In the search for a Cuban road to socialism, those advocating a gradualist and pragmatic approach clashed with Che Guevara and his supporters, who called for a radical and voluntarist development strategy. While criticized by Cuba’s Soviet and Eastern Bloc allies, Che’s radical economic ideas, which dominated Cuban policy by 1968, were shaped by North Korea’s example as well as its material support. North Korea appeared to show a tested path through which a small country emerging from colonialism and underdevelopment could transform rapidly into a modern, industrialized, socialist republic. The Cuban–North Korean ideological encounter reflected a broader discourse taking place within the international Left at the time reflecting disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the appeal of alternative models of socialism from the global South. As an ideological consensus between Cuba and North Korea solidified in the 1960s, the two governments became principal defenders of voluntarist economics within the socialist world, in resistance to the dominant trend towards “market socialism.” This partnership was given its most vibrant expression in the 1970 sugar harvest, Cuba’s pivotal experiment in voluntarist economics, in which North Korea participated directly.

By early 1965, new dynamics were taking shape within the international communist movement. Cuba and North Korea were at the forefront of this challenge. Relations between the two countries date back to the Korean War, when many Cubans, like young people across Latin America, mobilized to prevent their countries from joining the US-led war effort. When the Cuban Revolution of 1959 brought the island into the socialist camp, a bond began to grow between the Cuban and North Korean leaderships reflective of their shared history of anti-colonial struggle, and their common interests as small countries within a community of socialist states dominated by the Soviet Union and China. Political, cultural, and economic cooperation between Havana and Pyongyang grew steadily, including Che’s historic visit to North Korea in December 1960. By 1965, a nascent Third Worldist tendency affirming its independence from the two major socialist powers was coalescing around North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam. At its core was the conviction that it was those on the frontlines of the anti-imperialist struggle which most clearly recognized the true historic task at hand: the defeat of US imperialism.

Cuba’s shift to a more pragmatic and Soviet-aligned foreign policy in the early 1970s had major implications for its relationship with North Korea. Moreover, it influenced radical changes in North Korea’s own foreign policy. Pyongyang announced the “era of chajusŏng” (independence) and an apparent new faith in what could be achieved through peaceful diplomacy, multilateralism, and non-alignment. Key events influencing these shifts were the de-escalation of the Vietnam War, the defeat of the Latin American insurgencies of the 1960s, Nixon’s troop withdrawal from South Korea, Sino-US rapprochement, and the growing power of the Third World in the United Nations General Assembly. As both North Korea and Cuba adapted to a rapidly changing international environment in the early 1970s, the basis for their special partnership dissolved. Cuba and Vietnam moved closer to the Soviet Union, and North Korea reconciled with China, while repositioning itself as a member of the non-aligned Third World. The possibility that the militant Third Worldism of the Tricontinental Conference might grow and coalesce to constitute a real force in global politics appeared to fade away with the 1960s.

In 1966, more than 600 people from 82 countries travelled to Havana for the Tricontinental Conference. The unprecedented event defined a new, radical Third Worldist political tendency that reverberated throughout the international Left and provided a militant alternative to the old communist and socialist parties. Tricontinentalism rested on the belief that what was demanded by the current historical moment was the broadest possible united front of political forces willing to wage militant struggle against US imperialism. Cuba and North Korea stood at the forefront of this disruption, which correlated to a major shift in North Korean foreign policy, and the beginning of a new high point in DPRK–Cuba relations. By 1966, North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam were widely recognized as constituting a new, informal bloc within the socialist camp, increasingly bold in its willingness to speak on behalf of the Third World and to challenge the authority of Moscow and Beijing.

