fall of authoritarianism elicited, as this paper will show, serious attempts at coordinating democratization initiatives and a shared foreign policy that could protect the fragile experiments in democracy from interventionism from abroad. These attempts took the shape of international conferences for democracy, which gathered dozens of political parties – many in power and many more in exile – and trade unions from across the hemisphere. In these gatherings, participants defied the guiding Cold War cleavage employed by the superpowers, and attempted it to replace it with one of their own. This paper will examine two of such conferences, held in 1950 and 1960.

1950 Conference for Democracy

Many of the activists gathered in Havana in the spring of 1950 had started their political militancy as students in the 1920s and 1930s. The University Reform Movement began in Argentina in 1918. It spread across Latin America “like a torch relay,” conflating demands for increased student participation in the university with calls for a reorganization of society along democratic lines (Mella et al. 2008, 214). Calls for student assemblies were coupled with demands for universal suffrage. The Reform Movement was undergirded by a robust internationalist ethos, strengthened by student exchanges, lecture tours, and international conferences, and rested on a historical narrative that combined Bolivarian dreams of a united Latin America with Marxist notions of a borderless proletariat.⁹ The 1930s, particularly the Spanish Civil War, added further fuel to the internationalist outlook of the students. Thousands of young Latin Americans flocked to Spain to defend the cause of democracy against the threat of dictatorship.¹⁰ When the Second World War began, it was clear to the generation of pro-democratic activists that the war was between three ideologies: Fascism, Communism, and Democracy.¹¹ Shortly after the conflict began, Rómulo Betancourt, at the time an up-and-coming politician who had transitioned from student politics to creating a broad-based party that aspired to democratize Venezuela, organized a conference for “popular and democratic parties” in Chile, where he was exiled.¹² This conference, held in 1940, acted as a precursor to those examined in this paper. It gathered a number of Latin American Socialist parties and aimed to establish a common position for Latin America vis-à-vis the Second World War and its imminent arrival to the Western Hemisphere. Delegates proposed establishing a collaboration with the Allies rooted in equality – something which, in their view, could be achieved by leveraging the nationalization of strategic resources as a condition for their support in the war(Primer Congreso Kantor 1964, 11–12).¹³

As mentioned in the introduction, the 1940s were marked by political upheavals that brought to power several democratic regimes – Betancourt and his newly-founded party Acción Democrática (AD), among them. Between 1944 and 1945, parties that described themselves as different combinations of revolutionary, nationalist,¹⁴ socialist, and democratic took power in Guatemala (Partido de Acción Revolucionaria, PAR), Cuba (Partido Revolucionario Cubano – Auténtico, PRC-A), and Venezuela (AD). From their new position, they supported like-minded parties in the region that were struggling against dictatorship. In the Dominican Republic, the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) was founded by a group of exiles based in Cuba with close ties to the ruling PRC-A (Bosch 1989, 7–10). In Nicaragua, several of the leaders of the opposition Partido Liberal Independiente (PLI) had positions in the Guatemalan administration.¹⁵ In the years that followed 1945, these opposition parties received funding, weapons, and logistic support from their regional allies (Ameringer 1996; Moulton 2015 and 2017). ¹⁶ These efforts were only successful in Costa Rica, where the embryo for the Partido de Liberación Nacional (PLN) took power after a brief civil war in 1948.¹⁷ After a military defeat in the Dominican Republic in 1949, the pro-democratic network of political parties, exiles, and guerrillas faced a moment of introspection.¹⁸ The military element of this network argued that this web should institutionalize itself as a military organization: a pro-democratic paramilitary that would hire itself out, pro-bono, to support anti-dictatorial causes wherever they could be.

