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Rev. Bras. Polít. Int., 63(1): e004, 2020 Caterina – especially during Gagarin’s visit to Brazil in July 1961. We argue that his trip illustrated a change of perception by important Brazilian political actors (both civil and military) about the USSR. Therefore, the object of this article is to assess Brazilian elites’ reactions to the cosmonaut’s visit and their relationship with the Cold War domestic debate.

The literature on this topic is, unfortunately, very limited. J. Gregory Oswald (Oswald and Strover 1970), Gouré and Rothenberg (1975), Miller (1989), Blasier (1989) and Mujal-León (1989) were predominantly concerned with geopolitical, economic, and strategic factors in addressing interactions between the USSR and Latin America. This literature examines trade, Cuba/USSR relations, and contacts between communist parties in the region and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

Rupprecht (2015), however, emphasizes Soviet cultural diplomacy in Latin America and analyses the interactions between the USSR and the region’s countries after Stalin’s death in 1953. Under Khrushchev’s new leadership, a significant shift in Soviet foreign policy occurred. In 1956, the new secretary general announced that the USSR was seeking peaceful coexistence with the capitalist powers and voiced its support for the decolonization process taking place in Africa and Asia, as well as national liberation movements, including those in Latin America.

These developments indicated an opportunity for the Soviet Union to increase its influence in Brazil. By changing its self-representation abroad, the USSR changed the perception that the political elites of Third World countries – including Brazil – had of the socialist superpower and its foreign policy. This change altered the terms of the Cold War in the Brazilian domestic debate. The socialist superpower would diminish its official party rhetoric and concentrate its efforts on the diffusion of technological achievements and scientific advances. According to Rupprecht (2015), the space program would thus become “probably the single most successful element of Soviet self-representation abroad” (Rupprecht 2015, 42). The fear of Soviet communism as an ideology in Brazil would be balanced with a fascination by Soviet modernity.

This article intends to bridge the gap between recent literature that deals with Soviet cultural diplomacy and assessments on Brazil-USSR relations focused on geopolitical, economic, and strategic factors like those published in the late 1980s in a Cold War context. We argue that there is a missing link between Soviet cultural diplomacy and modernization efforts in Brazil, which had a lasting impact on bilateral relations.

The attraction of Soviet modernization would generate expectations for economic cooperation within the Brazilian government – especially in the energy field – that would prove unfulfilled in 1963/1964. These high expectations were some of the factors that impelled President João Goulart to threaten the U.S. government with the strengthening of relations between Brazil and the USSR in November 1962. As analysed by Loureiro (2017b), this threat met a blunt response from Washington, which contributed significantly to the collapse of the Three-Year Plan and eventually led to the civil-military coup in 1964. Gagarin in Brazil: reassessing the terms of the Cold War domestic political debate in 1961 2