Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (7 page)

The Soviet Union was nevertheless pleased with Castro’s new flexibility toward the region. In early 1970, Moscow’s diplomats announced to U.S. State Department officials and Latin American ambassadors in Washington the arrival of a “new Castro” who had “matured,” was “willing to live in peace and harmony with his neighbors,” and was “prepared for a more responsible role in international affairs.”
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Two years later, an internal Polish Foreign Ministry memorandum would then detail what Soviet bloc analysts regarded as having been “the Cuban leadership’s realistic revision and review of the situation in Latin America.” After a period of “adventurism”—when the Cubans had made theoretical and practical “mistakes” (e.g., by succumbing to “a false assessment of the revolutionary situation in Latin America” or supporting “pseudo-revolutionary groups”)—Warsaw recorded that important changes had taken place: Havana had broken off ties to “extremist and demagogic groups” in the region, there had been an adjustment in the Cuban cadres who dealt with Latin America (the Poles were actually wrong about the extent to which this had taken place), and
Havana had responded well to the emergence of progressive governments in the region.
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As Havana’s subsequent policy in Latin America clearly moved more in line with the Soviet Union’s, this opened up possibilities of cooperation, perhaps most extensively in Peru.
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Yet, where Chile was concerned, there are no indications to suggest that the Cubans coordinated their efforts with the Soviets or that they were acting on the Soviets’ behalf. Havana’s leadership had maintained close relations with Chile’s various left-wing parties throughout the 1960s despite—or, in some cases, precisely because of—its divergent position toward Moscow. To be sure, relations between Cuba and the pro-Soviet Chilean Communists had deteriorated in the mid-1960s, but as Castro’s strategy toward Latin America changed at the end of the decade, and as Cuban-Soviet relations improved, this tension diminished with what appears to have been a nudge from Moscow to its loyal allies, the Chilean Communists. When the PCCh leader, Volodia Teitelboim, arrived in Cuba for a visit in June 1970, the Chilean Communist Party reported to East Germany that this was “an initiative pushed by Moscow in order to improve relations between brother parties.”
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Be that as it may, this made it far easier for Cuba to support the Unidad Popular coalition as it began campaigning on behalf of its presidential candidate, Salvador Allende.

Allende had been the key to Havana’s ties with Chile since 1959. As Fidel Castro recalled in 2008, over the course of more than a decade he had had “the honor of having fought next to [Allende] against imperialism … from the time of the triumph of the Cuban revolution.”
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Of course, the Chilean leader had been an advocate of socialist revolution and a determined challenger of U.S. imperialism before Castro had even reached adolescence. Their experiences and methods were also poles apart. However, both shared a common set of values and a world outlook that brought them together at a critical moment in Latin American history. As a Chilean senator throughout the 1960s, Allende had denounced Washington’s aggression against Cuba, vociferously supported Castro’s revolution, and shown sympathy toward the Castroite far Left in Chile (to which his nephew Andrés Pascal and his daughter Beatriz belonged). Indeed, Allende’s political standing and his loyalty to the Cuban cause meant that Havana’s leaders regarded him as a highly significant ally.