In contrast, the civilian leader of the PRD, the future Dominican president Juan Bosch, countered that the evil that was plaguing Latin America was precisely the existence of independent militaries, detached from any civilian or governmental oversight. He argued that the anti-dictatorial cause should be institutionalized in the shape of an international civilian organization (Bosch 1949). Thus in early 1950, AD and PRD exiles united to organize a conference to gather the region’s pro-democratic forces.¹⁹ The objective was to define a joint ideological base, establish a distinct political position in the Cold War, and create a permanent organization to agitate for the cause of democracy in the hemisphere. The Cuban government, under the presidency of Carlos Prío (1948–1952), offered to host and fund the conference.²⁰

The first IACDF gathered a diverse sample of politicians and activists. It counted delegates from 15 countries across Latin America, the United States, and Spain. Many of the attendees would later on become democratically elected presidents of their countries, such as the Betancourt and Bosch, as well as Salvador Allende, Eduardo Frei, José Figueres, Carlos Andrés Pérez, and Raúl Leoni.²¹ One of the main themes of the different interventions at the congress was the international aspect of democracy: its interdependent nature and the need for its coordinated defence. The Guatemalan minister, Manuel Galich, put it plainly: “us Guatemalans don’t understand our democracy like an island; we see it as an American case, and as such it affects every other American country.”²² He added that all the “true democrats of America” had the “urgent” task ahead of them to “cooperate with the aim of isolating the remaining dictatorships in the continent.”²³ Miguel Suárez Fernández, the president of Cuba’s congress and a member of the PRC-A, concurred. He evoked the Cuban independence hero José Martí to state that democracy and freedom, according to Martí, had always had two dimensions, “one domestic, the other Americanist.”²⁴ As Cubans, it was the duty of all Cubans to promote abroad the democracy they were enjoying at home.²⁵ Underlying this internationalism was the idea that democracies survived surrounded by like-minded regimes rather than in hostile environments: it was rooted in a sense of democratic interdependence. Juan Guichón, a Uruguayan senator, made this point by paraphrasing Manuel Azaña, the last president of the Spanish Republic, who told a group of French journalists during the Civil War that in Spain “our destiny, and yours, is at stake.”²⁶

Defending democracy in the international arena reflected a standard view among attendees: the world was divided not by two opposite ideologies, Communism and Capitalism, but by two forms of government: democracy and totalitarianism. In their resolutions, the attendees proclaimed that “the problem of peace in the twentieth century arises from the conflict between the democratic system of government and the totalitarian and dictatorial systems of government” rather than from a confrontation between economic systems of production.²⁷ Thus, many attendees felt orphaned in the conflict between the Western and Eastern blocs in the Cold War, which was flaring in Korea at the time of the conference. Delegates repeatedly stressed the US government’s hypocrisy in their self-proclaimed defence of democracy worldwide while endorsing military dictatorships in Latin America.²⁸ On the other hand, local Communist parties were seen as complicit in the totalitarian dictatorships that Stalinism had established across Eastern Europe.²⁹ It was then the duty of delegates to stake the claim of democracy as a distinct pole in the Cold War, working along an entirely new axis. To this effect, participants agreed to establish the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom (IAADF), a non-governmental organization tasked with promoting the cause of democracy across the Western Hemisphere.

Along with establishing the democratic-dictatorial axis as a separate orientation for the Cold War, the IACDF agreed on a decalogue of democratic principles that were necessary for a regime to be considered as such. Embodied in the “Declaration of Havana,” these principles included “full political liberties” such as freedom of speech, of organization, etc.; a guarantee for the plurality of political parties “as elected by voters;” guarantees for the participation of ethnic, religious or political minorities in public life; periodical elections through universal suffrage; and guarantees for an independent judiciary and press.³⁰ During their interventions, many speakers stressed that democracy in the 20^th century could not be merely “political,” understood as a number of rights codified into law. Instead, democracy had to be “full” or “social,” and combine the aforementioned rights with an interventionist state which could guarantee public welfare.³¹ As one delegate declared, “for democracy to become stronger, misery has to disappear from America.”³²

