Chinese Troupes on Tour in Latin America: From Chinatown Itineraries to Cold War Cultural Diplomacy

Tracking the Cold War in Latin America William Michael Schmidli (bio) Hal Brands . Latin America's Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 385 pp. Figures, notes and index. $29.95. Stephen G. Rabe . The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xxxvii + 247 pp. Chronology, notes, recommendations for further reading and research, and index. $19.95. In an influential 2003 survey of recent scholarship on U.S.-Latin American relations, Max Paul Friedman asserted that, after decades of intellectual jostling with advocates of the orthodox or nationalist position, revisionist scholars had come to dominate the field. "It is now unusual" Friedman wrote, "to come across a work of history that strongly argues the merit of U.S. policies in the region or claims these have been designed principally to protect and promote freedom and democracy."1 Yet if revisionist scholarship still revolved around the "tragic idiom" first articulated by William Appleman Williams, Friedman continued, the field was nonetheless in the midst of a dynamic evolution. Reflecting broader trends in U.S. foreign relations scholarship, studies of U.S.-Latin American relations increasingly incorporated multinational (and multilingual) research and revealed a willingness to consider non-U.S. perspectives and an emphasis on Latin American agency. As a result, "their findings question some conventional wisdom about U.S. power," Friedman concluded, "including elements of the revisionist synthesis that depicted the United States as a regional hegemon, a 'core' nation to the Latin American 'periphery,' or—to take any one of the familiar images—a puppetmaster pulling the strings of puppet leaders, a central planet orbited by satellites, or the manipulator of client states."2 Nine years later, Hal Brands' Latin America's Cold War reveals just how far scholarship on U.S.-Latin American relations has moved in the direction anticipated by Friedman. The breadth of Brands' research is impressive: forty archives in thirteen countries—including ten Latin American nations. The scope of Latin America's Cold War is equally ambitious: Brands describes his book as the first "multiarchival, international" history to assess the entire Cold War era in Latin America. Both "multinational and multilayered," Latin America's [End Page 332] Cold War "deals seriously with all sides of the diplomatic and transnational struggles that occurred during this period," Brands writes, and it weaves diverse perspectives "from the highest echelons of superpower diplomacy to the everyday negotiation of social and political relationships—into an understanding of how the global, the regional, and the local interacted in shaping Latin America's Cold War" (p. 2). As a result, Latin America's Cold War offers a sharp corrective to revisionist studies that situate the projection of U.S. political, economic, and military power into Latin America at the heart of the conflict. The U.S. effort to prevent communist inroads in the hemisphere, Brands contends, was just one facet in a "series of overlapping conflicts" that buffeted Latin America during the Cold War era, including longstanding social, political, and economic struggles and the ideological impact of decolonization and the emergence of the Third World (p. 7). Far from exerting unchallenged hemispheric hegemony, he continues, U.S. Cold War policymakers struggled to contain the initiatives of their Soviet and Cuban counterparts in Latin America in a competition for influence marked by "substantial symmetry" (p. 262). Moreover, even U.S. success in shaping Latin American allies was decidedly limited; not only were the region's "shrewder statesmen as likely to manipulate as to be manipulated by the United States," Brands writes, but U.S. Cold War initiatives had a limited impact on anticommunist Latin American policymakers and military leaders, who needed "no coaching on the dangers of internal violence and upheaval" (pp. 257, 81). With its emphasis on Latin American agency and sensitivity to the many players and layers that shaped the Cold War in Latin America, Brands' book stands as a model of international history. But does Latin America's Cold War go too far in decentering the role of the United States? In striving for balance, nuance, and complexity, does Brands assign too much agency to Latin America relative to the enormous power...

