Latin American Studies and the Cold War

Abstract

This book is a collection of articles on Latin American studies during the Cold War in seven different countries (Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba). There is also a particularly detailed chapter on the United States written by the editor, Ronald Chilcote. Gilbert Joseph provides an incisive foreword, and there is a short afterword (by way of conclusion) by Judith Adler Hellman that also briefly addresses Latin American studies in Canada. In particular, Adler Hellman outlines trends such as how Canada's refusal to end diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba resulted in a Havana-Ottawa axis that facilitated a distinctive political and even geopolitical direction for Latin American studies in Canada.Rory Miller, meanwhile, emphasizes that neither Cold War imperatives nor British economic interests had much to do with early post-1945 efforts to stimulate Latin American studies in Britain. Work on the region was initially driven by the perception that Latin American expertise should be a part of a humanities and social science educational and research curriculum in Britain. He provides a wealth of detail, in particular, on the considerable impact that the rise of the New Left in Britain had on the study of the region in the 1960s and 1970s.Michiel Baud makes clear that Latin American studies in the Netherlands emerged from inside the academy and was “apolitical” in its inception (p. 121). Baud emphasizes the importance of the wider context of Christian missionary impulses, human rights concerns, and a growing interest in the Third World more generally that indirectly encouraged Latin American studies. Baud also emphasizes the political impact of the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions. Interestingly, Andre Gunder Frank spent 13 years at the University of Amsterdam in the 1980s and early 1990s.A chapter on Germany (East and West) by Hans-Jürgen Puhle makes clear, not surprisingly, that the impact of the Cold War on area studies was felt closer to home, and the study of West Germany's backyard (Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) was far more significant than geopolitical or academic interest in Latin America. It was not until later, in the 1970s and 1980s and then in the post–Cold War era, that serious Latin American studies emerged.In a chapter on Czechoslovakia, Josef Opatrný emphasizes that there was very limited interest in the Americas. It was not until the 1960s, he points out, that the study of Latin America was institutionalized as Prague followed Moscow's lead and established a Latin American institute. And what work there was on Latin America after the 1960s was primarily in literature or history, avoiding larger political or geopolitical questions.Russell Bartley's chapter on the Soviet Union is a thorough survey of key Latin American specialists at or connected to the Institute of Latin America in Moscow. He also chronicles efforts at collegial interaction and exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union on the part of the American Historical Association and the Latin American Studies Association. He argues that by the 1970s Latin American studies in the Soviet Union and in the United States were equally developed in qualitative, if not quantitative, terms. That is, like the United States, Moscow had a comparable share of devoted and independent-minded scholars, along with an equally fair share of ideologues and those working for the main intelligence agencies.Mao Xianglin and Shi Huiye, in a short chapter on China, emphasize that the study of Spanish and of Latin America flowed from basic diplomatic and geopolitical concerns: for example, in the early 1950s Zhou Enlai called for the study and teaching of Spanish so that Beijing would have interpreters to draw on in its diplomacy. Later, in 1961 at the behest of Mao Zedong, an institute for Latin American studies was established in Beijing. However, academic life in general continued to be subject to the vagaries of politics: for example, there was no research on Latin America done during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Then, by the late 1970s and down to the end of the Cold War and beyond, Latin American studies in China increased significantly in the context of increased relations between China and Latin America.There is also a very short and primarily descriptive chapter by Luís Suárez Salazar that traces the history of the Centro de Estudios sobre América (CEA), established in Cuba in 1977. Not surprisingly, researchers at the CEA carry out a considerable amount of work on the United States and on the US role in the region and beyond.Meanwhile, Chilcote's lengthy chapter on the United States ranges widely from discussing the impact of Central Intelligence Agency intervention in Guatemala in June 1954 to his own experience being jailed and interrogated in Angola in the early 1960s during Portugal's dirty wars in their colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. Chilcote's approach (and that of a number of the contributors) is a sort of robust Marxist empiricism, providing copious detail on radical academic and solidarity politics in the United States in relation to Latin America during the Cold War. This is a useful collection, but anyone looking for a more theoretical or analytical approach to Latin America during the Cold War may be disappointed. The most conceptually interesting section that emphasizes revisionist scholarship on the Cold War in Latin America (particularly studies of Latin America's long Cold War from as early as 1910) and discusses the Cold War's legacy is Gil Joseph's foreword. He emphasizes that the legacy of the Cold War in Latin America is often a dark one (such as gang problems in Central America and beyond) and that ideas of a unitary Latin America have less purchase in the post–Cold War era given the region's diversity and the importance of inter-American, transregional, and global trends. These trends have been responded to by “border crossings” on the part of academics engaged in more interdisciplinary studies with a focus on the Americas and beyond (p. 4).