Authors Patrick Iber and Karen Paget discuss the Cultural Cold War, the CIA’s attempt to champion left-wing cultural movements and student unions during the Cold War.
During the Cold War, left-wing Latin American artists, writers, and scholars worked as diplomats, advised rulers, opposed dictators, and even led nations.
Their competing visions of social democracy and their pursuit of justice, peace, and freedom led them to organizations sponsored by the Soviet-backed World Peace Council, the U.S.-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom, and, after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the homegrown Casa de las Américas.