Serafino Romualdi’s rambling autobiography, which emphasizes his career as organized labor’s Latin American representative from 1946 to 1961, suffers a good deal from diffuseness and lack of point. During three decades as an AFL (and later CIO) official, he evidently lost some of his ability to distinguish between significant occurrences and pseudo-events. Thus drab telegrams from George Meany, stale resolutions by ad hoc committees, and meaningless meetings with long lists of those who attended are printed in full and described in detail.
Romualdi’s Italian birth and long association with Latin Americans gave him a taste for rhetoric: we are told about the “visible rapture” of workers at a union meeting, about audiences “gripped with enthusiasm” by a lackluster speech, about a routine assembly as a “truly historical event.” We learn that in Santo Domingo, on April 13, 1965, the author received at the hand of Donald Reid Cabral, “the decoration of the Order of Duarte, Sánchez y Mella, with the grade of Knight Commander”—but nothing about how he earned the decoration, or about American labor’s role in helping to suppress the uprising that began nine days later. The whole atmosphere of the book, full of resolutions, wire-pulling, speeches, banquets, and inter-office squabbles, is far removed from the reality of life and labor in Latin America. Even the illustrations, standard publicity shots of official luncheons and receptions, are poorly chosen and tired.
As the AFL’s leading Latin American adviser for fifteen years, and as a founder and first executive director of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) from 1962 to 1965, Romualdi did play a part in real events. In a guileless way he provides evidence that supports many charges made against him as an agent of American business and government policy. Repeatedly and with pride he reveals the extent of his interference in the internal political affairs of other countries: telling Rómulo Betancourt to kick the Communists out of the Venezuelan labor movement; supporting Eusebio Mujal, General Secretary of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) and an apologist for the Batista dictatorship; backing the successful CIA intervention in Guatemala in 1954; telling President Julio Lozano of Honduras about his “grievous mistakes”; paying dues and hall rental for Christian Democratic trade unions in Chile; contributing $100 to a union in El Salvador and arranging millions of dollars of U.S. government loans to others; etc. Brushing aside his critics as misguided or “Castroite,” Romualdi takes credit for helping to oust Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana and bringing down the João Goulart regime in Brazil.
Because his anti-Communism was so visceral and instinctive, because he was so completely committed to American capitalism, because he could so happily combine self-interest and government interest, Romualdi served his employers well. (85% of the AIFLD budget, he tells us, came from the government, and the rest in equal amounts from George Meany and from Big Business. J. Peter Grace of Grace & Co., Charles Brinckerhoff of Anaconda, Juan Trippe of Pan American Airlines, and a representative of the Rockefeller interests sat on the Board of Directors.)
While students of Latin American affairs might have welcomed still more candor, for example about the precise nature of the ties between the labor movement and Central Intelligence Agency, Romualdi’s book is revealing enough. He, Meany, Jay Lovestone, and Joseph Beirne of the Communications Workers cooperated with their allies in the State Department and AID to maintain the status quo in Latin America, to keep organized labor from turning Communist or fidelista or otherwise anti-capitalist, and to extend American influence. So far, they have been remarkably successful; after more than nine years Castro’s regime remains isolated, the only Communist state in the hemisphere. It remains to be seen if Romualdi’s simple-minded kind of anti-Communism, backed by American wealth and military power, can indefinitely contain the forces for change actively at work in so many Latin American nations.