Latin America and the Global Cold War

Reviewed by: The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War Scott Pollard Franco, Jean . 2002. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $52.00 hc. $22.95 sc. 352 pp. In The Sociology of Music, Theodore Adorno paints a dour picture of advanced capitalism's deleterious effect on music (e.g., the imposition of a culture industry which subverted creative genius and privileged repetition and replication), yet he consistently demonstrates a faith in the avant-garde to escape the ravages of capitalism and arrogate a space for creativity and exploration. In The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War, Jean Franco writes a similar kind of cultural history for Latin America since the Cold War. The book is framed by a pessimistic evaluation of the lose-lose [End Page 196] effects of the Cold War for Latin America, yet throughout the book Franco consistently turns to exemplary cultural figures, texts, art, and film to demonstrate how a creative work or an aesthetic practice was able to escape the pitched ideological battles of the Cold War, find its own voice, and preserve a Latin American particularity in the face of homogenizing global forces. Admitting, at best grudgingly, some sense of hope in the face of an otherwise grim analysis of Latin American society since the 1950s, Franco finds continued evidence of an "exuberant creativity" in Latin America that can liberate itself from imposed ideological boundaries, adapt and master foreign imports to its own ends, and successfully assert its inexorable difference in a globalized economy. In the initial chapters, Franco lays out how binary Cold War ideologies invaded Latin America to its detriment. Seen as a prize by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Latin America became a battleground in the struggle of the two superpowers, and it lost: economically, culturally, and as a continent of autonomous nations. In Franco's judgment, neither of these imported political economies adapted to the particularities of the cultures, peoples, nations, and social milieus of the continent, and the poor fit resulted in inevitable and multifarious failures. Communism has not defeated poverty in Latin America nor met the needs of its marginalized communities. The Zapatista Revolution imagines Mexico as a multicultural society, but how can such a fight for freedom and autonomy be won when the revolution has been marketed as entertainment? The United States' ideological intervention was grounded in the duality of universalism (i.e., the preeminence of European culture) and the Soviet threat to that preeminence. Through the propaganda films of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Disney, print media (Encounters, Cuadernos, Mundo Nuevo), and the recruitment and use of conservative Latin American intellectuals (e.g., Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Octavio Paz, Salvador de Madariaga), the United States pursued an ideological campaign in Latin America that used universalism as code for an attack on Latin American particularity, which was inevitably linked with Soviet ideals (e.g., class struggle). Correlatively, Franco looks at the failures and mismatches of Marxism in Latin America, focusing on the disjunction between austere Marxist political practice and the "exuberance and excess of the aesthetic" (3). She uses the Mexican writers José Revueltas and Elena Poniatowska to exemplify literature's critique of the failures of Marxism in Latin America, and then she turns to the Chilean Pablo Neruda to explore how poetry and Marxist practice could co-exist. Franco makes clear her own political preference here: The sins of the application of Marxism in Latin America can be corrected, while there is no corrective for United States imperialism. [End Page 197] In the following chapters, Franco plots a causal arc from the failed socioeconomic policies of the Cold War in Latin America to the resultant dictatorships and military interventions to contemporary neo-liberalism. At each stage of that arc, she investigates the consequent implosions for Latin American culture, delineating the internalized products of these changes (e.g., dictatorship, torture, death) and then against their backdrop analyzing the function of literature and art as revelatory if ephemerally liberating counter-narratives. Although Franco takes on conventional themes...

Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies and Cultural Autonomy

In January 1958 the Council of Ministers of the Romanian People's Republic launched a worldwide effort to showcase Romania's progress in health care. The decision reflected the Communist regime's medical Cold War diplomacy and was also a result of growing interest in what outside Eastern Europe was called “socialized medicine,” that is, a state-funded and organized health care system with equal and universal access for all citizens. Among the governments that wished to learn from Romania's experience were those of Bolivia and Argentina. Their representatives were invited to Bucharest for official visits or specialization courses. In the case of Argentina, the collaboration also stemmed from interwar encounters at international medical congresses between physicians of the two countries.This example of early exchanges between Romania and Latin American countries signals a broader research field that has recently emerged in Cold War studies: the multiple geographies of medical exchanges, mobilities, and conceptualizations in the 1945–1989 period. The volume edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López is an essential addition to the growing literature about the relationship between health care, the bipolarity of the Cold War, and decolonization. Along with other pioneering studies, such as those by Marcos Cueto (Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 2007), Young-Sun Hong (Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime, 2015), and Dora Vargha (Polio across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic, 2018), the collection explores the fascinating terrain determined by the relationship between Cold War politics and rhetoric, on one hand, and notions of health, disease, and welfare, on the other.Peripheral Nerve brings two new dimensions to this scholarship. First, it offers a comprehensive panorama of Latin American cases of local, regional, and transregional alignments engineered by medical experts. It goes beyond the usual focus on U.S. interventions in and hegemony over this part of the world. The contributors convincingly emphasize the agency of Latin American actors, their ability to engage with multiple partners, and their savviness in taking advantage of the ideological competition between the two camps of the Cold War.Second, Peripheral Nerve brings a new chronological perspective for discussing health care