By Raúl Antonio Capote on March 23, 2021
Illustration: El Pais
Most of the clandestine operations of the CIA in Latin America during the 1960s were directed against the Cuban Revolution and against Fidel Castro. ”No more Cubas” was the agency’s slogan in those days.
They set up a division of the CIA, called Foreign Publications, Inc., in New York, in order to subsidize a number of anti-Cuban publications, many of which came from Miami. They also used the US Information Agency for this purpose.
In 1996, in Madrid, the CIA launched the magazine Encuentro ( Encounter), directed by the Cuban writer Jesus Diaz, with the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy doing the financing.
In 2002, in Puerto Rico, they created the publication Plaza Mayor, run by Patricia Gutiérrez-Menoyo, and funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The plan was for Plaza Mayor to publish books by Cuban authors, in a supposed “apolitical” and cultural project with the innocuous name of Cuban Culture Collection.
In 2004, as a prologue to what would become Project Genesis, the CIA created the Online Literary Agency (Agencia Literaria Online or Aló) to represent Cuban writers, promote their works overseas, and similar efforts. This was funded by the Pan American Development Foundation.
Thus, the CIA could rely on a complete infrastructure to work with writers that included a literary agency, a magazine, and publishers, all entirely independent of Cuban institutions. First they created a webpage to promote the authors, with great insistence that all political involvement should be avoided; they even used a phrase quoted from Fidel in the announcement of the page. According to the CIA, in a short time they would have control of a substantial part of the creative literary figures of the country. Economic and institutional autonomy would allow them to disagree with government policy without problems, and they would become committed to their new subsidizers.
The plans were to organize workshops, events, contests, and activities with other artists, painters, actors, and musicians in order to interest them in the agency little by little so that it would end up representing all arts and not just literature. The initials Alo – Agencia Literaria Online were chosen to take advantage of the popularity that the programs called Aló Presidente done by Hugo Chavez; they expected that the similar name would give the website immediate online visibility. Indeed in 2006, Alo changed to an agency that not only represented writers, but also artists from theater, music, and the plastic arts, etc.
According to the calculations of the CIA, working in this way- that is creating agencies or utilizing those that already existed in Miami – they would be able to try, unsuccessfully, to separate the writers and artists from Cuban cultural institutions, which would allow the CIA to exercise control over them and use them against the Revolution.
Source: Granma, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English