Born in 1912 in a proletarian neighbourhood of Buenos Aires as the son of Italian immigrants, Homero Cristalli was not so different from many other children of working-class families in early twentieth-century Argentina. He went on, however, to live a quite extraordinary life, which included playing football in the country's first division, participating in massive strikes as a trade union organizer, setting up the first Latin American sections of the Trotskyist Fourth International, and becoming the leader of a sect-like international network of political groups named after him and known for their interest in ufology and obsession with nuclear apocalypse. He ended his life in a communal house on the outskirts of Rome, surrounded by a court of followers and devising means to communicate with dolphins in order to educate his newborn daughter.
No doubt such a story deserves to be told, and it is actually quite surprising that nobody had done it before A.M. Gittlitz, an American journalist who undertakes this endeavour in a book recently published by Pluto Press. I Want to Believe is a fine work that will interest activists, academic historians of the left, and the general public alike, as the author skilfully manages to provide background to historical developments and avoids obscure jargon. Drawing upon a variety of sources, including secondary literature, party publications, obscure blog posts, personal interviews, and archives located in institutions throughout the world, Gittlitz provides the reader with a political biography of both Homero Cristalli and “J. Posadas”, the name coined as a collective signature for texts written by several members of his group that ended up becoming Cristalli's alias and the brand of his very own branch of the Fourth International. Telling the story of both the man and the movement, I Want to Believe becomes a worth-reading exercise in political biography and social history. It also represents an important addition to the growing field of labour historiography in Argentina, although the book includes a regrettably large number of typos when it provides quotes, names, and titles in Spanish.
Cristalli became acquainted with the early Trotskyist groups in the late 1930s, when he was active in the Socialist Party's left. Welcomed as one of the few sympathizers of working-class origin in a tiny movement dominated by intellectuals, his participation in a major strike in the province of Córdoba, in 1937, further contributed to his popularity. In the years that followed, Cristalli became the main organizer of the Grupo Cuarta Internacional (GCI), and made an effort to achieve recognition from the leadership of the Fourth International in Europe. He succeeded in 1951, when the Third World Congress recognized the GCI as the official section in Argentina and the Latin American Bureau (BLA), led by himself, as the main authority in the continent. Cristalli further aligned himself with Michel Pablo when the International split in 1953, and for the rest of that decade the BLA and its parties remained the stronghold of Pabloism in Latin America. In the early 1960s, when Pablo was incarcerated and the leaders of the International sought to reunify the groups that had split in the previous decade, Cristalli moved forward and broke with them. In April 1962, he organized a world congress and established his own Fourth International – Posadist.
The book goes on to explore the development of Posadist groups throughout Latin America, focusing on the cases of Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and Guatemala. Although they remained small and fairly isolated, the Posadists did gain some influence, to the point that Fidel Castro himself attacked Posadas in a famous speech at the Tricontinental Congress of January 1966. Gittlitz's account shows, however, that the group was increasingly assuming the features of a sect. Their behaviour had to follow a code of “revolutionary morality”, which prohibited the use of drugs and alcohol and insisted that non-procreative sex was a taboo – even in the case of married couples, the decision to have children had to be approved by the party. Abortion was strictly forbidden, and homosexuality was considered a capitalist degeneracy and banned completely. The personal authority of Cristalli became a sort of cult: “¡Viva Posadas!” became a mandatory phrase after each of his speeches.
Still, Gittlitz points out that “Posadism was so similar to most other Trotskyist groups […] as his cult-of-personality, abuse of militants, rabid anti-imperialism, paranoia, extreme zigzagging, and catastrophism were features more or less present in nearly every other tendency” (p. 110). Things would change, however, by the mid-1960s, when Posadists embraced the question of ufology. Avoiding caricatures and mockery, Gittlitz dives into these developments and argues, quoting a former militant, that Cristalli was not interested in turning the movement into an UFO cult, but rather made a speech at the 1967 congress to close the issue that one of his acolytes, Dante Minazolli, had been pushing with so much insistence. Whatever his intentions, however, the speech was published a year later (in the spring of 1968!) under the title “Flying Saucers, The Process of Matter and Energy, Science, The Revolutionary and Working-Class Struggle and the Socialist Future of Mankind”, becoming the most famous Posadas text in its history.
