Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (49 page)

Certainly, since the early twentieth century, Latin Americans have always had to work within the confines of the U.S. economic, geostrategic, and cultural sphere. Directly challenging the logic of this system and trying to negotiate an amicable separation or, in extreme cases, a favorable divorce has consistently proved to be unfeasible. To a large degree this has stemmed from traditional patterns of trade and industrial development that, once established, have been difficult to undo. But it was also because Latin American countries’ geographic position, coupled with their relative poverty and the limited resources other great powers could provide, made negotiating an end to the region’s dependence acutely difficult. As Letelier warned the UP during the Allende years, diversifying trade and aid in Europe and the Soviet bloc could simply not compensate for the loss of U.S. credits, spare parts, and trade. Only Castro, by tying himself firmly to the Soviet bloc and embarking on a new (but, in his estimation, still unsatisfactory) dependence was able to survive dislocation from the United States and escape what many Cubans regarded to be their geographic and historical fate, and even this proved to be monumentally difficult.

In this context, the United States rarely countenanced the idea of renegotiating its prescriptions for economic development or its principles for involvement in regional affairs. Even during a brief interlude when it proclaimed a “mature partnership” with the region, the Nixon administration continued to use the threat of estrangement or promise of cooperation as a means of maintaining influence over Latin America. “We have the only system that works,” George H. W. Bush and Secretary Rogers respectively told Allende in 1972 and 1973. Although the ideological makeup of those that rebelled against this system determined how the United States would oppose them, any country that chose a different path was essentially deemed as being wrong by successive administrations in Washington who felt they knew better than the unruly Latin Americans that they were forced to deal with (Nixon’s admiration for General Médici aside). Thus,
although Kennan had argued that Latin America’s loyalty was essential to the United States’ great power status, he had also advised Secretary of State Acheson that it was up to the Latin Americans to conform as opposed to the other way round. As he put it, U.S. officials had to remember “that we are a great power; that we are by and large much less in need of them than they are in need of us.”
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Following the Chilean coup of 1973 and the counterrevolutionary advances made in the Southern Cone during the two years preceding it, the United States could relax in the knowledge that Kennan’s observation was still true. To be sure, when he assumed the position of secretary of state in late September 1973, Kissinger “confessed he really didn’t know much about Latin America” and set up study groups to engage more with the problems of the region. He told Mexico’s foreign minister that he wanted a “more active” Latin American policy and announced the latest of what have been a stream of initiatives to begin a so-called New Dialogue with Latin America since Franklin Roosevelt’s rather more successful Good Neighbor Diplomacy back in the 1930s. (This time, he acknowledged that the United States could no longer “overpower” its “foreign policy problems” as it had in the past and that it could do “very little” without “understanding.”) Beyond surface platitudes, however, Kissinger resisted Latin American demands to transform U.S. regional policy, compromise on issues of economic assistance, practice nonintervention, or give preferential access to U.S. markets.
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After the long decade of the 1960s that lasted from the Cuban revolution until Allende’s overthrow or, as I have argued, just before this point, the United States had regained the initiative in the inter-American Cold War that it had previously lost with the help of local allies and the failings of those it opposed. Certainly, compared to 1970, when Allende’s election had pushed the White House to pay more attention to Latin America, Washington’s position was much more secure thanks to the new level of understanding it could count on from dictatorships in the Southern Cone and the new relations it had fostered with non-Marxist nationalists as a means of neutralizing the threat of more Allendes and Castros. This is not to say that Washington could henceforth stage-manage events on the ground. To the contrary, as recent international histories of U.S.–Latin American relations have convincingly shown—and as the Chilean chapter of the inter-American Cold War demonstrates—the United States’ power to
control
events south of the Rio Grande was more limited than is commonly suggested, despite the interest it had in doing so. Instead, it is to
acknowledge that from the early 1970s onward Washington could once more rely on mutual interests and a similar worldview with Cold Warriors in South America who were happy to accept U.S. funds, arms, or training to fight their own cause and share—or in some cases assume—the burden of fighting so-called communism in all its various forms.