By 1970 Cuban revolutionaries could also look back on more than a decade of friendships with Chilean left-wing leaders and at least some internationalist collaboration with them in Latin American revolutionary struggles. Certainly, before Chile severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1964 along with other OAS members—and with more difficulty after—Cuban intelligence officials passed through Chile to coordinate Havana’s support for revolution elsewhere in Latin America.
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Many Chileans also spontaneously volunteered to go to Cuba to offer their assistance to the revolution at the start of the decade, among them the future manager of Chile’s Central Bank during the UP years, Jaime Barrios. As a Cuban intelligence officer who worked in Chile in the early 1960s recalled, this early support for the revolution was “powerful.”
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Meanwhile, many of the young Cubans who arrived in Chile during this period (among them Cuban intelligence officials) were often rather frustrated and culturally bemused by Chilean “formality” and the “strictness” of legalistic strategies for revolution.
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And Havana’s leaders were also deeply skeptical of the concept of a peaceful democratic road to revolution. Yet in many respects they had always regarded Chile as a unique case in Latin America, lacking the prerequisites for armed insurgency. Two-thirds of Chile’s population lived in towns and cities, it was one of the most industrialized countries in Latin America, and its established left-wing parties participated in a stable constitutional democracy. When Che Guevara had pored over maps of the region to decide where he could locate a guerrilla motor to power a continental revolution, he likewise had not seen Chile as a viable location. With its arid desert in the north and Patagonia in the south, its climate extremes and its isolated position between Argentina’s armed forces over the Andes and the Pacific on the other side, it was never regarded as being a good base for a guerrilla movement.
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As such, Cuba’s deputy prime minister, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, later noted that Chile had always been “one of the few exceptions” where peaceful revolution could possibly succeed.
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Even so, some Chileans were eager to persuade the Cubans that their country was ripe for armed insurgency in the 1960s and were frustrated by the Cubans’ “respect” for the traditional Chilean Left’s emphasis on nonviolence.
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In 1965 a group of young educated students in the southern city of Concepción established the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement, or MIR), an unmistakably Cuban-inspired party. This was initially a small group, comprising only three hundred members, and even U.S. intelligence analysts believed the MIR’s strength
to be “far more miniscule” than the three thousand members press articles suggested it had in 1970.
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Moreover, the MIR’s initial attempt to create a guerrilla base camp in the cordillera of the Andes on the border of Argentina was a complete disaster.
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The MIR’s relationship with Cuba also complicated Havana’s relationship with Chile’s other left-wing parties, especially when the group launched urban guerrilla insurgency campaigns in the late 1960s. Its violence and mobilization efforts certainly tarnished the Left’s constitutional reputation in Chile and undermined the PCCh’s and PS’s efforts to gain power peacefully. And in this context, Cuba’s association with the MIR became a core issue dominating Chilean intra-Left struggles.

However, when Havana reduced its emphasis on armed struggle and moved closer to Moscow at the end of the 1960s, it had distanced itself from the MIR’s actions. As Chile’s future chargé d’affaires in Havana remembered, members of the MIR—or Miristas as they were known—enchanted the Cuban leadership, reminding it of its own youthful revolutionary fervor.
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But, increasingly, Cuba limited its support to funding the MIR’s newspaper,
Punto Final
, and instructed Miristas that they would have to finance their own insurgent activities (which they did through bank raids they euphemistically called “expropriations”).
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Did the Cubans also force the MIR to support Allende’s campaign in 1970, as some have argued? The answer is complicated. In the run-up to the elections, the MIR suspended its urban guerrilla actions not because the Cubans instructed it to so much as because of Allende’s direct request that it do so and the MIR’s own confidence that when Allende lost—as it believed he surely would—its commitment to armed action would gain credibility.
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More important, it now appears that Allende personally offered to pay the MIR to stop its violent actions in Chile. In a meeting with the group’s leadership during his presidential campaign, he listened sympathetically to the MIR’s argument that it would not be able to survive without funds generated from its expropriations, and he therefore offered to help the group economically. As one of those who was present at the meeting later remembered, he offered the MIR $80,000—“a lot of money in those days!”
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In February 1970, when the MIR announced its “critical support” for the UP, the Cubans were nevertheless pleased that it was getting behind Salvador Allende’s election campaign.
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After all, it was the presidential candidate and
not
the MIR that was, had been, and would be Havana’s main ally in Chile.