The message of the Cuban Revolution for a generation of young Latin American leftists was to put aside reformist politics and take up arms. North Korea vowed to support all those who heeded that call. Its intervention came at a time when many young radicals sought a personal transformation, one that would allow them to participate in the crucial historical juncture they believed themselves to be living through. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Latin American militants sought this transformation in secret training camps in North Korea, with the hope of returning to their home countries new subjects, with the physical and mental attributes necessary to make revolution. Between 1964 and 1970, North Korea provided military training to at least nine revolutionary groups in seven Latin American countries: Venezuela, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico. This chapter provides an in-depth overview and assessment of North Korea’s efforts to support revolutionary struggle in Latin America.

In North Korea, Latin American leftist intellectuals and political leaders were forced to come to grips with an extravagant personality cult centred around Kim Il Sung. Part of what made the North Korean model of socialism palatable to some in the 1960s, is that the Cuban Revolution had given new credence to the concept of the “maximum leader.” The New Left often romanticized charismatic leaders from the global South like Fidel, Kim, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, even while being critical of the autocracy they perceived in the Soviet Union. Admirers of North Korea’s political system argued it reflected the needs of a society in rapid transition from colonial-feudal backwardness to socialist modernity, and that ideas such as “freedom” were subjective and culturally determined. Such narratives of historical and cultural relativism were, ironically, also common among those critical of the North Korean model. This chapter looks at the different ways the North Korean political system could be interpreted within the Latin American Left, with examples from the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Chile.

During the 1960s, Cuba attempted to provide leadership to the Latin American Left, and to the region’s numerous Cuban-inspired guerrilla movements in particular. In the process, Cuban leaders departed from Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy, garnering harsh criticism from their Soviet and Chinese allies. Yet Cuba found a steadfast supporter of its controversial positions in North Korea. This support can in large part be explained by the parallels between Cuban and North Korean ideas about revolution in the Third World. Most significantly, both parties embraced a radical reconceptualization of the role of the Marxist–Leninist vanguard party. This new doctrine appealed primarily to younger Latin American militants frustrated with the old communist and social–democratic organizations. It was appealing because it captured the sense of urgency created by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and provided a path of immediate revolutionary action. The impact of the Cuban/North Korean concept of the party went beyond polemics and theoretical debates. It had a tangible influence on strategies and tactics employed by revolutionary movements in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, and Bolivia, as they took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter mainly concerns the shuttle diplomacy of the US secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, in 1976. Kissinger made two trips to Africa in 1976, hoping to influence Cold War conflicts in southern Africa. Kissinger succeeded, with South African help, to force the Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, to concede to the concept of majority rule in two years. Plans were then put in motion for an all-parties conference in Geneva, run by the British. This chapter examines the pre-conference diplomacy, including attempts by Mugabe and Nkomo to have those military leaders from ZANLA who were accused of the murder of Herbert Chitepo released by the Zambians. This chapter includes coverage of discussions between Kissinger and the South Africans, the British, and with Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere. There is also discussion of a letter by Bishop Muzorewa charging Nyerere and Mozambique’s Samora Machel of keeping him and Reverend Sithole from reaching the liberation forces in Mozambique and Tanzania.

The chapter introduces Churchill’s army career between 1895 and 1900, but does so from an important new perspective: using his exploits in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa to explore the origins of his lifelong interest in intelligence and clandestine operations. It argues that his first foray overseas to Cuba was in the ‘well-established tradition of the British amateur spy’ but that he maintained his interest in military intelligence thereafter through the connections he made to support his writing and journalism on the Indian north-west frontier, while attached to Kitchener’s expedition in the Sudan and later as a war correspondent and then soldier in South Africa. The author looks at the intelligence lessons that Churchill learned, including the power of guerrilla insurrection, the importance of properly resourced intelligence services, the comparative roles of the civil and military intelligence arms and the need for a managed relationship with the press.