The conference drew considerable criticism from several quarters. Several dictatorial governments of the region threatened the Cuban government to sever diplomatic relations if they continued their sponsorship of the IACDF.³³ In the Diario de la Marina, a leading Cuban daily subsidized by the Perón and Franco regimes,³⁴ one of their leading columnists bashed the meeting: the prestigious author Gastón Baquero, likened the delegates to “unpleasant beggars,” adding that “we don’t believe, and we can’t believe, in the middle ground [between the US and the Soviet Union]. Time is up for the intermediary position; there is no place in the world today for the middle-of-the-road democrat, who doesn’t want to be one thing or its opposite, who doesn’t want to join one or the others” (Baquero 1950). According to Baquero, this “middle ground” would only facilitate Soviet penetration. “Democracy doesn’t have the energy within it to go on the offensive (…). The old dream of a free republic, democratic, pure, without swords nor iron, will have to wait” (Baquero 1950.) Baquero, in short, rejected the existence of any alternative to the Communist-Capitalist axis – and with it, the possibility of taking democracy “on the offensive.” Conservatives and the allies of the dictatorship disparaged the IACDF as a Stalinist and pro-Communist gathering.³⁵ Ironically, the regional Communist parties decried the conference as a meeting of US government stooges and lackeys of imperialism.³⁶ One of the IACDF attendees, the Cuban intellectual Raúl Roa, saw this criticism from “the extremists of right and left” as the “most conclusive evidence of the genuinely democratic spirit of this conference” – of its success in carving a new Cold War axis which side-lined Communists and Capitalists alike.

Meanwhile, the US State Department’s official position on the problem of democracy in Latin America was that the region was not “ready” for democracy and rejected anti-dictatorial activism as irresponsible and pointless.³⁷ The idea in Washington was that developmentalist dictatorships would usher in the economic conditions for democracy in the long term. In an intellectual pirouette, the conclusion reached by the State Department seemed to be that to reject dictatorship was to reject democracy (Y. 1950). As the IACDF delegates had expected, their position drew the ire of an unlikely Cold War coalition: military dictatorships, Communist parties, and the US government.

1960 Conference for Democracy

The permanent institution created at the Havana conference, the IAADF, enjoyed a burst of activity through the 1950s. Based in New York, the IAADF was mainly led by US activist Frances Grant, who campaigned relentlessly to influence US public opinion in favour of Latin American democrats.³⁸ The IAADF provided a forum where exiled Latin American leaders could meet influential public figures in the US, from politicians and labour leaders to journalists – among the latter stood out Herbert Matthews, the New York Times Latin America editor who was closely linked to the IAADF, providing ample space to the organization in the newspaper’s coverage of the region (Gosse 1993, 77). From the mid-1950s, some military dictatorships began to fall in the continent, starting with Perón’s overthrow in 1955, followed by General Odría in Peru in 1956, General Rojas Pinilla in Colombia in 1957, General Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela in 1958, and finally, General Batista in Cuba in 1959. The New York Times christened the moment as the “Twilight of Dictatorships” (Szulc 1959). Batista’s overthrow in Cuba and the victory of the Movimiento 26 de Julio (M26/7) guerrillas, led by Fidel Castro, was a particularly momentous occasion for the IAADF and the anti-dictatorial network.³⁹ In the US, the IAADF had actively campaigned in favour of the M26/7, hosting events with the guerrilla’s presidential candidate and leading spokespersons; in the pages of the New York Times, Matthews heaped praise upon a largely unknown Castro.⁴⁰ However, what followed the M26/7’s seizure of power was not a return to the democratic system enshrined by the Cuban 1940 Constitution, as expected by the main parties in exile, but rather a rapidly radicalizing revolutionary project. In the spring of 1960, a second IACDF was held in Venezuela to celebrate the fall of dictatorship across the region and the return to power of democratic parties such as AD. However, the events in Cuba would bitterly divide the pro-democratic movement.

