• 1 Fernández Joaquín, “Nacionalismo y Marxismo En El Partido Socialista Popular (1948-1957),” [Marxism (...)
• 2 Waiss Oscar, Amanecer en Belgrado [Dawn in Belgrade], Santiago de Chile, Prensa Latinoamericana, 19 (...)

2In Latin America, one of Belgrade’s most important partners was the Chilean Popular Socialist Party (Partido socialista popular, PSP). In the 1950s, Chile became one of the footholds of Yugoslav activities in Latin America: the country was systematically included in Yugoslav tours in the continent, a Yugoslav-Chilean cultural center was active in Santiago, and the PSP regularly printed and distributed many editions in Spanish of Yugoslav authors such as Edvard Kardelj and Boris Ziherl.1 Relations between the PSP and the Yugoslav regime gave way to regular visits by Chilean socialists to Yugoslav soil, with party leaders Raúl Ampuero, Salomon Corbalán and Salvador Allende visiting Yugoslavia during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet perhaps the most illuminating of these was the visit carried out by party intellectual Oscar Waiss and senator Aniceto Rodríguez in 1955. The experience was extensively described in Waiss’s 1956 book Amanecer en Belgrado [Dawn in Belgrade], which became one of the first and most exhaustive works about the Yugoslav socialist experience available in the Spanish language to Latin American readers. In the pages of the book, Waiss extolled the Yugoslav partisan struggle against fascism; he expressed his admiration for the Yugoslavs’ courage and independence vis-à-vis the USSR; and he articulated a strong defense of socialist self-management as a democratic socialist model.2

• 3 Cosovschi Agustín, “A Voice for the Yugoslavs in Latin America: Oscar Waiss and the Yugoslav-Chilea (...)

3As I have claimed elsewhere, Amanecer en Belgrado made of Waiss almost a speaker for the Yugoslavs in Latin America: his admiration for the Yugoslav model, as well as his respect for the Yugoslavs’ moral values, made him a perfect vehicle to convey a positive image of Yugoslav socialism to Latin American readers.3 Yet the book is not only remarkable for these overtly programmatic components, but also for its potent portrayal of Yugoslavia as a mesmerizing land of cultural, historical and topographical diversity; an unknown territory full of wonders and surprises, much captivating for a foreigner coming from across the ocean. In his book, Waiss devotes extensive passages to describing his experience of the cities, the towns and the natural landscape of the Balkans, and he repeatedly conveys the image of a multicultural Yugoslavia in which the diverse traditions of the kingdoms and empires of Southeast Europe coexist in peace and harmony under the umbrella of socialism. In other words, Amanecer en Belgrado is not only a work about the Yugoslav model, it is also a portrayal of the political, economic, social and cultural geography of socialist Yugoslavia.

• 4 Todorova Maria, Imagining the Balkans, New York, Oxford University Press, 2009 [1997]; Bakić-Hayden(...)
• 5 Bougarel Xavier, “Yugoslav Wars: The ‘Revenge of the Countryside’ between Sociological Reality and (...)
• 6 Allcock John B., “Rural-Urban Differences and the Break-up of Yugoslavia,” Balkanologie, vol. 6, n^o(...)
• 7 Le Normand Brigitte, Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade(...)

4Historical scholarship on Yugoslavia has given considerable attention to the problem of space. Several works have analyzed the political, social and cultural dynamics of space and its imagining in the Balkans. Drawing on Edward Said, works such as Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans and Milica Bakić-Hayden’s analysis of “nesting orientalisms” have shown the political and cultural uses of space in the region, showing among other things that ideas and images associated with the Balkans have often served to reinforce internal borders, spatial hierarchies and regional disparities in the Southeast European region.4 Moreover, tensions between the city and countryside have also been posited by many authors as a key dimension in the analysis of Yugoslav history,5 and the problem of regional and republican disparities has also been at the center of several works dealing with the crisis of Yugoslav socialism.6 More recently, the works of Igor Tchoukarine about the history of tourism and Brigitte Le Normand’s research on the history of housing and urban policies have also attended to the dimension of space, and especially to its political and social construction through different policies emanating from the Yugoslav communist regime.7

• 8 Ethington Philip J., “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History,” Rethinking H (...)

5In this article, drawing on some of these works and inspired by what authors have called “the spatial turn” in humanities and social sciences,8 I analyze the book Amanecer en Belgrado primarily from the perspective of spatiality. I read it as an instrument of spatial imagining and use it to shed light on the political, economic, social and cultural construction of space in socialist Yugoslavia. I examine Waiss’s portrayal of Yugoslav geography and I interpret these perceptions against the background of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s. Moreover, in order to enhance my interpretation of Waiss’s visit, I draw on a number of tools for digital mapping to visualize his itinerary in the country. This allows me not only to give a concrete picture of his journey, but also to analyze it against the background of other phenomena such as the distribution of mass tourism, existing natural and economic differences among Yugoslav regions, and to compare it with the itineraries of other Chilean socialist travelers who came to Yugoslavia in later years. Thus, visualizations allow me to raise new questions concerning Waiss’s experience of Yugoslavia’s geography, and more generally about the communist regime’s use of space as a political and ideological tool.

