their letter stated, “is to find our common, united voice and grant it the strength, presence, and dissemination that our age—and the destiny of our peoples—demand.”33
The Cuban Revolution endorsed this idea of a region-spanning literature and offered a wealth of resources to promote it. As critic Harss said about the revolution, “The Latin American novelist is less interested in its political and economic ends than in its strength. [The revolution] is the realization of a deep socio-cultural transformation within a continent that finally begins to define itself.” Casa de las Américas (literally, the House of the Americas) was in charge of spreading the cultural ideals of the revolution in Latin America. This political and cultural organization opened four months after the triumph of the revolution. It sought to achieve the region’s cultural independence from outside forces and its unity according to the ideals of the revolution. To do so, it organized a regional literary award and published a magazine, Casa de las Américas. Already in its first issue, it featured works by members of the three generations. During the 1960s, it promoted the New Latin American Novel and it was mandatory reading for the region’s cultural establishment until the revolution started to purge critical intellectuals the following decade. Also, Casa de las Américas had a library that organized café-conversatorios (coffee-round tables), in which works by Alfonso Reyes, José Bianco, and García Márquez (Big Mama’s Funeral), among others, were read and promoted as Latin American literature. In 1968, this publisher released the first international edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude in its collection Literatura latinoamericana (including blurbs by Vargas Llosa, Rama, and the Times Literary Supplement). Soon, these and other cultural activities of the revolution attracted the world’s attention to Latin America. As Spanish literary critic Castellet said, “Through Cuba we began to understand the Latin American phenomena and Latin American literature much better, because, first, we began to understand what we could call this dynamic and militant unity of Latin American literature.” Casa de las Américas responded to this international interest by organizing big events such as the Congreso Cultural in Havana in 1968. It gathered five hundred delegates from seventy countries, such as Aimé Césaire, Italo Calvino, Carpentier, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa.34
The cultural activities of Casa de las Américas strengthened the region’s cultural autonomy, which in return helped with the commercial success of the New Latin American Novel. However, something of more international scale fully landed in Latin America after the revolution. As tensions between the Soviet Union and United States rose, the region became a Cold War battleground. This war was waged in the domain of politics and also of culture. And the result of this confrontation between cultural organizations outside and inside was to further develop Latin America as a lettered region.35
In the early 1940s, while World War II was spreading throughout Europe, the U.S. government sponsored translations of works by Latin American writers, and the State Department invited experts to lecture on Latin American literature at colleges. After the war, the U.S. government introduced the Point Four Program to counter the influence of the Soviet Union and its communism over developing and Third World countries. The U.S.-based Ford and Rockefeller Foundations seconded the efforts of the government to shape the agenda of the arts and social sciences in Latin America. Also, the Faulkner Foundation created in the 1950s the Ibero-American Novel Project. It followed the desire of Faulkner, who used part of the money from his Nobel Prize in Literature to create fellowships for Latin American writers. The goal was to promote the work of established and upcoming novelists from the region. One of its early beneficiaries was Donoso. His first novel, Coronation, received the 1962 Ibero-American Award from the foundation. These awards led to important professional connections and growing excitement about the future of the region’s literature. Donoso himself recalled that Scottish literary scholar Alistair Reid told him that Vargas Llosa was going “to be one of the greatest novelists of his time.” Reid also gave him a copy of Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero. Shortly after, in 1964, Donoso published in the leading Chilean magazine Ercilla an enthusiastic book review with the subtitle “The Novel that Triumphs Worldwide.”36
Starting in 1962, cultural philanthropist Rodman Rockefeller and editor Alfred Knopf helped fund the symposia organized by the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts. Three years later, the symposium met in Chichén-Itzá, Mexico. Among its participants were writers William Styron, Oscar Lewis, Nicanor Parra, Juan García Ponce, Donoso, Rulfo, Fuentes, Sábato, and García Márquez. At this meeting, García Márquez and Donoso consoled each other about their writer’s block. Having the chance to talk about his writing problems with peers helped him, since a few weeks later he put his writer’s block behind him and started working on One Hundred Years of Solitude. The following year, the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts changed its name to Center for Inter-American Relations and, thanks to the advice of critic Rodríguez Monegal, it shifted its focus away from symposia to the promotion of Latin American books. In ten years, the center sponsored the translation into English of fifty titles, including One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Like the United States, communist Soviet Union and China promoted Latin American writers. Although more research is necessary to fully understand this promotion, two of the most popular writers in the region before the 1960s, Amado and Neruda, were under the spell of the Soviet Union. Their works were translated and circulated in the countries behind the Iron Curtain as well as in China. The Soviet Union also tempted budding writers. In 1957, a thirty-year-old García Márquez traveled to Moscow to attend the Sixth World Youth Festival as a member of a Colombian cultural delegation. Four years later, the Latin American Institute opened its doors in this city. In Latin America, the Soviet Union gave not only ideological but also cultural support to the Cuban Revolution. One of its many initiatives was to fund the Cuban book industry. With this purpose in mind, a Czech-Russian book-publishing consortium started to operate on the island. Soon after, “Soviet-financed books [were] sold in South America at what we would call nominal prices, about a third of the price of Spanish books.”37
In Spain, high-ranking officials of the Franco government were as concerned as their U.S. counterparts about the growing threat of the Cuban book industry, with its cheap pro-Soviet titles and writers. But Spanish officials were equally worried about the threat of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. U.S. funding for writers, books, and publishers endangered Spain’s geo-cultural power over the book industry in Latin America. Thus, Spanish institutions sought to influence the region through journals such as Mundo Hispánico and Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, organizations such as Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, professional meetings such as Congreso de Instituciones Hispánicas, summer courses, cultural travels, and fellowships for Latin American students. Fellowships, in particular, connected Latin America to Spain by co-opting its artists, as was the case for the twenty-two-year-old Vargas Llosa, who left Peru to study in Madrid.38
For France, Latin America was also a target of cultural entrepreneurship. French interventions included journals, professorships, book collections, and organizations. The Maison de l’Amérique Latine was created in Paris in 1945, while the Institut Français d’Amérique Latine opened branches in the capitals of Mexico, Haiti, Chile, and Peru. The same year the prestigious Collège de France established the chair on literature and language of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. And France’s leading literary publisher, Gallimard, created in the early 1950s the pioneering collection La Croix du Sud. This collection promoted the region’s literature, mostly novels. Among its forty-two titles, there were indigenists, cosmopolitans, and Brazilian authors. The director of this collection was the French critic Roger Caillois. He lived in Buenos Aires as a World War II refugee. During his stay, he met Borges and his circle and became familiar with the region’s literature. When he returned to France, Borges’s Ficciones was the first volume in La Croix du Sud, and its publication in this collection started a national interest in Latin American writers that peaked in the 1960s. Caillois also directed UNESCO’s Collection d’oeuvre representatives, which published works by “Ibero-American” authors. Its titles included foundational fictions from the nineteenth century such as Sarmiento’s Facundo, groundbreaking writers
