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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.
Trotsky succumbed to another assassination attempt in 1940. His surviving associates weathered World War II, during which Communists in Mexico and the United States joined up with their governments in the name of Allied victory. The end of the war, and the onset of the diplomatic Cold War, brought a startling change of fortune for dissident leftists, some of whom followed their bitter anti-Stalinism into the arms of the U.S. government. These “anti-Communist entrepreneurs,” as Iber calls them, responded to the activities of the Soviet-backed World Peace Congress movement by offering to take up the franchise of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Latin America.
Iber’s decision to start his chronology early makes it easy to see things from the point of view of CCF collaborators like Julián Gorkin; a revolutionary socialist, he escaped the radical fratricide of the Spanish Civil War only to suffer permanent physical scarring from an assault by Stalinists in Mexico City, and then became a major CIA collaborator in the Latin American CCF. Besides showing the reasons for collaboration, the meaning of collaboration is itself complicated. Consider that Leon Trotsky actively tried to testify before HUAC, the congressional anti-Communist panel that would come into its own under McCarthy. But Trotsky planned to use his address to denounce Stalinism and also to incite the workers of the United States to revolution. In the event, the committee, far from seducing him, refused him even the ability to enter the U.S. to testify.
full: https://newrepublic.com/article/136622/congress-cultural-freedoms-ultimate-failure
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