ABSTRACT
The ‘Cold War’ is hardly an adequate term for a period in which hot wars were fought by the Soviet Union against dissident satellites and by the US against ‘communism’. The armed truce between the great powers was not extended to the entire world which was, nevertheless, caught up in the bipolar confrontational logic. In Latin America, the period from the Second World War to the 1990s was marked by US intervention in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Grenada, by the Bay of Pigs debacle, by covert operations and eventually by the intellectual and political defeat of the left accelerated by military governments that came to power under the aegis of the United States. Given this scenario, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it was also a period of innovation, experiment and belief in liberation from political and economic dependency, a period in which there was a convergence between politics and culture. The Cold War in Latin America was not just about the great powers and their influence but about this other story that was eventually stifled, one in which the literary intelligentsia played a crucial role. This role can be understood only in relation to what Pascale Casanova terms ‘the world republic of letters’1 and the claim for universality made from the centre, most notably from Paris, which was the magnet that had drawn generations of Latin American writers and the standard according to which they would be evaluated. The Cold War altered this relationship. Paris remained a magnet, but the 1945-89 period was one in which the USA and the Soviet Union also vied for cultural supremacy, pitting freedom against peace. While a few Latin American writers were drawn in by one side or the other, the majority attempted to find a third space, one that corresponded both to the political aspiration of a uniquely Latin American form of progress and to the cultural aspiration of liberating its literature from mere imitation and copying. Originality was to define both its political and its literary solutions: the third space between the Cold War extremes. Although these aspirations foundered politically they helped to launch the ‘boom’ of Latin American literature in the 1960s and early 1970s.