• 9 Jakovina Tvrtko, Američki komunistički saveznik: Hrvati, Titova Jugoslavija i Sjedinjene Američke D (...)
• 10 Jakovina Tvrtko, Treća Strana Hladnog Rata [The Third Side of the Cold War], Zagreb, Fraktura, 2011 (...)
• 11 Pajović Slobodan, “La emigración yugoslava a América latina,” [The Yugoslav Emigration to Latin Ame (...)

7After the split with the USSR in June 1948, and facing not only economic isolation but also the immediate threat of a Soviet invasion, socialist Yugoslavia set out to develop an autonomous foreign policy mainly with the aim of securing political, economic and military assistance from Western powers, and particularly from the United States.9 In parallel, Belgrade started to develop its first systematic contacts with recently decolonized Asian and African nations on the basis of a neutral position in international affairs, thus setting the grounds for an international network of alliances that would later lead to the creation of the Non Aligned Movement in 1961.10 Yugoslavia’s policy of establishing wider and stronger connections with governments and progressive movements in the non-European world also reached Latin America, a region of special interest not only because of its economic potential, but also due to the presence of a large Yugoslav diaspora.11

• 12 Casals Araya Marcelo, El alba de una revolución. La izquierda y el proceso de construcción estratég (...)

8The Southern Cone was one of the regions where Belgrade invested great effort. Yet, in spite of Argentina’s economic prevalence and the importance of Buenos Aires as a regional center notwithstanding, it was Chile that rapidly became the main focus of Yugoslav activity, mostly due to the very fruitful relations that were established with the Popular Socialist Party (PSP) in the early 1950s. In many ways, Chilean socialists constituted almost an ideal partner for the Yugoslavs. With a history of active institutional participation in government and a fairly good electoral record, the party entered the 1950s in a political crisis following internal divisions. As a result of such crisis, the PSP began a process of ideological transformation and radicalization: under the leadership of Raúl Ampuero and under the intellectual influence of people like Oscar Waiss and Eugenio González, the party moved toward the adoption of anti-imperialist and nationalist positions and early forms of “Third-Worldism,” including strong expressions of solidarity toward movements of national liberation in Asia and Africa and a growing interest in Yugoslav socialism.12

• 13 “Šifrovano pismo,” 27 August 1951, Archive of Yugoslavia, Fond 507, “Chile,” IX, 21/III-1.
• 14 Cosovschi, “A Voice for the Yugoslavs in Latin America”, art. cit.; Cosovschi, “Searching for Allie (...)

9As a result, when the Yugoslavs started to invest growing efforts into building a network of allies in Latin America in the early 1950s, the context was ripe for the development of a strong friendship with the Chilean socialists. According to Yugoslav archival sources, the first contacts between the Yugoslav regime and the PSP took place in August 1951 at the Yugoslav delegation in Santiago and due to the Chileans’ initiative.13 In following years, relations between Belgrade and the Chileans developed apace, giving way to numerous mutual visits on both sides of the Atlantic and to a constant and fruitful political dialogue. Contacts were mostly channeled by the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia (Socijalistički savez radnog naroda Jugoslavije, SSRNJ), an umbrella organization of the communist regime that gathered sociopolitical organizations in the country, and which was also responsible for establishing links with progressive forces abroad. Veljko Vlahović, the President of the Commission for International Relations of the SSRNJ, played a key role in the development of these relations: his experience as a freedom fighter in Spain, his personal charisma, and his understanding of political diplomacy rendered him an ideal agent in the knitting of such bonds.14

• 15 See his interview for the Yugoslav weekly Borba in 1953: “Živo pratimo iskustva Jugoslavie” [We liv (...)

10On the Chilean side, several leading figures of the socialist party actively promoted relations with the Yugoslavs, with party leader Raúl Ampuero often expressing his admiration for socialist Yugoslavia, condemning Soviet pressures, and supporting his party’s rapprochement with Belgrade.15 Moreover, one of the key agents in the development of these connections was party intellectual Oscar Waiss. A Marxist thinker of Jewish background and earlier Trotskyite leaning, trained as a lawyer and a journalist, Waiss was a critic of the Soviet brand of centralized socialism and a detractor of Soviet foreign policy. Sensitive towards Latin American forms of popular nationalism and wary of all that reeked of bureaucratism, Waiss was particularly sensitive to Yugoslav ideas of neutralism and workers’ self-management. Thus, when the time came for the Chileans to visit Yugoslavia for the first time, it was decided that Waiss would be one of the members of the delegation.