entanglements, circulations, and partisanships: ideas, choices, and affinities during the Cold War were rooted in the interwar period. They are linked to the institutional and intellectual history of medical reforms in Latin America before 1945, to international experiences such as cooperation within the League of Nations Health Organization, or to the fascination with the Soviet Union's radical experiment in state-managed health care. Moreover, many of the contributors provide suggestive connections between pre-1989 policies and phenomena that unfolded after the end of the Cold War.The overarching theme of Peripheral Nerve is that of local agency and, consequently, of revising the history of the Cold War from its margins. Such an approach brings Latin America back into the global history of the period, a task flagged by other recent publications as well. For instance, in the introduction to the impressive volume Latin America and the Global Cold War, Thomas Field Jr., Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà affirm that they compiled the book to revive “the history of what were once powerful interactions between Latin America and the rest of the Global South” (p. 2).Peripheral Nerve opens with a foreword by Gilbert Joseph, who places the volume in the general trend of “remaking . . . Latin American Cold War history” (p. ix). Three sections follow, each with its own distinct vantage point. The first deals with the interplay between leftwing internationalism and U.S. pressure on Latin America during the early Cold War. Katherine Bliss examines the biography of Lini de Vries, a former U.S. antifascist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who sought to elude the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation by going into exile to Mexico in the 1940s. The Mexican government welcomed her contribution to rural health care reform, despite encountering criticism from U.S. officials. Nicole Pacino shows how the shrill anti-Communism of the 1950s in Washington led to the politicization of the Rockefeller Foundation's grants to medical schools in Bolivia, a departure from the institution's more ecumenical approach before 1945. Gabriel Soto Laveaga offers a fascinating study of how U.S. pharmaceutical companies skillfully employed Cold War rhetoric to control international prices and exert pressure on the Mexican government to open up its steroid hormone industry. If in the early 1950s a Mexico City company, Syntex Laboratories, controlled much of the world's steroid trade, by the end of the decade U.S. investors had purchased Syntex and relocated its headquarters to Palo Alto, significantly diminishing Mexico's domestic pharmaceutical capacities. In these three cases one can observe the degrees to which Latin American governments were able to maneuver in the increasingly troubled waters of U.S.-Soviet competition.The second section of the volume deals with the circulation of ideas and experts within the ideological camps of the Cold War. Each contribution underlines levels of ideological adaptation and transfer in various Latin American countries. Raúl Necochea López analyses how fertility surveys in Puerto Rico were the basis for U.S. advocacy of family planning policies throughout Latin America. He insists that this process antagonized Puerto Rican nationalists who used the Cold War to consolidate their position on the island. Gilberto Hochman and Carlos Herinque Paiva present the intellectual and ideological itinerary of parasitologist Samuel Pessoa. They link his fascination with Communist states’ health care systems (from the Soviet Union or China) and his membership in the Brazilian Communist Party to his interwar advocacy for medical, social, and economic reforms in the Brazilian countryside. The chapter provides glimpses into the multifaceted Latin American engagements with “socialized medicine.” From 1956 to 1961, Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek emphasized state centralization and planning of programs for the control and eradication of rural endemic diseases (p. 151). Jennifer Lambe examines the evolution of psychiatry in Cuba from the perspective of debates pitting Sigmund Freud against Nikolai Pavlov as central paradigms of the profession. She stresses the prerevolutionary roots of these discussions. She insists on the eclecticism, particularly in the 1960s, of Cuban responses to official attempts to emulate the Soviet focus on the Pavlovian tradition. She also shows how the two Soviet psychiatrists sent to Havana to advise on the revolutionary reform of the discipline had to acknowledge the diversity of local approaches (pp. 172–173).The third section is centered on the multidirectionality of Latin American medical experiences throughout the Cold War. Jadwiga Mooney focuses on two biographies—those of Salvador Allende and Benjamin Viel—when recounting Chilean attempts to create a national health service. For both men, Mooney emphasizes the pre-1945 origins of their reformist projects as well as the role of other health care models, such as the British or the Soviet, in shaping their visions of the Chilean medical system. Marco Ramos's chapter explores Argentinian psychoanalysts’ syncretic interactions and cross-fertilizations with Soviet, Western, and Third Worldist approaches in the field. These exchanges pushed some professionals to call in the 1970s for the “nationalization” of psychiatry so that it would better reflect Argentine realities. Ramos shows the shifting meaning of anti-imperialism and its embeddedness in the local context. This sometimes caused “failed encounters” (desencuentros) between strands of anticolonial medicine (p. 212). Cheasty Anderson contributes a study of Cuban medical teams’ activity in Nicaragua during the Sandinista regime. The Cuban government sought to insulate its medical workers from Nicaraguan society, beyond their medical provision tasks. Nicaraguan officials likewise safeguarded their policymaking autonomy. Anderson offers an engrossing analysis of daily contacts between Cuban personnel and the Nicaraguan population, but she does not fully explore the potential hierarchies of this interaction, particularly the Cuban superiority complex that sometimes appears between the lines of her interviewees’ accounts. Anderson could have also pursued a comparison between Cuban activities and East German doctors’ experience at the Carlos Marx hospital, created and operated by the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s. Iris Borowy has written a captivating account of this medical institution in the journal História, ciências, saúde—Manguinhos (2017). Peripheral Nerve would have benefited from a more comparative exploration connecting Latin American experiences with other instances of medical entanglement and circulation in different regions during the Cold War.Peripheral Nerve ends with a conclusion by the two editors that discusses the