Over halfway through Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, Ulises Lima disappears. The character (modeled on Bolaño’s close friend, Mario Santiago) fortuitously ends up in a group of Mexican poets traveling to Nicaragua to show solidarity with the revolutionary Sandinista government. The trip’s leader worries that the anarchist Lima will fight with the otherwise Marxist-Leninist delegation, but between revolutionary tourism and getting drunk no one notices. At the end of the trip, Lima is nowhere to be found. At some point, he stumbled from the metaphorical blind alleys of radical politics into literal oblivion. The plane leaves without him.

NEITHER PEACE NOR FREEDOM: THE CULTURAL COLD WAR IN LATIN AMERICA by Patrick Iber Harvard University Press, 336 pp., $39.95

Patrick Iber’s Neither Peace nor Freedom explains why a besieged revolutionary government would bother meeting with a delegation of foreign poets. The Cold War was, among other things, an intense intellectual and cultural dispute. Around the world, the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) claimed to represent the cause of autonomous cultural expression and democratic procedures against the onslaught of, what Harry Truman called, “the slave world.” The Soviet equivalent, the World Peace Congress, stood against the world-bestriding (and nuclear-weapon-using) United States. They sought, furtively or openly, to win the loyalty of artists and writers. Intellectuals, for their part, hoped that by choosing sides (or artfully negotiating them) they could realize the unique promise of the intelligentsia as a force in modern politics.

The familiar story of the “cultural Cold War” is about North America and Western Europe, and most often about the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s initiatives to erode Communism’s intellectual prestige. Its highlights are sponsorship of abstract expressionism and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, social democratic journals, and pirated Russian editions of Doctor Zhivago. Its defenders stand by what they see as a genuinely pluralist effort to undermine totalitarianism. Gloria Steinem—who worked with the CIA-backed Independent Research Service to bring Americans to the Soviet-Sponsored World Youth Festival—said she was “happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were far-sighted.” Critics echo Andrew Kopkind’s judgment that this was “a sham pluralism, and it was utterly corrupting.”

But the CCF operated in 35 countries, not just the North Atlantic. Iber shifts the focus to Latin America, where the U.S. and the USSR (and after 1959, Cuba) engaged in extensive cultural work to claim intellectual prestige. This is not just a matter of giving each region equal weight, but of showing how different the story looks from one region of the global south. Latin America has a fair claim to being the birthplace of the cultural Cold War. And specific characteristics of its society reveal fundamental tensions in the cultural politics that remained latent in other parts of the world. Finally, a focus on Latin America paints the cultural Cold War as a failure on all sides, and an illustration of the political impotence of intellectuals.

Iber begins in Mexico, where the post-revolutionary government put cultural workers in an important political role, most famously sponsoring leftist muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Then, in the 1930s, President Lázaro Cárdenas made Mexico a haven for radical émigrés. The most famous, Leon Trotsky, was not only leader of socialist opposition to the USSR but also the author of Literature and Revolution and an associate of André Breton. One famous socialist muralist (Rivera) helped bring Trotsky to Mexico, while another (Siqueiros) personally tried to assassinate him.