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  For Gerardo Bongiovanni,

  promoter of liberal ideas and loyal friend

  THE CALL OF THE TRIBE

  I would never have written this book had I not read Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station more than twenty years ago. This fascinating study traces the evolution of the idea of socialism from the moment when the French historian Jules Michelet, intrigued by a quotation, started to learn Italian to read Giambattista Vico, up to the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station in Saint Petersburg, on April 16, 1917, to lead the Russian Revolution. I then had the idea for a book that would do for liberalism what the American critic had done for socialism: an essay that, starting in the small Scottish town of Kirkcaldy with the birth of Adam Smith in 1723, would trace the evolution of liberal ideas through their main exponents and the historical and social events that caused them to spread throughout the world. Although it is quite different from Edmund Wilson’s book, this was the early inspiration for The Call of the Tribe.

  It might not seem so, but this is an autobiographical work. It describes my own intellectual and political history, the journey from the Marxism and Sartrean existentialism of my youth to the liberalism of my mature years, a route that took me through a reappraisal of democracy helped by my readings of writers such as Albert Camus, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler. I was being drawn to liberalism by certain political events and, above all, by the ideas of the seven authors to whom I dedicate these pages: Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich August von Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel.

  I discovered politics when I was twelve, in October 1948, when a military coup in Peru led by General Manuel Apolinario Odría overthrew president José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, a relative of my mother’s family. I think that it was during Odría’s eight-year reign that I developed a hatred for dictators of any stripe, one of the few invariable constants in my political outlook. But I only became aware of the social dimension, that Peru was a country weighed down by injustice, where a minority of privileged people exploited the vast majority in abusive fashion, when, in 1952, I read Out of the Night by Jan Valtin in my final year of school. This book led me to go against the wishes of my family, who wanted me to attend the Catholic University—then the place where wealthy young Peruvians studied—as I applied to San Marcos University, a public, popular university, not cowed by the military dictatorship, where, I was sure, I would be able to join the Communist Party. The party had almost been eradicated by Odría’s repressive measures when I entered San Marcos in 1953 to study literature and law, its leaders imprisoned, killed, or forced into exile; and it was trying to reconstitute itself as the Cahuide Group that I belonged to for a year.

  It was there that I received my first lessons in Marxism, in clandestine study groups, where we read José Carlos Mariátegui, Georges Politzer, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and we had intense discussions about socialist realism and “left-wing” communism, branded by Lenin as “an infantile disorder.” The great admiration I felt for Sartre, who I read devotedly, inured me against dogma—we Peruvian communists at that time were, in the words of Salvador Garmendia, “few but very sectarian”—and in my reading group I adhered to Sartre’s theory that upheld historical materialism and class struggle but not dialectical materialism, which caused my comrade Félix Arias Schreiber to label me in one of our discussions as “subhuman.”

  I left the Cahuide Group at the end of 1954 but I remained, I believe, a socialist, at least in my readings, an interest that took on fresh impetus with the struggle of Fidel Castro and his barbudos in the Sierra Maestra and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in the final days of 1958. For my generation, and not just in Latin America, what happened in Cuba was decisive, an ideological watershed. Many people, as I did, saw Fidel’s epic achievement as a heroic and generous adventure, of idealistic fighters who wanted to end the corrupt dictatorship of the Batista regime, and also as a means of establishing a nonsectarian socialism that would allow for criticism, diversity, and even dissidence. Many of us believed this, which explains why, in its early years, the Cuban Revolution had such great support the world over.

  In November 1962 I was in Mexico, sent by Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, where I worked as a journalist, to cover an exhibition that France had organized in Chapultepec Park, when the Cuban missile crisis erupted. I was sent to cover this event and was on the last flight by Cubana Airlines to leave Mexico before the blockade. Cuba was in a state of general mobilization, fearing an imminent invasion by U.S. marines. It was an impressive sight. Along the Malecón, small antiaircraft guns called bocachicas were operated by young men, almost boys, who put up with the low-level flights of U.S. Sabre jets without firing at them, and radio and television gave instructions to the people as to what to do when the bombing started. What they were living through brought to mind the emotion and enthusiasm of a free and hopeful people described in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, when he reached Barcelona as a volunteer at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Profoundly moved by what seemed to me to be the personification of socialism in freedom, I joined a long queue to donate blood. Thanks to my old companion at the University of Madrid, Ambrosio Fornet, and the Peruvian Hilda Gadea, who had met Che Guevara in Guatemala during the Jacobo Arbenz regime and had married and had a daughter with him in Mexico, I spent time with a number of writers connected to Casa de las Américas and its president, Haydée Santamaría, whom I met briefly. When I left, some weeks later, young people were singing in the streets of Havana, “Nikita/mariquita/lo que se da/no se quita” (“Nikita, you little poof, what’s given can’t be taken back”) because the Soviet leader had accepted Kennedy’s ultimatum and withdrawn the missiles from the island. Only afterward did it become known that in this secret agreement John F. Kennedy had promised Khrushchev that in return for the removal of the weapons, the United States would refrain from invading Cuba and would withdraw its Jupiter missiles based in Turkey.