Gathered in Maracay, the second IACDF reunited several guests from the previous edition and expanded its representation to include delegates from 21 Latin American republic and the US.⁴¹ If the “crisis of democracy” had dominated the first IACDF, by 1960 the concern had shifted towards the immediate issues of governance: foremost among them, economic development. Speakers repeatedly addressed the continent’s economic situation; stagnation, poverty, and corruption threatened to derail democratic consolidation. In an inversion of the modernization paradigm propounded by many social scientists of the time (whereby increased economic development correlated with democracy), delegates at the IACDF argued that development was needed to guarantee the stability of democratic politics – rather than as a precondition for its existence.⁴² As two Costa Rican delegates said, “One cannot speak of democratic stability where the exploitation of man exists” (Report of the Second Inter-American Congress, 81). However, attendees identified a dilemma in bringing about industrialization and economic modernization that could guarantee rising incomes, redistribution, and, thus, stability. This vast effort had to be directed by the state, rather than by private capital, and to overextend the remit of the state threatened to bring about an authoritarian regime. The Venezuela’s Central University rector, Francisco D’Venanzi, labelled it the “fundamental dilemma of our times: the conflict between the unresolved antagonism of political liberty and the economic planning required to satisfy material needs fully” (1961, 17). Delegates expressed dissenting opinions on how much the state should intervene in the economy to direct the modernizing process. Rafael Caldera, leader of the Venezuelan Christian-Democratic party COPEI (and future president of Venezuela), clearly argued: “If we must choose between heavy industries and freedom, we choose freedom!” (1961, 28). Others, such as D’Venanzi, conceded that the appeal of a forceful yet redistributive state, such as that being developed in Cuba, was undeniable among the Latin American youth (1961, 20). While the dilemmas posed by development remained unresolved, the issue itself was framed in terms of a continental emergency: the congress resolved to “stress urgently” some economic resolutions, including “the urgency of agrarian reform.”⁴³ Despite the Decalogue established in 1950, the questions opened by the prospect of democratization defied easy or ready-made answers.

In international politics, the position of the second IACDF evolved from its first iteration along the same ideological lines. The anti-colonial character of the parties and unions gathered at Maracay was reinforced. The IACDF agreed to establish a colonial committee tasked with overseeing the process towards independence of all remaining European colonies in the Americas, and passed a resolution calling for the complete independence of Puerto Rico (1961, 258). Its anti-colonial vocation extended beyond the confines of Latin America and called on all democrats of the continent to join the international boycott against the South African government’s apartheid regime (1961, 257). To advance the anti-dictatorial cause, the IACDF proposed a number of international mechanisms to isolate authoritarian regimes. The final resolutions called for the withdrawal of recognition to dictatorial regimes and a suspension of commercial ties. As Betancourt put it, “What is needed is to eradicate dictators from the juridical American community, because otherwise we witness the hypocrisy of reviling European totalitarianism, and sitting beside the personages of American totalitarianism, at the same table for discussion” (1961, 43). The objective was to repurpose a tool of the US in their Cold War against the East – the Organization of American States (OAS), which was meant to gather all US allies in the hemisphere – into a tool of the democratic-dictatorial Cold War; one which would define admission not based on US acceptance, but on adherence to democratic norms. The Congress thus continued to promote its separate axis for the Cold War. It called for a reduction of defence budgets. It repudiated “all forms of imperialism, totalitarianism, Fascist, Nazi, Falangist and Communist,” as well as the “vestiges of colonial systems” that survived in the Americas (1961, 43). The US government was repeatedly criticized for supporting Latin American dictatorships and working under a “pessimistic interpretation of Hispano American sociology, which believes in the strong men as governors, in order to impede the advent of democracy” (Cited in 1961, 90).

Unsurprisingly, the second IACDF attracted the same unlikely coalition of Cold War enemies as its first gathering. Days before the conference was due to start, a military insurrection backed by the Dominican dictatorship threatened to overthrow Betancourt’s government. Popular mobilization and the government’s swift action managed to suppress the uprising.⁴⁴ From Cuba, the pro-regime Communist press attacked the conference throughout, dubbing it a gathering of “imperialism and its stooges.”⁴⁵ From the United States, the New York Times granted some coverage to the conference, however, there was no official comment from the government.⁴⁶ While attendees quickly portrayed the conference as a success in the face of their enemies, it had been mired by dissension. The Cuban Revolution had driven a wedge among delegates, with some praising the new regime and aiming to draft a resolution of support. In contrast, others sought to minimize the issue and avoid discussing it openly.⁴⁷ In the stands of the auditorium, Venezuelan students from different parties traded insults, and some chanted “vivas” to the Cuban Revolution – the members of the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) were heard calling for a revolution “like the Cuban one.”⁴⁸ As stated earlier, the manifold possibilities of democratization defied uniform models despite the best efforts of the conferences to reach a consensus on a minimum set of features to define democracy.