For Cuba, this renewed inter-American Cold War offensive in the early 1970s was disastrous. When more than a hundred Cubans descended the steps of an especially commissioned Aeroflot plane at Havana’s international airport on 13 September 1973, Raúl Castro had been there to embrace them while hundreds of onlookers applauded their arrival.
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Less than twenty-four hours earlier, it had been touch-and-go whether these Cubans would escape Chile alive. Now that they were back in Havana, they had to accept that their hasty departure from Santiago had marked a devastating end to three years of intimate involvement in Chile. And once back in Havana after his tour of Asia, Fidel Castro moderated even his previously new so-called mature stance toward Latin America that had evolved since 1968, backing away from the steadfast principles he had held up until that point. In essence, this is because he had very little choice after September 1973. Reflecting on “recent setbacks” in early 1974, Manuel Piñeiro also warned that “even harder times” awaited revolutionaries in the region.
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Ultimately, Cuba’s leaders concluded that the objective conditions for successful revolution no longer existed in South America. When far Left revolutionary movements in the Southern Cone—including the MIR—moved from Chile to Argentina to instigate a regional insurgency in November 1973, Castro was therefore reluctant to help, reportedly calling their collective Junta Coodinadora Revolucionaria “a waste of time.”
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As he told East Germany’s Erich Honecker a few months later, “The situation is difficult, the persecution is great, the struggle is hard.” Explaining that the Cubans were not “interfering” any more, he also sharply criticized the MIR, noting that “They had conflicts with Allende, and Allende was right…. They had really extremist positions.”
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It is partly as a result of such observations—and their implications for the way in which Cuba conceptualized the opportunities for supporting a revolutionary campaign in Latin America—that the CIA in 1975 was able to report that Cuban support to insurgent groups was at its “lowest levels since 1959.”
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Certainly, when speaking privately to Allende’s doctor after the coup, Piñeiro dismissed hopes of reversing Chile’s coup for at least a decade.
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Without the “objective” conditions to support revolutionary upheaval, Castro reluctantly acknowledged that he had to work with the regional
dynamics he confronted if his revolution was to survive. In view of its options, and referring to ongoing nationalization disputes between South American states and the United States, or Panama’s efforts to regain control of the Canal Zone, Piñeiro explained to DGLN employees in mid-1974 that Cuba was now “employing flexible tactics.” As he put it, it would be “childish” not to take advantage of the fact that sectors of the national bourgeoisie in the region were “adopting attitudes that clash objectively with U.S. policy” because of their “secondary economic contradictions with imperialism.” In Piñeiro’s words, forming relationships with these actors favored revolutionary progress by promoting “organization, strengthening and preparation for the final battle to seize political power,” be it in one, two, or three decades ahead.
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In terms of its relations with a variety of different sectors of the national bourgeoisie, Allende’s reestablishment of relations with Cuba in 1970 had been pivotal in breaking Castro’s isolation in the hemisphere. Before and during Cuban involvement in Chile’s revolutionary process, Havana had also been simultaneously developing a new multifaceted regional policy that responded to the failure of previous guerrilla struggles and allowed it to keep up its support for a range of different revolutionary processes. Now that Chile’s revolutionary process lay in tatters, this more flexible policy became ever more elastic and important to Cuba’s hopes of playing a role within the inter-American system. The fact that Castro had resigned himself to new circumstances and downgraded his appraisal of revolutionary conditions in the Americas also led Havana to engage in exploratory talks with Kissinger in 1974–75, who for his part pragmatically realized that the United States no longer needed to block the normalization of Cuba’s relations with a growing variety of Latin American states.
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Indeed, by 1975, revolutionary Cuba had diplomatic relations with Peru, Argentina, Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia at least in part thanks to the precedent of Allende’s reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba and his support for an end to the island’s formal isolation within the hemisphere. Finally, after more than a decade of collective sanctions, the majority of the OAS also voted in 1975 to allow sanctions to be dropped without a two-thirds majority to overturn it. Henceforth, states were to be able to deal independently with Cuba without opposition from the United States (albeit with no help from Havana’s bitter new ideological foe in Latin America, General Pinochet).