new vistas for research on health, medicine, and the Cold War in Latin America. The linchpin for the issues they raise is the central role played by international institutions (e.g., the World Health Organization or United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund) in global health care dynamics. These bodies offered world forums for various governments and their experts to pursue their interests, engage in dialogue, and imagine their positions in international political and medical hierarchies. Birn and López also explore the continuities across the 1989 threshold, underlining that the end of the Cold War did not bring “a wholesale rebooting of health philosophies and proposals in Latin America, instead hosting a mingling of the old and the new” (p. 272). They connect medical solidarities across the region during the post-2000 Pink Tide of elected left-leaning governments with programs first established during the Cold War. For instance, they show how the 2005 PAHO Declaration of Montevideo revived the primary health care principles of the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978), and they point out that the Cuban-Venezuelan Misión Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighborhood) was an offspring of Havana's pre-1989 medical diplomacy. In this last case, they should have stressed the blatant manipulation of the program by Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to ensure his and his party's reelection, as detailed for instance in extensive reporting by Nicholas Casey in The New York Times in March 2019.The volume edited by Birn and López is a trailblazing contribution to the global history of medicine during the Cold War. It presents geographies and expertise that recapture the complex connections pursued from Latin America, which equally echoed and defied ideological divides during the second half of the 20th century. Such versatile reading of international health care politics is highly topical for the present: the COVID pandemic has reopened debates about medical diplomacy, competition among health care models, and vaccine nationalism.

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum

Reviewed by: The Latin American Literary Boom and US Nationalism during the Cold War by Deborah Cohn Thayse Leal Lima Cohn, Deborah. The Latin American Literary Boom and US Nationalism during the Cold War. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2012. Pp. 264. ISBN 978-0-8265-1805-7. Celebrated, contested, and criticized, the Boom of Latin American literature has been a constant topic of academic debate. Its appeal to intellectual curiosity may be explained by the boom’s peculiar position in the crossroads of literary, cultural, ideological and political events, which makes it a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. In The Latin American Literary Boom and US Nationalism during the Cold War, Deborah Cohn explores this intricate history, investigating the infrastructure and politics behind the dissemination of Latin American literature. Through a remarkable job of exhaustive archival research, the study reveals how the promotion of Latin American literature in the United States became entangled in political interests. Cohn analyses documents from universities, publishing houses, and cultural foundations and their affiliates, demonstrating that Cold War rhetoric pervaded most of these institutions’ efforts to attract sponsorship from both government agencies (such as the CIA and NCA), as well as cultural branches of major capitalist corporations (such as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation). Support for Latin American literature was perceived and justified as a way of instilling a positive view of the United States amongst Latin American writers and intellectuals, a group that had a strong influence on public opinion back in their home countries and which, for the most part, were severe critics of US international policies. Studies focusing on the Boom’s ideological and political background are not uncommon, the most influential perhaps being the memoir Personal History of the Boom (1972) by José Donoso. However, while the Chilean writer and other authors relate the phenomenon to the Latin American political context, Cohn adopts a much wider transnational perspective, which brings forth the competing forces and disparate intentions that were at stake in the circulation, promotion, and reception of Latin American literature abroad. This geopolitically expanded point of view, allied with a contrapuntual approach, allowed the author to consider the purposes and aspirations of the many actors involved in the boom. Cohn contrasts the interest of novelists and their editors in the promotion of their work abroad to the machinery of universities, cultural foundations, and publishing houses, most of which were financed by public and private US institutions concerned with harvesting the sympathy of internationally acclaimed intellectuals. The dialogical analyses applied in the book also prevent it from establishing facile relationships of causality between the success of Latin American writers in the United States and the intentions of their international sponsors. In the introduction, Cohn clarifies that most of the writers, translators, and agents were unaware of government support. Therefore, the goals of cultural patrons were not always met, and writers were able to keep the integrity of their political and ideological views. She further argues that if at times the promotion of Latin American literature benefited from international support, at others, the Cold War agenda interfered in a negative way. Chapter 1, for example, focuses on the contradictions born of US anticommunist strategies that would go from courting left-leaning intellectuals as potential allies to considering them as imminent threats to national security. To illustrate this, the author recounts the infamous stories of writer Carlos Fuentes and critic Ángel Rama in their struggle with the McCarran-Walter act, which imposed visa restrictions to individuals considered “subversive.” The authors faced visa impediments despite having received, on several occasions, sponsorship indirectly offered by governmental agencies. The second chapter also offers an emblematic example of Cold War policy ambiguity and unpredictability, and shows how the 1966 PEN Congress compromised with the establishment proposing themes that fit official US ideology, while also creating an opportunity for authors to publicize the Latin American agenda of mutual cooperation and solidarity. In chapters 3 and 4, Cohn argues that universities and private non-governmental institutions that were invested in the promotion of Latin American literature also acted as indirect agents of cultural diplomacy. These institutions used the growing interest in Latin America after the Cuban [End Page 784] Revolution...