• 16 Waiss, Amanecer en Belgrado, op. cit., p. 5.
• 17 Zourek Michal, “Los viajes de los intelectuales latinoamericanos a Europa Oriental 1947-1956: organ (...)
• 18 Cosovschi Agustín, “A Voice for the Yugoslavs in Latin America”, art. cit.; Cosovschi, “Searching f (...)

11In 1955, following an official invitation from Belgrade, Oscar Waiss took a plane in Santiago together with socialist senator Aniceto Rodriguez, to “peregrinate to the unknown land of Marshall Tito.”16 His experience during the month-long sojourn in Yugoslavia is told meticulously in the book Amanecer en Belgrado, published in 1956 by the PSP’s publishing house, Prensa Latinoamericana. Waiss’s book is certainly not one of a kind: as analyzed by authors such as Michal Zourek, tours and visits sponsored by Eastern European states played a key role in the diffusion of communist ideas among Latin American intellectuals, and this “revolutionary tourism” resulted in numerous testimonies that reflected the changing perceptions of Eastern European socialism in the eyes of Latin American visitors.17 Waiss’s book is part of this larger trend and, as I have claimed elsewhere, it constitutes a rich testimony of the appeal that the Yugoslav socialist model had on Latin American left-wing intellectuals who sought an alternative to Moscow in the context of the Cold War.18 Yet Amanecer en Belgrado not only attests to Yugoslavia’s sway on account of its political and economic feats, but also to the fascination that the country elicited through its rich and diverse cultural and physical landscape, and it shows the powerful influence of the multicultural image that Yugoslavia fashioned for itself in the eyes of foreigners.

• 19 Waiss, Amanecer en Belgrado, op. cit., p. 13.

12Waiss’s account is extremely thorough and rich in its descriptions of the Yugoslav cultural and physical landscape, bringing the reader right to the ground of 1950s Yugoslavia. From the very beginning, the author sets for himself the mission to understand and “know” Yugoslavia through this journey, although he admits the difficulties of such a task. “Knowing a country,” he claims, “is, to a certain extent, like knowing a person. There are qualities and flaws that come out immediately. Later one begins to dig deeper and gets to understand the whole in its entirety.”19 According to the author, he and his comrade travelled across Yugoslavia visiting numerous locations in most of the republics and in diverse regions, going through cities and towns, visiting the mountains and the seaside, and stopping by agricultural cooperatives and foundries. The destinations mentioned and described in the book are indicated in Figure 1:

• 20 Ibid., p. 14.
• 21 Ibid., p. 63.
• 22 Ibid., p. 93.
• 23 Ibid., p. 116.

13In these pages, Waiss describes every city and every region with much detail, underlining their particularities, giving useful information on their history and creating a particular identity for every place visited. In his words, Belgrade is characterized as a site of officialdom, a place for meetings and discussions, a city “with a feeling of coldness” and with buildings that are often “uncommunicative without expression” and with “monotonous commerce.”20 Conversely, Maribor in Slovenia is portrayed as “a typical Austrian city, with streetlights that drop their bulbs in bunches and hundreds of bikers in the streets,” and the author takes the time to describe the Velika Kavarna, a coffee house with “wide, comfortable and antique with cream-colored walls, angled tables with red seats and big lamps on the ceiling and hanging from the walls,” and with “a wide room of Renaissance style, with yellow panels and cream-colored curtains.”21 Conversely, the town of Bor in Eastern Serbia is characterized with the typical appearance of mining towns, with narrow streets the endings of which get lost between the mountains, and men wearing sweaters and helmets marching with the calculated slowness of those who come back or go to the Earth’s insides,”22 while the small town of Trogir near Split in Dalmatia is described as an antique site, “with narrow streets that still have a typical aspect from the Middle Ages.”23

• 24 Ibid., p. 25-26.

14With each of these descriptions, Waiss gradually creates the image of a Yugoslavia that is made of multiple and converging pasts. Moreover, he repeatedly underlines the importance of geography and he stresses that history has left traces in the landscape, not least because the communists themselves have made systematic effort to leave materials traces of past struggles. The space, he claims, is imprinted by history all around: “in a bridge, a plaque in the memory of the executed; in the corner of any road, a monument to those who fell there; in the factories, tributes to those who gave their lives.”24 Space is thus seen as a materialization of history, and nowhere is this clearer than in the passages where he describes Sarajevo, a city that Waiss sees as a civilizational crossroads and a graveyard of fallen empires:

• 27 Ibid., p. 103.
• 28 In order to visualize the way in which each site of his tour becomes entangled with a unique experi (...)