Conclusion

It would be easy to dismiss both IACDF conferences as embodying a failed, fleeting moment in Latin America’s long road toward democracy. Shortly after the 1960 gathering, several military coups undid the “Twilight of Dictators.” By the 1970s, only Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela had civilian, democratic governments. However, in 1976, Betancourt was once more taking the stage to address a new conference of democratic parties in Caracas. This time, it was organized jointly with Socialist International (SI), led by German ex-chancellor Willy Brandt. Several veterans from the 1950 and 1960 IACDFs were once more present, joined by some of Europe’s most prestigious social-democratic statesmen, such as Olof Palme, Bettino Craxi, Felipe González or Mário Soares.⁴⁹ The second half of the 1970s saw the beginning of a collaboration between the SI, and some Latin American democratic parties closely related to the IACDF, such as the aforementioned AD, APRA, PRD or PLN, where support flowed in both directions: AD and the PLN provided funding to the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) during Spain’s transition to democracy, while Soares, leader of the Portuguese Socialist Party (PS), supported the Dominican PRD by pressuring the aged autocrat Joaquin Balaguer to concede his defeat to the opposition party (Pedrosa 2019, 167 and 171).⁵⁰ As democracy returned to Latin America during the late 1970s, in what became known as the “third wave of democratization” by political scientists, the parties involved had deep roots in the continent’s earlier struggles during the 1940s to 1960s.

The ideological position charted at the IACDFs was therefore neither ephemeral nor inconsequential. While US officials and Moscow-aligned Communists were happy to read international politics as a bipolar conflict between the Eastern and Western blocs, a number of parties, trade unions, activists and cultural organizations from Latin America organized tirelessly to challenge this dichotomy. As this article has shown, the advent of democracy in the continent cannot be ascribed to US foreign policy or Communist activism. The struggle for democracy and against dictatorship, so influential in the region at the time,⁵¹ reveals a new axis to approach the Cold War in Latin America. The unlikely partnership by military dictators, Communist parties, and US officials in their rejection of the pro-democratic struggle throws into question the validity of a communist-capitalist dichotomy to explain the period. The opposition to the IACDF shows that the ideological barrier between US-backed dictators and Stalinist parties was far from an “iron curtain.”

Furthermore, this paper’s transnational lens, focusing on parties, exiles, and activists whose actions and ideas moved across borders, reveals a number of continuities between the different “waves” or democratic “openings” identified in the literature. In examining the activities of the IAADF and its conferences, this article has uncovered the recurring presence of certain parties, ideas, and individuals that thread the pro-democratic upheavals of the 1940s with the transitions of the 1970s. While historical context varied greatly throughout these moments, these conferences show to what extent there was an attempt to harmonize the different democratization projects that emerged between the 1940s and 1950s. Efforts to standardize an enforceable definition of democracy had some success in securing the support of a considerable number of parties in government. Some questions, however, particularly around development issues, proved thornier and more challenging to resolve, as shown by the irruption of the Cuban Revolution and its reverberation across the hemisphere.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Betancourt was President of Venezuela in 1945–1947 and 1958–1964.

2. On the anti-dictatorial activities of this period see the work of Charles Ameringer and Aaron Moulton: Charles D. Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians, Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–1950 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); The Democratic Left in Exile: The Antidictatorial Struggle in the Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FLA: University of Miami Press, 1974); Aaron Coy Moulton, “Building Their Own Cold War in Their Own Backyard: The Transnational, International Conflicts in the Greater Caribbean Basin, 1944–1954,” Cold War History 15, no. 2 (3 April 2015): 135–54; “Militant Roots- The Anti-Fascist Left in the Caribbean Basin, 1945–1954,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y El Caribe 28, no. 2 (29 December 2017).