As noted, the relationship between Castro and Allende rested first and foremost on a similar view of Latin America’s predicament. Both leaders
shared a belief that they faced similar challenges of dependency and underdevelopment in an unequal capitalist world and that they were circumscribed in their efforts to redress this system by the overbearing power of the United States in Latin America. As Allende told the crowds that gathered to celebrate his inauguration as president, Chile’s backwardness was the result of a “dependent capitalist system which counterposes the rich minority to the needy majority internally and the powerful nations to the poor nations externally.”
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And as far as the Socialist Party was concerned, “worldwide exploitation involved not only social classes but also nation-states.”
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Allende—a lifelong Socialist himself—saw Chile as just one front line in a wider battle between the world’s poorest peoples and its richest nations in which he and Castro were fighting on the same side.

Like many others in the global South, including Castro, Allende also adopted Marxism—and Marxist-inspired theories of dependency—as a means of understanding his country’s backwardness and of solving it.
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Two decades before becoming president, he had argued that human destiny was “marked out by the road of socialism … not just because it represents technological and economic progress but also because of its different concept of communal life, because it puts the common heritage at the service of all.”
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This did not entail an automatic allegiance to the Soviet Union. To the contrary, the Socialist Party’s very identity was based on its opposition to the PCCh’s pro-Soviet stance, and, as a founding member in the early 1930s, Allende argued the need to find Chilean—as opposed to Soviet—solutions to his country’s problems. During his presidential campaign in 1964, when faced with what Chileans at the time referred to as a “terror campaign” that linked his candidacy with the prospect of Soviet tanks rolling into Santiago, he had also clearly stated that reduced dependency on the United States need not mean new subservience to the USSR. Chile would be no one’s partner in the Cold War struggle, he insisted.
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Indeed, rather than a strict division of the world between East and West, it was the split between the global North and South that conditioned Allende’s worldview. In prescribing socialism as a route to economic development, equality, and emancipation for the Third World, Allende subscribed to what Forrest Colburn has termed the “vogue of revolution in poor countries.”
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The new Chilean government shared a view of historical inevitability that drew on Marxist notions of progress, what another scholar, Robert Malley, describes as “a well-defined, if misinterpreted, progression of events from the fall of the colonial order to independence and to the victory of ‘revolutionary’ Third World movements.”
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Certainly,
Allende would refer to his own victory as “a monument to those who fell” in Chile’s “social struggle, who sprinkled with their blood the fertile seed of the Chilean revolution” and made it possible.
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And looking toward the dawn of a new world, Chile’s foreign minister during the Allende years, the Socialist Clodomiro Almeyda Medina, later argued that “the current of history” tended “to strengthen the efforts of developing countries” and aid their efforts to close “the gap … that irrationally separates the developed capitalist world from the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”
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As some of the young Chileans that would work closely with President Allende recounted, the war in Vietnam, student protests in Paris in 1968, and the rise of Third Worldism also imbued them with enthusiasm and a sense that their country’s political developments were part of a major shift in global politics.
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As one such Chilean recalled, by the late 1960s, they believed that world revolution was imminent and that it would be determined in the global South.
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Back in 1959, Castro’s revolution had reinforced Allende’s beliefs and inspired him. In March of that year he had arrived in Cuba to see for himself what it and its leaders were like, whereupon Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, who had spent some time in Chile during the 1950s, introduced him to the country’s new leaders. When Allende met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, he had been immediately impressed. As if to prove his allegiance to the ideals Havana’s leaders espoused, but to distinguish himself from their methods, he often exhibited Che Guevara’s dedication to him that read: “To Salvador, who by other means is trying to obtain the same.” Allende later also explained to Régis Debray that in Cuba and Vietnam, which he visited in 1969, he had found inspiration in “a united people, a people with political conscience, a people whose leaders have moral strength.”
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And in a speech he had given while visiting Havana in 1962, he also proclaimed that the enemy of the Chilean people was the same enemy Cuba faced. “Cuba is not alone,” he pledged. “Cuba has the solidarity of all the oppressed peoples of the world! We are with you because your revolution which is Cuban and national is not only your revolution but the revolution of all oppressed peoples … as a people you have opened, in words and in action, a great road of liberation in Latin America.”
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