The pharmacon of information: Fantasies of the Cold War and the Cuban Revolution (1959)

Abstract

In this work, I analyze how various actors, including revolutionaries and journalists of the Americas and members of the US diplomatic service, typified the connection between information, politics, and emotions within the context of the Cuban Revolution, through a series of keywords such as propaganda and brainwashing, among others. These keywords make even more sense within the context of a conflict like the bipolar one, associated with a "psychological" one. I argue that they constitute evidence of a scientific culture that revisited the old nineteenth-century paradigm of "hypnosis-suggestion," intertwined with communication theories and analyses of politics and mass communication—where international news agencies take on a central role—regarding social order/disorder. Each piece of that political analysis contains, in its own way, a breviary of fantasies that fueled it while also being operative in the ideological-political dispute.