Hal Brands’s goal in reconstructing the history of Latin America’s Cold War seeks to deal with the subject through a multinational and multilayered approach. By this the author means integrating perspectives from diverse realms and views, from the highest echelons of superpower diplomacy down to the everyday negotiation of social and political relationships, in order to understand how global, regional, and local influences interacted in shaping Latin America’s Cold War. This has been the call of recent research and writing from a variety of scholars of Latin America’s Cold War. On the surface Brands seems to be sensitive to new approaches, debates, and sources, but in fact he delivers a conventional diplomatic history, albeit enriched by his foray into numerous Latin American and US archives. By not delving into the everyday forms of the Cold War conundrum, the book limits our understanding of the human, the ethical, and the complex interaction of the internal and the external roots and consequences of the long and bloody Cold War in Latin America, which much of the recent Cold War history has tried to recover.True, the history of the Cold War cannot be reduced to the duel between the political and ideological right and left, but neither can it be depicted as a result of the convergence of post – Second World War sociological and political conflicts embedded in historically given economic, political, and cultural structures. According to Brands, Latin America’s history after the Second World War is the result of extremism fostering extremism, intervention inducing intervention, and one layer of instability exacerbating another as if they were all equal, as if there were not disparities and abuse of power. Critical history is not about apportioning blame, but neither is it bereft of ethical values. The author’s view is that to think in terms of moral implications leads scholars to blindness; instead, Brands advocates a detached narrative and analysis.Brands’s point of departure is the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and not the paradigmatic overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’s democratic government of Guatemala in 1954, in which, he points out, the United States did not play a central role. The rejection of the centrality of the United States in the unfolding and trajectory of the Cold War in Latin America runs throughout the book, flying in the face of mountains of studies that have documented the contrary. We are told time and time again that the point is not to assign the United States “the primary responsibility for the course of events in Latin America during the 1960s” (p. 61). While it is true that the United States did not manufacture all of the Latin American dictators, by doing business with them and by using trade, labor, technology, culture, and even philanthropy as props to its relations with them as the stronger partner and the provider of military know-how and hardware, the US government tended to coerce much of Latin America to its Cold War designs.At critical junctures, the book reiterates the argument that US intervention and counterinsurgency were not decisive in defeating the radical left but that the left and the guerrillas defeated themselves. This point requires qualification. Indeed, the foco theory proved to be the wrong tactic to retrieve the population from the shackles of poverty and domination, and made the revolutionaries an easy prey for counterinsurgency forces, but this worked largely the other way round: state repression and counterinsurgency forces weakened the left, compelled it to make blunders and be cornered, as in the Guatemala of the 1980s. Even conceding that the revolutionary left’s erroneous steps reduced its efficacy, drawing moral equivalency between state terror and revolutionary insurgency is a travesty.As other reviewers of Brands’s book have noted, the author’s insistence on parallel responses to Latin America’s unrest by Moscow, Havana, and Washington leads to treating the three players as if they were of equal strength and engagement. True, “Moscow, Havana, and Washington looked to gain influence in Latin America by remaking the region in their own images” (p. 38), but their intentions, instruments of power, and not least the strength of their allies certainly differed. To treat them as equals distorts the complex picture.Even though Brands did not intend it that way, his Latin America’s Cold War can be read as an eloquent exemplification of what Greg Grandin describes in Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006) as the denial of any wrongdoing on the part of the United States.

