Description:

During the Cold War, left-wing Latin American artists, writers, and scholars worked as diplomats, advised rulers, opposed dictators, and even led nations. Their competing visions of social democracy and their pursuit of justice, peace, and freedom led them to organizations sponsored by the governments of the Cold War powers: the Soviet-backed World Peace Council, the U.S.-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom, and, after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the homegrown Casa de las Américas. This talk will delve into the entwined histories of these three organizations and the aspirations and dilemmas of intellectuals who participated in them, from Diego Rivera and Pablo Neruda to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges.

Patrick Iber is the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. He is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso. Prior to coming to El Paso, he taught political economy at Berkeley and was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Stanford University.

Open to the public. Reception following talk.

This event is co-sponsored by the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.