H-Diplo ARTICLE REVIEW 984 9 October 2020

James G. Hershberg. “Soviet-Brazilian Relations and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Journal of Cold War Studies 22:1 (Winter 2020): 175-209. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_00930. https://hdiplo.org/to/AR984 Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Michael E. Neagle | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by Felipe Loureiro, University of São Paulo

f there is one single event that represented the dangers and perils of the Cold War, it was the US-Soviet confrontation over the deployment of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba in October 1962, which is best known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world had never been closer to a thermonuclear war than during that tense thirteen-day standoff between U.S.I President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

For decades, the Cuban Missile Crisis was studied as a classic example of a U.S.-Soviet bilateral confrontation, with Fidel Castro’s Havana playing at most a supporting role. Over the last two decades however, scholars have globalized and decentralized the crisis, showing that countries and societies of all parts of the world were not only strongly impacted by it, but also influenced, in multiple and sometimes key ways, how the superpowers’ standoff played out.1

As the geographic theater of the story, Latin America stood out as one of the main regions where the U.S.-Soviet stalemate produced major social and political impacts. Scholars have explored how President Kennedy’s 23 October public announcement about the existence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba sent shockwaves across the continent, prompting different reactions from state and non-state actors, including government crackdowns against local Communists and leftist groups, as well as a multilateral initiative for the establishment of a nuclear free zone in the hemisphere, which culminated years later with the signing of the Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967.2

Latin American countries also played direct roles in the crisis itself. Back in 2004, James Hershberg published an outstanding two-part article in the Journal of Cold War Studies exploring an unknown aspect of the U.S.-Soviet standoff: Washington’s overture towards Cuba, which was secretly made through Brazil and presented to Castro as a Brazilian proposal, in which Cuba would cut off all military ties to the Soviet Union, including, of course, the withdrawal of Soviet weapons from the island. Cuba would also and terminate policies aimed at encouraging or supporting revolutionary activity

1 Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 17/18 (Fall 2012), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/bulletin- no-1718-fall-2012.

2 Renata Keller, “The Latin American Missile Crisis.” Diplomatic History 39:2 (2015): 195-222, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dht134.

© 2020 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US H-Diplo Article Review 984 in Latin America, in exchange for Havana’s reintegration in hemispheric affairs (Cuba had been expelled from the Organization of the American States in February 1962) as well as the improvement of U.S.-Cuban relations.3

Brazil’s so-called “independent” foreign policy of the early 1960s, and the fact that Brasília had been constantly presenting Page | 2 itself as a mediator between Cuba, the United States, and other anti-Castro Latin American governments, made Brazil an ideal candidate for the U.S. plan. Even though U.S.-Brazilian relations were far from warm at the time, especially because of President João Goulart’s close links with left-wing labor groups, including Communist trade union leaders, the Kennedy administration had not reached the conclusion yet that Goulart needed to go.4 It is true that since mid-1962 Washington had been providing economic aid through the Alliance for Progress to anti-Goulart state governors—a policy named “islands of administrative sanity” by the U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon.5 But by that time, Washington’s goal was only to limit Goulart’s political moves by strengthening pro-U.S. politicians in Brazil and not to overthrow him, as it would be the case later.6 Washington’s request for a secret Brazilian mediation towards Castro’s Havana during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis is further strong evidence that the bridges between Kennedy and Goulart had not been completely destroyed in October 1962.

This would soon change, though. Hershberg’s 2004 two-part article had already pointed out that Kennedy officials, especially Ambassador Gordon, became exasperated by the way Brazil behaved during the missile crisis. Not only did Brazil abstain at the Organization of American States (OAS) on the use of force against Cuba if needed (even if Brasília voted in favor of the U.S. naval quarantine), but also top officials of the Goulart administration delivered public remarks in support of Havana’s right to self-determination, in response to domestic criticism from Brazilian left-wing groups. The situation grew worse in the following weeks, including two tense standoffs between President Goulart and U.S. officials. The first involved Ambassador Gordon in November 1962, when Goulart threatened to look for Soviet assistance if Washington did not provide economic aid to Brazil’s development plan; the second concerned Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who came down to Brazil in December to confront Goulart on the president’s cozy relations with left-wing leaders (among other things).7 From late 1962 on, especially after mid-1963, relations between Brasília and Washington would reach an historical low, culminating in U.S. support for the March 1964 military coup that overthrew President Goulart and installed a 21-year military dictatorship in the country, producing key impacts in the region during the 1960s and 1970s.8