16Still, the diversity that Waiss notes in Yugoslavia is remarkable because it composes for him a colorful, yet harmonious mosaic. Waiss conveys an image of Yugoslavia as a fascinating land where diverse histories, cultures and landscapes have been brought together and coexist peacefully thanks to the amalgamating action of the antifascist struggle. The mosaic effect is reinforced by a telling detail: after describing their departure from Santiago and their successive stops in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Geneva, Waiss never gives the reader a sequential itinerary of his tour around Yugoslavia. The author presents all these experiences in Yugoslavia attending to a thematic angle and avoiding any reference to the order of the sites or to the general itinerary of the tour. He presents the particularities of each region and each local scenery, he delves into the history of each town, but never does he address interregional connections, nor does he describe the experience of travelling from one place to the other. At some point, ironically, he even claims to have a lack of awareness of space: “I get lost even in the symmetrical streets of the city where I was born,” he claims, “and when I travel, I never know in which direction my hotel is.”27 Waiss’s conception of space is somehow intangible and abstract, yet lively and strongly imprinted by historical sensitivity and an awareness of cultural difference. Thus, he conveys the image of Yugoslavia as a meeting space where history, or rather histories, materialize in the form of diverse social and physical landscapes and coexist unproblematically making up a fascinating mosaic.28

• 29 Cosovschi Agustín, “Between the Nation and Socialism in Yugoslavia. The Debate between Dobrica Ćosi (...)

18As attested by several scholars of Yugoslav cultural history, following the ideological transformations of the 1950s, the adoption of the principles of socialist self-management, and the implementation of republican decentralization, the communist regime increasingly renounced the amalgamating idea of Yugoslavism, and started instead to promote a multicultural concept for Yugoslavia.29 In the words of Andrew Wachtel:

• 31 Tchoukarine, “Un espace offert au tourisme”, art. cit.; Tchoukarine, “Playing the Tourism Card”, ar (...)

19This multicultural conception had an impact on the ideas that the country conveyed through its cultural and educational policies, but also on the image that it diffused through tourism, an activity that played a key role in Yugoslav economic life and which was also an important channel for the diffusion of Yugoslavia’s image abroad. As analyzed by Igor Tchoukarine, the 1950s were precisely the decade in which Yugoslavia’s foreign tourism witnessed a boom, with the country becoming a well-established world tourist destination. And in such a process, the image of Yugoslavia was fabricated as that of a multicultural land with a rich and multilayered historical and cultural heritage, with a diverse physical and social landscape and a rich mosaic of diverse traditions and national identities.31

• 32 Roglić Josip, “Prilog Regionalnoj Podjeli Jugoslavije,” [Contribution to a Regional Division of Yug (...)

22Finally, it is worth underlining that Waiss’s journey also sheds light on certain problems and gaps in the harmonious image that socialist Yugoslavia fashioned for itself. The distribution of his destinations clearly shows a tendency to privilege areas in what has traditionally been termed the “peripheral belt” (rubni pojas) in Yugoslavia, that is the band that surrounded the country and followed its borders with neighboring countries and with the sea, and which held the main political, economic and cultural centers of the country. This region stands in contrast with what has traditionally been called the “mountainous core” (planinska jezgra), a zone of key historical importance because it often served as refuge in face of external invasions, but of minor economic importance and in general terms, considerably less urbanized and less developed than the belt. Figure 3 shows Waiss’s stops against a map of regions elaborated by Yugoslav geographer Josip Roglić in 1954,32 the year before the Chileans’ visit:

• 33 Allcock, “Rural-Urban Differences and the Break-up of Yugoslavia”, art. cit.; Pleština, Regional De (...)

23The exclusion of regions such as Central Croatia, the Sandžak, Southern Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and all of Bosnia with the exception of the charming Sarajevo, shows that as a general rule, less economically developed regions and areas were left out of Waiss’s itinerary. Although we do not dispose of sufficient elements to examine the nature and meaning of these omissions in Waiss’s account, considering the heavy regional inequality that characterized the Yugoslav federation,33 this omission suggests the possibility that in circuits of “revolutionary tourism,” certain areas were excluded in order to avoid weakening the picture of Yugoslavia as a successful experiment in economic and social modernization. This idea is reinforced when we examine Waiss’s journey next to the itineraries of other Chilean socialist travelers who came in later years, namely party leaders Raúl Ampuero and Salomón Corbalán, that I have reconstituted here on the basis of Yugoslav archival sources. The following map shows that Waiss’s journey was not at all exceptional and that other travelers in the 1950s were taken to the same or similar sites, with itineraries that often favored touristic areas, and which mostly circumvented regions that could potentially challenge the official narratives of Yugoslav success.