  My support for the Cuban Revolution lasted for most of the sixties. I traveled five times to Cuba as a member of the International Council of Writers affiliated with Casa de Las Américas and I defended the revolution in manifestos, articles, and public acts, both in France, where I was living, and in Latin America, where I traveled quite regularly. In those years I took up my Marxist readings again, not only the classics but also work by writers identified with the Communist Party, or close to it, like György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Lucien Goldmann, Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Che Guevara, and even the ultraorthodox Louis Althusser, professor at the École Normale, who later became insane and killed his wife. However, I remember that, during my years in Paris, once a week I would stealthily buy a copy of the paper deplored by the left, Le Figaro, to read the column by Raymond Aron, whose penetrating analyses of current events made me uneasy but also captivated me.

  Several events at the end of the sixties began to distance me from Marxism. There was the creation of the UMAP camps in Cuba, where, behind the euphemistic term, Military Units to Aid Production, there lay the reality of concentration camps where counterrevolutionaries were kept with homosexuals and common criminals. My visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1968, when I was invited to a commemoration related to Pushkin, left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I discovered there that, had I been a Russian, I would have been a dissident in that country (that is, a pariah) or I would have been rotting in the Gulag. That made me feel somewhat traumatized. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and the journal Les Temps Modernes had convinced me that, despite everything that was wrong with the U.S.S.R., it represented progress and the future, a country where, as Paul Éluard put it in a poem that I knew by heart, “there are no prostitutes or thieves or priests.” But there was poverty, drunks sprawled in the street, and a widespread apathy; one felt everywhere a collective claustrophobia due to the lack of information about what was happening inside the country and in the rest of the world. One just had to look around to realize that although class divisions based on money might have disappeared, in the U.S.S.R. the inequalities were enormous and were exclusively related to power. I asked a talkative Russian, “Who are the most privileged people here?” He replied, “Submissive writers. They have dachas for their holidays and they can travel abroad. That puts them way above ordinary men and women. You can’t ask for more!” Could I defend this model of society, as I had been doing, knowing now that it would have been unlivable for me? And my disappointment with Sartre was another important factor, the day I read in Le Monde an interview with Madeleine Chapsal where he stated that African writers should give up lit
erature and dedicate themselves first and foremost to revolution and to creating a country where literature might then become possible. He also declared that, faced with a child dying of hunger, “La Nausée ne fait pas le poids” (“Nausea has no weight”). I felt I had been knifed in the back. How could he say that, this man who had made us believe that writing was a form of action, that words were acts, that writing influenced history? Now it turned out that literature was just a luxury that could only be allowed in countries that had achieved socialism. At that time I began to read Camus again and to agree with him, realizing that he had been right in his famous polemic with Sartre over the Soviet concentration camps. His idea that assassinations and terror began when morality became divorced from politics was as plain as could be. I later charted this evolution in my thinking in a short book that brought together articles on both writers that I had written in the sixties: Entre Sartre y Camus (Between Sartre and Camus).1

  My break with Cuba, and, to some extent with socialism, came as a result of the then very famous (though now almost no one remembers it) Padilla affair. The poet Heberto Padilla, an active participant in the Cuban Revolution—he became vice minister of Foreign Trade—began to make some criticism of the cultural politics of the regime in 1970. He was first virulently attacked by the official press and then jailed, with the absurd accusation that he was a CIA agent. Indignant at this news, five friends who knew him—Juan and Luis Goytisolo, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Josep María Castellet, and I—drafted a letter of protest in my apartment in Barcelona, which was signed by many writers throughout the world, including Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Alberto Moravia, and Carlos Fuentes, all protesting this outrage. Fidel Castro replied in person, accusing us of serving imperialism and stating that we would not step on Cuban soil again for “an indefinite and infinite period of time” (that is, for all eternity).

  Despite the campaign of abuse that I received as a result of this manifesto, it lifted a great weight from me; I would now no longer have to feign an adherence that I did not feel to what was happening in Cuba. However, it took me a few years to break with socialism and reassess the meaning of democracy. It was a period of uncertainty and reappraisal during which I slowly began to understand that the “formal freedoms” of so-called bourgeois democracy were not a mere appearance that covered up the exploitation of the poor by the rich, but rather the boundary between human rights, freedom of expression, and political diversity and an authoritarian and repressive system in which, in the name of the one truth represented by the Communist Party and its leaders, all forms of criticism could be silenced, dogmatic orders could be imposed, and dissidents could be buried in concentration camps or even “disappeared.” With all its imperfections, which were many, democracy at least replaced arbitrary action with laws and allowed free elections and independent parties and unions.