Latin American Studies and the Cold War

Reviewed by: Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America by Estelle Tarica Cara Levey Tarica, Estelle. Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America. State U of New York P, 2022, pp. 300. ISBN: 9781438487946. This ambitious study fills a significant gap in the literature on both the Cold War era in Latin America and Holocaust Studies. Drawing on examples from Argentina, [End Page 163] Mexico and Guatemala, Tarica argues that there is framing, rearticulation and iteration of Holocaust Memory across Latin America, responding to some of the passing, and occasionally lazy, comparisons that frequent contrasting contexts of extreme violence. Indeed, in Latin America, recourse to the Holocaust as a paradigmatic case of extreme violence, became evident, as authoritarian violence escalated during the latter half of the twentieth century. Central to the book's focus, and outlined in the introductory chapter, is the identification of Holocaust consciousness in Latin America. This allows the author to frame Holocaust memory in Argentina, Mexico and Guatemala not as simply transposition, but as an authentic and distinct regional iteration that involves construction and agency. This is a welcome shift away from viewing Latin America as passive recipient of Anglophone or European-dominated work on memory, in showcasing multiple intersections between the Holocaust, recent authoritarianism, dictatorship, civil war and longer historical trajectories of revolutionary movements and anti-colonialism. Although Tarica incorporates contrasting vehicles of memory such as periodicals, literary works etc, into her framework, testimony often takes centre stage. This is, in part, because of its significance in the aftermath of the Holocaust. However, the genre of testimonio has its own distinct history in Latin America, that dovetails with the denial of state violence in the Cold War era. Although the focus of Tarica's volume is overwhelmingly literary, the prominence of the testimonial permits engagement with wider debates about perpetration, criminal responsibility, and, significantly, victimhood. It is the latter that is the most problematic when discussing Holocaust consciousness in Latin America. Tarica rightly anticipates this, pointing out that if we view the victims of state violence in Latin America as passive, we risk depoliticising what was, for many, a political struggle against authority. Such sensitive analysis allows us to reflect on what European and Anglophone scholars of Holocaust Memory may learn from Latin America as part of a truly multidirectional deepening of memory. The five substantive chapters give space to voices from three contrasting contexts, that are not explored in isolation, but in relation to one another and against a backdrop of transnationalism. They are not deemed representative of the entire region, but there are enough differences between the various case studies, to make the author's aim of identifying and tracing a Holocaust consciousness as a counterpoint to European and North American-dominated narratives. Argentina, the focus of Chapters 1 and 2, is an obvious starting point because of the long-standing debates about Holocaust discourse. This is, in part, because of its significant Jewish population, but also its simultaneous status as site of refuge for Holocaust perpetrators. Tarica deepens our understanding of Holocaust consciousness during the 1976-83 dictatorship, the focus of Chapter 1, demonstrating its presence among Jewish and non-Jewish Argentine communities. In Chapter 2, she moves beyond the temporal parameters of dictatorship to explore the post-1995 memory 'boom,' a period in which the Holocaust has loomed more frequently in debates over the recent past. In particular, we see how discussions in Argentine periodicals have drawn on the Holocaust to critique dominant memory narratives. The intensity of these debates reveals that Holocaust consciousness and how it is used [End Page 164] remains contentious, entangled with political narratives. Recontextualisation does not equal depoliticisation. Chapter 3 does not move away entirely from the Southern Cone, but explores the connections between Argentina, Mexico and the Holocaust through the Argentine exile community in Mexico City. Here, exiles used the Holocaust example to press the urgency of violations, not only in their homeland, but in 1970s Mexico. Testimony, in the work of writers such as José Emilio Pacheco and Tununa Mercado, as well as in interviews conducted by the latter with Holocaust survivors, is thus reconsidered as a means to denounce...

In 2003, historian Diego Armus reflected on the coalescing subfield of the history of medicine in Latin America. His edited collection Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS demonstrated that medicine was a fruitful analytical lens for exploring broad historical phenomena in the region. A new volume, Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America, edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López, illustrates how much the subfield has developed over the last two decades—and how much necessary research remains to be done.In exploring the Cold War through Latin American medicine, Peripheral Nerve pokes holes in two influential narratives that have guided scholars' understandings of the Cold War. The first replicates a bipolar framework and centers action in the Western and Eastern blocs; the second maintains that the United States exercised an all-encompassing hegemony over Latin America, pulling the puppet strings throughout the region to secure its interests. Peripheral Nerve proves how these two assumptions have papered over a more complex reality.The title of the book cleverly speaks to its arguments. “Peripheral” references Immanuel Wallerstein's designation of Latin America as a periphery to the cores of the global economy. “Nerve” speaks to the “impudence or even daring” of the region's actors (p. 19). However, the combined term “peripheral nerve” has a physiological meaning: those nerves that connect the brain and the body, which “often cause the most insistent shock (pain) that makes the body take note” (p. 19). Birn and Necochea López contend that seemingly marginal Latin