3 James Hershberg, “The United States, Brazil, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (Part 1),.” Journal of Cold War Studies 6:2 (2004): 3-20, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/152039704773254740; James Hershberg, “The United States, Brazil, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (Part 2),” Journal of Cold War Studies 6:3 (2004): 5-67, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/1520397041447364.

4 Felipe Loureiro, “The Alliance for or Against Progress? US-Brazilian Financial Relations in the Early 1960s,” Journal of Latin American Studies 46:2 (2014): 323-351, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X14000029.

5 Lincoln Gordon, “US-Brazilian Reprise,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 32:2 (1990): 165-178, 171, DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/166014.

6 Felipe Loureiro, A Aliança para o Progresso e o governo João Goulart. Ajuda econômica norte-americana a estados brasileiros e a desestabilização da democracia no Brasil pós-guerra (São Paulo: UNESP University Press, 2020)

7 Felipe Loureiro, “The Alliance for Progress and President João Goulart’s Three-Year Plan: The Deterioration of U.S.- Brazilian Relations in Cold War Brazil,” Cold War History 17:1 (2017): 61-79, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2016.1254620; Hershberg, “The United States, Brazil, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (Part 2),” Journal of Cold War Studies, 60-62.

8 Tanya Harmer, “Brazil’s Cold War in the Southern Cone, 1970-1975,” Cold War History 12 (August 2012): 2-22, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2011.641953; Anthony Pereira, “The US Role in the 1964 Coup in Brazil: A Reassessment,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 37:1 (2016): 1-13, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12518; Matias Spektor, “The United States and the

But a crucial part of this puzzle was missing. We still knew almost nothing about President Goulart’s interactions with Moscow and the Communist bloc during his administration. And in no other period was this more important than during the Cuban Missile Crisis and late 1962, when the US-Brazilian relationship derailed, opening the doors for Goulart’s overthrow in March 1964. Gianfranco Caterina’s study covering the major political trends in Soviet-Brazilian relations during the Cold War was the first to bring to light this much-needed perspective, but Caterina focuses on the larger picture (the 1940s to the 1980s), and not on the key juncture of the Goulart administration (1961-1964).9 Hershberg’s sequel in Page | 3 the Journal of Cold War Studies to his 2004 two-part article, now addressing the interactions between Soviet and Brazilian high officials during the Cuban Missile Crisis, represents an outstanding and long-awaited effort to address this historiographical gap.

Employing an impressive array of primary sources from multiple official archives, particularly Russian and Eastern European sources, along with U.S. and Brazilian documents, Hershberg masterfully shows how President Goulart played a dangerous double game between the United States and the Soviet Union in the middle of Cuban Missile Crisis. While Goulart praised U.S. efforts against Havana and Moscow in his private conversations with Ambassador Gordon, congratulated Washington for what he called the “American victory” against Khrushchev, and agreed to carry out a secret mission to mediate between Cuba and the United States—following Washington’s request, but presenting it as a purely Brazilian initiative—Goulart portrayed a completely different picture to acting Soviet Ambassador to Brazil, Andrei Fomin. Ambassador Chernyshev had drowned in a Rio de Janeiro beach on October 21, the day before President Kennedy made his public speech about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba (196).