3. Moulton first defined it as a “Cold War of their own” in “Building Their Own Cold War in Their Own Backyard”

4. On this episode and the internationalist support for democracy during Cuba’s Auténtico period see Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, “‘Our Liberty Is Your Liberty:’ Democracy, Exile and Revolution in the Foreign Policy of Cuban President Carlos Prío, 1948–1952,” in Reconsidering Political Currents and Constituencies in Cuba’s Republic, ed. Ariel Mae Lambe and Melina Pappademos, (forthcoming; Charles D. Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Experience: The Auténtico Years, 1944–1952 (Gainesville, FLA: University Press of Florida, 2000).

5. See for example Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States 1944 – 1954 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, Gleijeses 1992); Ameringer, Cuban Democratic Experience; Robert J. Alexander, Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982); Manuel Caballero, Rómulo Betancourt, Político de Nación (Caracas: Alfadil, Caballero 2004).

6. For some useful historiographical analysis, see Gilbert M. Joseph, “Border Crossings and the Remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies,” Cold War History 19, no. 1 (2 January 2019): 141–70; William A. Booth, “Rethinking Latin America’s Cold War,” The Historical Journal, 5 October 2020, 1–23; Vanni Pettinà, Historia Mínima De La Guerra Fría En América Latina (Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México, 2018); Tanya Harmer, “The Cold War in Latin America,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (London: Routledge, Harmer 2014).

7. For proponents of a long-durée approach see Harmer, “The Cold War in Latin America;” Greg Grandin and G. M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, Grandin and Joseph 2010). On the other hand, for a volume proposing 1959 as a starting point, see Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, Grandin and Joseph 2010).

8. See the introduction and conclusion to Bethell and Roxborough, Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War.

9. A good introduction to the ideas of the University Reform Movement is Dardo Cuneo, ed., La Reforma Universitaria: 1918–1930 (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979).

10. It was seen in these terms by Latin American press of the time, see for example the editorial in Repertorio Americano, 22 August 1936, or Marcelino Domingo, “La Amplitud de La Democracia,” Bohemia, 28 November 1937. Over one thousand volunteers departed from Cuba alone. See Ariel Mae Lambe, No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 88.

11. See for example Enrique Henríquez, “Nuestros Partidos Revolucionarios Frente a La Guerra Internacional,” Bohemia, 6 April 1941.

12. Primer Congreso De Los Partidos Democráticos Y Populares De América Latina (Santiago de Chile: Talleres Gráficos Gutenberg, 1941).

13. Some of the parties in attendance were the Argentinian, Chilean, Ecuadorian, Panamanian and Uruguayan Socialist parties, as well as the Peruvian APRA, the Mexican PRM and the Venezuelan Partido Democrático Nacional (PDN), precursor of AD.

14. Understood, as explained by Betancourt himself, in an anti-imperialist sense rather than in any ideas of national superiority or chauvinism. Rómulo Betancourt, “Nacionalismo (1936),” in Selección de Escritos Políticos (Caracas, 2006).

15. Edelberto Torres and Carlos Castillo Ibarra were employed by the Guatemalan state: the former had a position in the Department of Public Instruction and the latter received a government salary. See “Communist Influence in Guatemala and El Salvador,” 7 February 1951, CIA, CIA-RDP82-00457R006800130001-9.

16. Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion; The Democratic Left in Exile; Moulton, “Militant Roots- The Anti-Fascist Left in the Caribbean Basin, 1945–1954;” “Building Their Own Cold War in Their Own Backyard.”

17. For an account of the war from a regional perspective, see Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion.

18. The defeat was at Luperon. For more see ibid.

19. “Dominican Revolutionary Meeting in Cuba,” 12 January 1950, CIA, CIA-RDP82-00457R004100550008-2.

20. “Inter-American Conference for Democracy and Freedom,” OIR Report No. 5263, 7 August 1950, Division of Research for American Republics, accessed through ProQuest History Vault, 3–4.

21. Other prominent guests included Germán Arciniegas, Raúl Roa, Daniel Cossío Villegas or Eduardo Rodríguez Larreta. Conferencia Interamericana, 23–27.