  Opting for liberalism was above all an intellectual process that took a number of years. I was greatly helped by living in Britain at the time, teaching at the University of London in the late sixties and, later, witnessing firsthand the eleven years of the government of Margaret Thatcher. She belonged to the Conservative Party but she was guided as a politician by convictions and above all, an instinct, that were profoundly liberal; she was very similar to Ronald Reagan in this respect. When she assumed office in 1979, Britain was a country in decline, where Labour (and also Tory) reforms had been running out of steam, mired in increasingly statist and collectivist routines, although public freedoms, elections, and freedom of expression were all respected. But the state had grown everywhere with the nationalization of industries and with policies, such as in housing, for example, that made citizens ever more dependent on state benefits. Democratic socialism had made the country of the industrial revolution lethargic, as it now languished in monotonous mediocrity.

  The government of Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) was a revolution, conducted within strict legal boundaries. State enterprises were privatized and British companies stopped receiving subsidies and were forced to modernize and compete in a free market, while council houses, which governments up until then had rented out to people with low incomes—thus maintaining electoral clientelism—were sold to their tenants, in line with a policy that sought to turn Britain into a country of property owners. Its borders were opened to international competition while obsolete industries, such as coal, were closed down to allow for the renovation and modernization of the country.

  All these economic reforms, of course, led to strikes and social mobilization, like the miners’ strike that lasted two years, during which Margaret Thatcher showed a courage and a conviction that Britain had not seen since the days of Winston Churchill. These reforms, which, in a few years, made the country the most dynamic society in Europe, were accompanied by a defense of democratic culture, and an affirmation of the moral and material superiority of liberal democracy over authoritarian, corrupt, and economically bankrupt socialism that resonated across the world. These policies coincided with those being implemented in the United States under president Ronald Reagan. At last there were leaders at the head of Western democracies who had no inferiority complex with regard to communism, who highlighted achievements in human rights, equal opportunities, and respect for individuals and their ideas, in contrast to the despotism and economic failure of the communist countries. While Ronald Reagan was an extraordinary disseminator of liberal theories that he doubtless understood in a rather general way, Mrs. Thatcher was more precise and ideological. She has no qualms about saying that she consulted Friedrich von Hayek and that she read Karl Popper, whom she considered to be the most important contemporary philosopher of freedom. I read both men in those years and from that time The Road to Serfdom and The Open Society and Its Enemies became fundamental texts for me.

  Although on economic and political issues Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had an unequivocally liberal outlook, on many social and moral issues they defended conservative and even reactionary positions—neither of them would have accepted gay marriage, abortion, the legalization of drugs or euthanasia, which seemed to me to be legitimate and necessary reforms—and on these matters, of course, I disagreed with them. But taking everything into account, I am convinced that both made a great contribution to the culture of freedom. And in any event, they helped me to become a liberal.

  I had the good fortune, through my old friend the historian Hugh Thomas, to meet Mrs. Thatcher in person. Thomas was an adviser to the British government on Spanish and Latin American affairs and he organized a dinner of intellectuals in his house in Ladbroke Grove to pit Mrs. Thatcher against the tigers. (The left, was, of course, the most vehement enemy of the Thatcher revolution.) She was seated next to Isaiah Berlin, whom she spoke to the entire evening with the utmost respect. Also present were the novelists V. S. Naipaul and Anthony Powell; the poets Al Alvarez, Stephen Spender, and Philip Larkin; the critic and short story writer V. S. Pritchett; the playwright Tom Stoppard; the historian J. H. Plumb, from Cambridge; Anthony Quinton, the president of Trinity College, Oxford; and someone else whose name escapes me. She asked me where I lived and when I replied Montpelier Walk she reminded me that I was a neighbor of Arthur Koestler, whom she had clearly read. The conversation was a test that the intellectuals set the prime minister. The delicacy and good form of British courtesy scarcely disguised deep-seated aggression. The host, Hugh Thomas, opened fire by asking Mrs. Thatcher if the opinion of historians interested her and helped her in any way when it came to government concerns. She answered the questions clearly, without being intimidated or putting on airs, with conviction for the most part, but, at times, expressing her doubts. At the end of the dinner, after she had left, Isaiah Berlin summed up very well, I think, the opinion of most of those present: “Nothing to be ashamed of.” And yes, I thought, quite a bit to be proud of to have a leader with such mettle, culture, and convictions. Margaret Thatcher was going to travel to Berlin in the coming days, where she would visit for the first time the wall of shame erected by the Soviets to stop the increasing number of citizens fleeing from East Germany to West Germany. There she would deliver one of her most important speeches against authoritarianism and in defense of democracy.