According to Fomin’s account of the two meetings he had with Goulart during the Cuban Missile Crisis (unfortunately there are no reports of these encounters in Brazilian archives), Goulart employed bitter words when referring to the United States, whose “monopolistic circles,” according to Goulart, wished for “the outbreak of war to find their way out of the contradictions inherent to the Capitalist system” (193). Goulart also justified Brazil’s position at the OAS claiming that the country’s representatives did not follow his instructions, and that his government was being subjected to constant U.S. blackmail and pressures, particularly from Ambassador Gordon, about whom Goulart talked about with profound disdain. Likewise, the Brazilian president praised Moscow in effusive terms, pointing to Khrushchev’s “humane and forward-looking actions” in defusing the crisis—more evidence of how the Soviet premier was a “tireless fighter for peace,” bringing “a new, extremely important victory” for the Soviet Union—and even revealed to the Soviet Ambassador the Brazilian “secret” mission to Havana, claiming that the initiative had been requested, among others, by Washington (196-197). Whenever possible, Goulart reminded the Soviet official about the importance of Soviet economic and technical aid to Brazil, a precondition, according to him, for the country to break away from Washington’s imperialist grip (192-197). To sum up, it is hard to imagine a more contrasting position than the one that President Goulart espoused before the U.S. and Soviet representatives during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

One could reasonably claim that the lack of Brazilian accounts of the meetings weakens Hershberg’s conclusion regarding Goulart’s ‘double game’ strategy. In reality, besides the fact that many pieces of information that Goulart passed on to the Soviet official are backed by what happened—particularly when it comes to the Brazilian mission to Havana on behalf of the United States, which was unknown until Hershberg’s 2004 two-part article came out—Hershberg brings in other pieces of evidence that support his conclusions. For example, using Chinese and Czech diplomatic sources, Hershberg shows that Goulart applied a similar anti-U.S. rhetoric when talking with other Communist leaders, from Mao Zedong’s China to Antonín Novotný’s Czechoslovakia. In some cases, the references made by these other sources to Goulart’s quotations were

1964 Brazilian Military Coup,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2018, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.551.

9 Gianfranco Caterina, Um grande oceano: Brasil e União Soviética atravessando a Guerra Fria (1947-1985). PhD diss., Getúlio Vargas Foundation, 2019. Another key contribution on the subject, but looking into the field of cultural diplomacy, is Tobias Rupprecht, “Socialist High Modernity and Global Stagnation: A Shared History of Brazil and the Soviet Union during the Cold War,” Journal of Global History 6:3 (2011): 505-528, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S174002281100043X.

© 2020 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US H-Diplo Article Review 984 almost identical to those found in Fomin’s meetings with the Brazilian president, such as when Goulart claimed to Mao in Beijing in August 1961, according to the Chinese account, that Brazil was “making a great deal of effort to break the chain that tied (the country) to the (U.S.) imperialists” (206). Finally, Goulart’s threat to sever relations with the United States and accept Soviet economic aid weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis reinforces the perception that Goulart had embarked in a double-game strategy in late 1962, a move that would spark serious consequences for US-Brazilian relations and for the future of his presidency. Incidentally, Goulart’s threat offers great similarities to the strategy employed by Brazilian president Page | 4 Getúlio Vargas with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II (Goulart had been Vargas’s protégé and would become his political heir in Brazil).10

Hershberg’s 2004 two-part article on the triangular diplomacy between the U.S., Brazil, and Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis instantly became a must-read study for those interested in the U.S.-Soviet standoff and its implications to the Global Cold War, as well as for scholars working on Latin America’s Cold War, bringing a “pericentric perspective”—to use Tony Smith’s appropriate denomination—for the study of U.S.-Latin American relations.11 Similarly, Hershberg’s sequel to this amazing story sheds light not only on Brazil’s links with the Communist bloc during a critical juncture of the Global Cold War, but also contributes to our understanding of the deterioration in U.S.-Brazilian relations and the conditions that led to Goulart’s overthrow, the emergence of a 21-year military regime in South America’s largest country, and the advent and strengthening of military regimes in Latin America.

Felipe Loureiro is an Associate Professor at the Institute of International Relations of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and a Research Fellow at Brazil's National Institute for Studies on the United States (INCT-INEU). He is the author of A Aliança para o Progresso e o governo João Goulart (UNESP University Press, São Paulo, 2020) and he is currently working on the history of the New Right in the United States and its impact on U.S. and Brazilian politics.

10 In another article, I have explored in detail this similarly between Vargas’ and Goulart’s approaches to the United States. See Loureiro, “The Alliance for Progress and President João Goulart’s Three-Year Plan,” Cold War History (2017): 76-79.

11 Tony Smith, “New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 24:4 (2000): 567-590, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/0145-2096.00237.