Americans instead shaped the trajectory of medicine in the global Cold War.Rather than that influence being unidirectional or even bidirectional, Latin Americans occupied a “complex positionality,” one in which there were “multidirectional, tangled connections among all the players” (pp. 3, 22). While Latin Americans did have to contend with constraints imposed by the United States, they did so in multifaceted ways, accepting, rejecting, or reshaping these constraints to serve their own interests. In addition, Latin Americans sought medical connections with a variety of other players in the Cold War, whether in the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc, or the global South.The editors' historicization of the Cold War emphasizes how complex the era was. The chapters are broken into three chronological sections, allowing readers to trace change and continuity over time. For example, Gabriela Soto Laveaga's chapter on “wonder drugs” in Mexico illustrates that the opening salvo of the Cold War proved unique. In the 1940s and 1950s, one Mexican company maintained a virtual monopoly over steroid production. This power put US pharmaceutical companies at a disadvantage and allowed Mexicans to establish pharmaceutical and political connections with the Soviet Union. However, Mexicans' agency proved tenuous. As the Cold War heated up, US pharmaceutical companies purchased control over Mexico's steroid hormone industry, claiming that such a move was critical for ensuring national security.Other chapters emphasize continuity. For example, Jennifer Lynn Lambe posits that leading Cuban psychiatrists in the 1960s attempted to extirpate Freudian influences and make hegemonic the Pavlovian model (the basis of Soviet psychiatry). Despite their efforts, Freudian traces remained among “an unorthodox mélange” of psychiatric practices in Cuba (p. 159). This landscape bears remarkable similarities to Argentine psychiatrists later in the Cold War. Marco Ramos explores this group of medical practitioners who criticized psychiatric schools in both the United States and the Soviet Union for their inherent imperialism. Instead, these Argentine psychiatrists sought to develop diverse alternatives: from anti-imperial models that could apply throughout the global South to models that were fundamentally local, drawing on national popular practices. Lambe and Ramos thus demonstrate that Latin American psychiatrists did not adhere to a binary East-West divide or a solely North-South orientation; instead, they practiced what Lambe terms a “theoretical eclecticism” (p. 160).The authors within Peripheral Nerve present a dazzling array of medical connections that Latin Americans forged in the Cold War. The editors, however, note that the volume is limited (e.g., its lack of attention to subaltern actors) and detail a set of research questions that still need to be answered. Their compelling agenda centers on more fully understanding medical connections, within and beyond the region.Another fruitful avenue that may exist in the future is more explicitly comparative scholarship. In the foreword, Gilbert Joseph notes that there was a particular Latin American Cold War. Peripheral Nerve contends that there was also a distinctive Latin American Cold War medicine, with long-term legacies, such as Latin America's contemporary leadership in South-South health cooperation. Birn notes that histories of science in the Cold War have remained focused on the two superpowers and “their major allies” (p. 7). One hopes that as the history of medicine in Africa and Asia during the Cold War more fully develops, Latin Americanists researching transnational medical connections will employ a comparative lens toward other parts of the global South. While a difficult task, this will more firmly define what makes Latin American Cold War medicine unique as well as historicizing the causes and identifying the consequences of those characteristics. Peripheral Nerve has proven that such efforts will engage a multidisciplinary audience of readers.

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

This edited collection presents 11 meritorious essays on life in Latin America during the Cold War, a perplexing introduction by the editors, and an incisive afterword by a distinguished scholar. This is a University of Texas at Austin project. The editors and the essayists are all affiliated with the university via teaching, studies, or fellowships. The one exception is Alan McPherson of the University of Oklahoma, the author of numerous erudite studies on inter-American relations, who wrote the afterword. The essayists naturally took advantage of the splendid holdings at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection on their campus. Most also conducted archival research in Latin America, and many visited the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, which is near the Benson Collection.The editors wanted the essayists to consider Latin American initiatives during the Cold War, to explore how Latin American citizens experienced the Cold War, and to question whether the Right/Left, capitalist/Communist dichotomy properly explained the Cold War in Latin America. In short, the editors wanted this collection to demonstrate Latin American “agency” during the Cold War. They lament that the dominant tradition in the historiography of inter-American relations has been to present the United States “as an all-powerful and (almost always) repressive hegemon that wielded practically unchallengeable political, economic, military, and cultural power in the hemisphere” (pp. 3–4). Yet the editors never name the scholars who are guilty of such sins. The editors chose the title Beyond the Eagle's Shadow to distinguish the collection from Peter H. Smith's popular textbook on inter-American relations, Talons of the Eagle (2013). But this is an unfair characterization of Smith's work, for he employs international relations theory to place US–Latin American relations within the context of global politics. For the past several decades, analysts of inter-American relations, including Smith, have highlighted the abilities of Latin Americans to resist US power and shape their own destinies in the international arena.Once past the misleading introduction, scholars will find