In 1982, on his way back from picking up his Nobel Prize for literature, Gabriel García Márquez stopped off to visit his old pal Fidel Castro. Márquez’s near neighbor and former friend, the great Mexican poet Octavia Paz, was no doubt disturbed. Paz, a longtime diplomat, viewed Castro’s revolution as poisoned by Marxism. Wartime, when opposing governments rout traitors, seduce heroes, and quell incompatible ideas, has always been precarious for artists and scholars. Certainly, the Cold War, which gave us the Red Scare and Hollywood witch hunts, was no exception. But, in Poets, Painters and Spies: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, Patrick Iber, author of Neither Peace Nor Freedom, explores how left-leaning artists who yearned for social justice — like Márquez and Paz, like Pablo Neruda, Diego Rivera, and Jorge Luis Borges — made choices and conscious alliances with the Soviet-backed World Peace Council, the U.S.-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Cuba’s Casa de las Américas, to achieve idealistic aims, with disappointing and sometimes perilous results.
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