1968 was also a turning point in the history of the group because the police imprisoned the whole leadership of the Posadist International, including Cristalli, during a meeting on the outskirts of Montevideo. After several attempts to be deported to Chile or Argentina, Posadas and his circle finally found asylum in Italy, thanks to the intervention of the Italian Communist Party. Cristalli spent the rest of his life in Europe: drawing upon testimonies of former militants, Gittlitz explains that he managed to raise enough money “to establish his own Coyoacán-style compound in the volcanic Alban Hills south of the city”, with his old guard living in a separate communal compound in Rome (p. 127). By the mid-1970s, Gittlitz argues, Posadism had become “an experiment in living communism in their microcosmic Villa” (p. 147).
After Cristalli's death, in May 1981, his movement gradually dissipated. A number of sections remained active, and they eventually found a new leader in Posadas's son, León Cristalli. An important part of this late “court” remained loyal to Posadism clandestine tradition in the years following Cristalli's death, and refused to be interviewed by Gittlitz in the preparation of the book. Nowadays, the current is almost non-existent, apart from some obscure websites and publications. In political terms, they are openly supportive of nationalist regimes, Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba – and even Donald Trump, whose victory in 2016 was seen as a “working-class revolt against a traditional imperialist oligarchy” (p. 164).
Homero Cristalli belonged to the first generation of Trotskyists that led the movement after Trotsky's assassination. Like Pierre Frank (born in 1905), Michael Pablo (1911), and Ted Grant (1913), he was somewhat older than the generation born in the 1920s, which included Pierre Lambert, Guillermo Lora, Ernest Mandel, Livio Maitan, and Nahuel Moreno. Cristalli stood out for some peculiar features of his biography: he started working at a young age, first as a metalworker and later as a painter, and never pursued formal education. A flamboyant and attractive personality, he developed both a talent for singing tangos and for playing football, even reaching the country's first division, playing for Estudiantes de la Plata in 1928 and 1929.
In paying attention to these aspects of the life of Cristalli, Gittlitz provides important insights to understand the history of Trotskyism, a tireless movement of devoted militants that, in most cases, had to struggle with sect-like behaviours and a painful isolation from the mass of workers. The author points out that Cristalli's working-class background, as well as his character and his football skills – both tango and football would become some sort of ritual among Posadist ranks – had a long-lasting influence in the years to come and help explain much of his appeal. “The mystique of Posadas, the International's leaders soon found, was their best recruitment tool. […] He was a soccer star and manual worker, tragically sidelined by industrial disfigurement and forced to a life of full-time militancy.” (p. 80) These traits of his biography and his personality also help explain how he managed to attract some of its most important cadres, such as Adolfo Gilly and Guillermo Almeyra. Gittlitz argues that, for them, “the strangeness of Posadas was worth his working-class intuition, motivational ability, tireless organizing, and absorption of his intellectuals’ positions” (p. 138).
The author also makes a significant contribution by locating Posadas's eccentricity in the broader context of the 1950s and 1960s, when both the possibility of nuclear apocalypse and interest in ufology and the space race were actually widespread. Gittlitz rightly points out that the peak of Posadas's political influence “overlapped with the more ardent period of the space race” (p. 10).
Both in the introduction and in the conclusion of his book, Gittlitz – whose first name, as with J. Posadas, remains a completely mystery to the reader – seems to suggest that there is something more than irony in the recent reappraisal of Posadism through memes and jokes, namely the appeal of apocalyptical perspectives in a time of crisis and climate catastrophe. Even if one is not willing to go that far, it is worth celebrating the idea that prompted the author to write a useful book that sheds light on the history of revolutionary ideas and movements in the twentieth century.