informative essays that occasionally are constrained by the requirement to address the questions of the editors. As McPherson tellingly notes, the essayists “too often attempt to force their topics into the vise of the Cold War” (p. 318). To be sure, some essays are directed at traditional Cold War topics. Giovanni Batz explores how Guatemalan military officers used the military aid for counterinsurgency supplied by the United States in the 1960s to forge a consensus that the military should be the leading political force in the nation. Batz's analysis would have been strengthened, however, if he had conducted research at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, for the Kennedy administration helped place Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia in power in 1963. In Batz's judgment, President Peralta (1963–1966) ushered in Guatemala's era of military domination. Research in the Kennedy Library would also have aided Aragorn Storm Miller, who analyzes the complex relationship between the United States, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela from 1958 to 1961. To his credit, Miller worked in the archives in the Dominican Republic and discovered that the embattled Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–1961) solicited the help of Fidel Castro. In an excellent piece, Jonathan C. Brown identifies the Cuban exiles who worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Castro from 1960 to 1965. The exiles were not old supporters of Fulgencio Batista but rather “liberals” who opposed Castro's embrace of Marxism-Leninism (p. 109). The Johnson administration eventually distanced itself from the exiles, because they engaged in attacks on Cuba that embarrassed the United States and served as a propaganda boon for Castro. In her discussion of Lázaro Cárdenas and the Latin American Peace Conference held in Mexico City in 1961, Renata Keller reveals the Mexican government's ambiguous, even duplicitous, attitude toward the Cuban Revolution.Other essays are simply set during the Cold War period. In “The Other Dirty War,” Jennifer T. Hoyt shows imagination in analyzing how the Argentine military, when it was not busy slaughtering people, tried to use scientific efficiency to improve trash collection and the park system in Buenos Aires in the 1970s. Porteños readily denounced the military government for failures in garbage collection and apparently suffered no consequences. For points of comparison, Hoyt might have asked why Argentines who had the audacity to defend the rights of the disabled, or schoolchildren in La Plata who petitioned against an increase in bus fares, were murdered. In his study of agricultural modernization in rural Brazil, Seth Garfield shows how military governments employed Cold War mantras to justify long-held aspirations of Brazilian policymakers “to modernize the countryside and to incorporate the peasantry into the nation-state” (p. 169). Julio E. Moreno, who gained access to the archives of Coca-Cola, proves that the soft drink company had business goals that differed from US policy and the ideologies of local bottlers.Other fine essays examine the role of Cuban doctors in Sandinista Nicaragua, the political goals of the Miskitu Indians of Nicaragua, social Catholicism in post-1954 Guatemala, and the evolution from the Cold War to the war on drugs. As McPherson observes, all chapters “evince impressive international research and the highest academic rigor” (p. 307).

Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War and Justice. By Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achar, Stephen R. Shalom. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2009. 319 pp., $18.95 (ISBN-13: 978-1-59451-313-8). The United States and Latin America after the Cold War. By Russell C. Crandall. New York City: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 260 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-71795-3). America and Its Critics: Virtues and Vices of the Democratic Hyperpower. By Sergio Fabbrini. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008. 222 pp., $22.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4251-2). To See Ourselves as Others See Us: How Publics Abroad View the United States after 9/11. By Ole R. Holsti. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2008. 234 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-472-05036-9). The Obama administration faces many challenges in the world from the ongoing war on terrorism and the quest for peace in the Middle East, to issues of the environment and trade. Each of the books reviewed suggest that the United States cannot solve these problems alone. Ole Holsti argues, “few contemporary international problems lend themselves to unilateral solutions” (p. 218). However, a hallmark of the Bush administration has been the idea that you are either with us or against us. This philosophy of unilateralism has led to short-sighted and reactionary policies that have unintended consequences. The alienation of our allies and the “wariness of China and Russia” have led to a situation where “we have more to fear from our own mistakes” (Chase 2002:8). According to Russell C. Crandall, the challenge for future policymakers is “not [to] let outdated assumptions…automatically lead us to foregone conclusions” (p. 247). The authors reviewed analyze American policy in different regions of the world, ask different research questions and use different methodological approaches. But the thread that ties these books together is a call for a more multilateral approach to foreign policy or, in the words of Holsti, “a cold eye assessment of policies and consequences” (p. 187). In Crandall's, The United States and Latin America after the Cold War we get an exhaustive look at American foreign policy in Latin and South America. Crandall contends that the end of the Cold War “diminished the ideological and strategic constraints that…dictated US policy” (p. xi). However, he states that political analysis of the region continues to suffer because we continue to view it through an outdated security paradigm. This text is an attempt to fill that gap in the literature by systematically addressing US policy through the post-Cold War administrations. He finds that America has “acted …