In February 1995, Maurice Halperin, one of the grandotes of the World War II generation of Latin Americanists, died in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the age of 89. The first half of his remarkable life was a triumphal celebration of the American Dream, the second half a Cold War odyssey: flight, wandering, disillusion, and final refuge in Canada.
Born in Boston in 1906 of an immigrant family from the Eastern European shtetl, Maurice attended Boston Latin High School, Harvard University, and the Sorbonne, at which he became docteur ès lettres in French literature in 1931. In that Depression year he joined the faculty of the University of Oklahoma, and he remained in Norman through the following decade. There his scholarly interests shifted to Latin American subjects, above all, politics; his commentaries began to reach a national audience in such journals as Current History and Foreign Affairs.
William Langer recruited him into William Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services; soon he headed the Latin American section. The position was less lofty than it sounded, for the FBI had preempted Western Hemisphere intelligence operations, and the OSS could not openly run agents in Latin America. Nevertheless, the Latin American section’s Research and Analysis reports were widely circulated in wartime Washington, and they presumably influenced Maurice’s many contacts there—contacts that included many eminent Latinos and most of the academic Latin Americanists mobilized by the war effort. When the OSS was disbanded at war’s end, Halperin worked at the new United Nations as a lobbyist for the emerging State of Israel. He then moved on to Boston University, where by the early 1950s he had created a well-respected Center for Latin American Studies. But in 1953 his life underwent a tumultuous reversal.
He took to the grave the secrets of his involvement with Communism. We know that in the 1930s, while at Oklahoma, he had contact with Mexican and Cuban leftists; in 1939 and 1940 he fell afoul of local anti-Communists and was dismissed from the university (then as now, academic freedom existed only so long as it was not exercised). At the OSS his reporting on Latin America aroused the suspicions of the young Arthur J. Schlesinger, Jr.; in 1945 he figured in Elizabeth Bentley’s revelations to the FBI concerning Soviet spying in the U.S. capital. Finally, in 1953, he was twice summoned to appear before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (the “Jenner Committee”). Although he enjoyed the support of his BU colleagues, he and his wife, Edith, chose to move to Mexico before his second appearance. Convinced of the implacable enmity of J. Edgar Hoover (no delusion: the latter’s persecution of Halperin’s son, David, is another sorry episode in Hoover’s career), they never again resided in the United States. Threatened by deportation from Mexico in 1958, they moved to the Soviet Union, where Maurice worked in the Latin American section of the Academy of Sciences (he regarded it, and most things Soviet, with dismay). A chance meeting in Moscow with Che Guevara in i960 brought them to Cuba in 1962. Disappointed in time with Cuban socialism also, in 1968 they made their final move, to Canada.
There, at Simon Fraser University in the Vancouver area, he taught political science and wrote three books on Castro’s Cuba: The Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro (1972), The Taming of Fidel Castro (1981), and Return to Havana: The Decline of Cuban Society Under Castro (1994). The books are sharply observed (his account of Castro’s mistreatment of the anthropologist Oscar Lewis is paradigmatic); they reflect clearly Maurice’s disillusionment with Communism and his increasingly rigid conservatism. Numerous colleagues, fascinated by his career, urged him to write his memoirs. Instead, depressed by the death of Edith, who had supported him staunchly during their long hegira, he submitted to hours of taped interviews with historian Don S. Kirschner. The upshot was Cold War Exile: The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin, published (by the University of Missouri Press) the week of Maurice’s death. Kirschner’s analysis is judicious and his conclusions are unequivocal, but if there was anything to confess, Halperin did not do so; perhaps the final truth lies in as-yet-unopened KGB and CIA archives. To the end he remained a fine raconteur, busy scholar, always-surprising fount of historical information, and unexcelled colleague. And enigma.