Even so, Cuba’s new pragmatism in the Americas did not mean that it rejected principles of revolutionary internationalism or that it was willing
to sacrifice its global revolutionary ambitions for the sake of its own détente with the inter-American system. With a firm U.S. commitment to containing Cuba’s role in its own backyard and slim prospects for revolution in Latin America, Castro turned to Africa, urging the Soviet Union to join him in his support for national liberation and socialism. Indeed, after fewer than 150 Cubans left Chile in 1973, Havana sent 36,000 Cuban soldiers to fight alongside the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, or MPLA) in Angola’s civil war between 1975 and 1976, followed by 16,000 to aid Ethiopia in 1978. Africa had certainly not been the Cuban leaders’ priority when they seized power in 1959. However, partly as a result of the United States’ dominance closer to home in Latin America and decisive setbacks there—including Chile in 1973—Africa is where they were able to make the most decisive impact on the struggle against imperialism.
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As a battle between Cuba and the United States developed first in southern Africa and then with renewed vigor in Central America during the 1980s, the international struggle for Chile—a sliver of land far away from either superpower—came to prominence as a lesson in a new phase of this global confrontation, even if the lessons people drew from Allende’s Chile depended on who they were and what they wanted to learn. Faced with the fall of détente and renewed superpower hostility in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviets rhetorically pointed the finger at U.S. intervention in Chile as having caused Allende’s overthrow when they invaded Afghanistan. As Brezhnev explained in 1980, “to have acted otherwise would have meant leaving Afghanistan prey to imperialism, allowing the forces of aggression to repeat in that country what they had succeeded in doing for example in Chile, where the people’s freedom was drowned in blood.”
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Interestingly, in the immediate aftermath of the coup seven years earlier, Moscow’s leaders had been far been more cautious and circumspect about holding the United States accountable for Chilean events. In the months that followed 11 September 1973, Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, approached Nixon administration officials privately to exert leverage on the junta on only one issue, the release of the Chilean Communist Party’s secretary-general, Luis Corvalán.
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True, the Soviet Union broke off relations with the Chilean junta a week after the coup, but as others have suggested, this seems to have been related more to Moscow’s desire to assume a leading role in mourning Allende’s death in the socialist bloc as well as the West, together with the relative insignificance
of Soviet-Chilean economic relations, than to its ideological distaste for Santiago’s new regime.
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Meanwhile, the Chilean coup sparked introspective, self-reflective discussions within the international communist movement centering on the lessons to be drawn from Allende’s overthrow and what this meant for strategies of winning power and building socialism. As communist leaders began analyzing what had happened in Chile, what is striking is that more often than not they tended to focus on internal factors, and primarily those associated with the UP’s record as opposed to its enemies. In China, Zhou Enlai essentially agreed when Kissinger denied U.S. involvement in bringing down Allende during Sino-American talks in 1973, criticizing Allende’s “rashness” and telling his U.S. counterpart that the UP had been “much too complicated.”
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In Western Europe, where the UP’s victory had initially been enthusiastically welcomed as a potential model for reaching socialism by peaceful democratic means, Allende’s failure also provoked divisions regarding the lessons communist parties should draw.
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In Italy, the secretary-general of Italy’s Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer, laid out a new strategy for “Historic Compromise.” His ideas—that the Left would have to make concessions to the center, work within institutional structures, and embrace pluralism as an end in itself—were heavily shaped by the UP’s experience and failings in these areas.
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Elsewhere, the Portuguese Communist Party concentrated on its relations with the country’s armed forces as a means of resisting another Chile after the unexpected fall of Portugal’s dictatorship in 1974.
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And, together with the PCCh, the Soviets now concluded that a revolution needed the means to defend itself and that the UP had not been sufficiently prepared, which led it to focus on armed struggle within Chile during the 1970s and 1980s.
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Overall, it seemed, Soviet analysts primarily ascribed the coup to the Chilean Left’s mistakes (and particularly those of the far Left).
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