22. Ibid, 64.

23. Ibid, 66.

24. Ibid, 36.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid, 93.

27. Ibid, 199.

28. See for example Betancourt’s preface in ibid, 11.

29. US Socialist Waldo Frank declared at the conference, “to be a straight, orthodox communist, is not to be a revolutionary but a reactionary.” Ibid, 88.

30. This decalogue was also published in the Cuban press. See “Declaracion de la Habana,” Bohemia, 21 May 1950.

31. See for example Conferencia Interamericana, 196.

32. Ibid, 125.

33. The governments that threatened to break relations were the Argentinian, Colombian, Dominican, Peruvian and Venezuelan. “Inter-American Conference for Democracy and Freedom,” OIR Report, 15–17.

34. For evidence of the subsidies, see “Possible sale of EL MUNDO: alleged subsidies to Habana newspapers: statements of Dr. Pedro Cué,” 19 June 1947, US State Department, accessed in latinamericanstudies.org. For more on the history of the Diario de la Marina and its links with falangismo and Franco, see Andrea Virga, “Fascism and Nationalism in Cuba: A Case Study on the Global Projection of an European Ideology” (Lucca, IMT School for Advanced Studies, 2018), 65–93.

35. Criticism came as far as from Francoist Spain. See “Inter-American Conference for Democracy and Freedom,” OIR Report, 16–20.

36. See for example the coverage of Cuban Communisty daily, Noticias de Hoy, between 9 and 14 May 1950.

37. Y., “On a Certain Impatience with Latin America,” Foreign Affairs 28, no. 4 (1950): 565–79. The article was published anonymously in Foreign Affairs and was meant to express the Department’s opinion. See Jorrit Van den Berk, Becoming a Good Neighbor Among Dictators: The U.S. Foreign Service in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, Van den Berk 2017), 271.

38. See Grant’s report in Report of the Second Inter-American Congress (New York: Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, 1961), 44–76.

39. For the relation between the M26/7 and the wider anti-dictatorial network, see Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano, Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War: Exiles, Revolutionaries and Tyrants, 1952–1959 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, Prados Ortiz de Solórzano 2020).

40. See Chapter 3 in Gosse, Where the Boys Are. See also Anthony DePalma, The Man Who Invented Fidel: Cuba, Castro, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times (New York: Public Affairs, DePalma 2006).

41. The list of attendees extended to 200 names, including many from the 1950 IACDF such as Allende, Frei, Figueres, Guichon; and new attendees such as Rómulo Gallegos, Carlos Lleras Restrepo, Eduardo Santos or Arturo Uslar Pietri.

42. For more on modernization theory, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

43. See the resolutions in ibid, 263.

44. “Venezuela Reports a Rebellion Halted,” New York Times, 21 April 1960.

45. “Un Comentario: La Lección de Maracay,” Noticias de Hoy, 29 April 1960. Hoy was severely critical of the second IACDF, however, the newspaper praised the anti-colonial resolutions adopted by the conference, and argued that they had been passed by progressives such as Allende and Juan José Arévalo against the wishes of the organizers.

46. “Freedom Congress Opens in Venezuela,” New York Times, 25 April 1960.

47. “Cuban Issue Avoided by a Latin Congress,” ibid, 28 April 1960.

48. “De Carácter Privado y Democrático la Reunión de Caracas,” Diario de la Marina, 23 April 1960.

49. For more on these encounters between the Socialist International and Latin American parties, see Bernd Rother, Global Social Democracy: Willy Brandt and the Socialist International in Latin America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022); Bernd Rother and Klaus Larres, eds., Willy Brandt and International Relations: Europe, the USA, and Latin America, 1974–1992 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, Fonseca 2019).

50. See also Ana Mónica Fonseca’s chapter, “From the Iberian Peninsula to Latin America: The Socialist International’s Initiatives in the First Years of Brandt’s Presidency” in 179–194.

51. A CIA report from 1954 read: ““In Caribbean and in general Latin American opinion, this issue of ‘democracy’ versus ‘dictatorship’ (…) is a matter of far greater importance than the question of Communism or anti-Communism.” “National Intelligence Estimate, the Caribbean Republics,” 24 August 1954, CIA, NIE 80–54.