Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Exile and dissent in the making of the cultural Cold War -- Making peace with repression, making repression with peace -- The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the imperialism of liberty -- The anti-communist left and the Cuban Revolution -- Peace and national liberation in the Mexican 1960s -- Modernizing cultural freedom -- Disenchantment and the end of the cultural Cold War -- Conclusion

Abstract: Because of the echoes in our times of the conditions that produced Cold War liberalism, it should not surprise us that recent years have brought a renewed interest in the tradition. Today, its inheritors warn ominously of the growing threats from the authoritarian right. But they are also concerned about the left's drift toward a rejection of liberalism. The war in Ukraine has further enlivened their coalition. What should be made of this revival?

In 1981, as revolution and counterinsurgency raged across Central America, Mexico's secret police believed they had bagged an important spy: Jorge Castañeda Gutman, the son of the foreign secretary. According to surveillance carried out by the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), Castañeda was an avowed "Marxist Leninist" who had betrayed his country on behalf of the Cuban government, by using his father's connections to help foreign revolutionaries from Central America. A quarter century later, in 2006, Jorge Castañeda published an article in Foreign Affairs that would have shocked his DFS pursuers.

The basic idea of democratic socialism is straightforward: the only socialism worthy of its name is one that preserves individual liberty and democratic procedures, while simultaneously extending the values of democracy to the economic sphere. But the twentieth century has provided, on the one hand, examples of authoritarian socialism, and, on the other, welfare state capitalism, neither of which meets the standard. If it is clear what democratic socialism is not, the harder question of what it is remains contested. Regardless of the eventual outcome, Bernie Sanders's surprisingly robust performance in the Democratic primary makes this an opportune moment to revisit that debate.

ANTONIO NIÑO Y JOSÉ ANTONIO MONTERO, (EDS.): Guerra Fría ypropaganda: Estados Unidos y su cruzada cultural en Europa y AméricaLatina. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2012.

AbstractThis article describes the relationship of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, Mexico's most important writing centre in the second half of the twentieth century, to the US foundations that funded it. The Centre was founded by a North American writer, Margaret Shedd, with the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation understood the Centre as a 'Pan-American' effort to improve relations between the United States and Mexico by bringing its writers closer together. Later, there were also contributions from two CIA fronts, the Farfield Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to the Centre and its star graduate, Juan Rulfo. However, this article argues that none of the US foundations realised the ambitions that they had for the Centre. Through a process of 'Mexicanised Americanisation', a project that had elements of Yankee cultural imperialism produced instead one of the world's finest writing centres, but without any clear political benefit for the United States.