This chapter describes Roberto Bolaño’s life and work in the context of the Cold War. In Latin America, that conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union often had the character of an internal civil war. Many of the region’s most prominent writers, who by and large belonged to the political left, spoke about Cold War politics as a continuation of U.S. imperialism in the region. But there were also deep divisions on the left. Some writers were pro-Soviet, while others were anti-Stalinist. After the Cuban Revolution, it too became a fault line. Born in 1953, Bolaño began his literary career at a time in the early 1970s when these political and literary paths seemed increasingly exhausted. As a young provocateur, he mocked the pretensions of both Communists and anti-Communists. His works often feature the invented lives of writers, but not in the heroic or redemptive roles they are sometimes mythologized as playing. Bolaño’s major output, published in the 1990s and 2000s, looks back on the Cold War with a sense of loss: the losses of accumulated violence, and the lost dreams of political justice that could not come to pass.

In this chapter, Dara Goldman focuses on the case study of the “New Man” in Cuba and how it has been reconfigured in twenty-first-century LGBTQ films. The analysis focuses on Tomás Gutierrez Alea’s landmark film, Fresa y chocolate (1994), and how it positions queer sexuality vis-à-vis the revolutionary ideals and imagined future that it seeks to forge. The author also examines how recent films have repeatedly reposited and reimagined the central dialectic of Gutierrez Alea’s film, with particular attention to Mariyln Solaya’s Vestido de novia (2014). The author analyzes Fátima o el parque de la fraternidad (2015), which traces the evolution of and transgender transformation of the protagonist. The chapter places this work in dialogue with two other recent films – Conducta (2014) and Ultimos días en la Habana (2016) – that examine how masculinity is disciplined in moments of crisis. In the end, the author argues that the failures depicted in these works allow us to better understand the role of gender in Latin American cultures. As these works reimagine the parameters of gender and transgender, they confront the fundamental attachment to normative gender roles as a legitimating force in Latin American cultural traditions.

Much of the work that has been devoted to Latin American history of science, as well as the analysis of intersections between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, points toward the flawed relationship that this region has had with science and technology. Science encompassed a series of proposals of new ways of seeing; it was a new platform that allowed writers to assume and retain control of their environment. This chapter explores the emergence of popular science magazines in Latin America – publications in which, it is argued, we find literary accounts of science as well as creative accounts of scientific observation. An improved understanding of this vast body of work helps us, in turn, to think of fin-de-siècle Latin American science as representative of what Bruno Latour defines as the “exegesis,” or constant inscription, that represents the central quality and activity of modern scientific life.

This chapter examines the tensions between the supporters of two modes of writing Latin America – magical realism and testimonial writing – under the lens of the figures of the falcon and the tortoise, a simile employed by one of Cuba’s first and most prominent theorists of testimonio, Miguel Barnet. It explores how the hybrid mode of testimonio was conceptualized in the first two decades of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and, more generally, in Latin America, and how these concepts presented a challenge to the literary establishment in Latin America and beyond. Through examining the key positioning of Cuban testimonio in the first two decades of the Cuban Revolution, the chapter argues that the role assigned to testimonio in these early conceptual formulations shared many commonalities with the aims of magical realism, but also some important differences based on positionality and power. As such, the schism of 1971 represented not only a political fracture between Cuba and some Latin American nations but also a tipping point, or moment of transition, in terms of Latin American literatures’ potential in the world.

Mexico’s 1982 announcement that it would be unable to make its debt payment set off Latin America’s “Lost Decade.” All over the region, economies stagnated and millions of people suffered. The international response, spearheaded by the United States, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank, initiated market reforms that would cut state spending, privatize state-run industries, dismantle tariffs, and construct free trade agreements. The neoliberal era had been launched. The reforms and trade agreements that accompanied this new era reflected continued U.S. hegemony but also the ways in which economic power was supplanting military power. Latin America initially found few alternatives to the neoliberal model. At the end of the twentieth century Latin American economies were growing once again, but in many cases they were only returning to where they had been before the crash. With millions feeling economic pain, neopopulist leaders gained momentum. Commitment to free trade agreements also waned as leaders like Donald Trump questioned their benefits. This chapter explores the region’s political economy of the last 50 years.

U.S. security interests intensified with the early Cold War. The high ideals of the Good Neighbor Policy rapidly disappeared and after the 1954 invasion of Guatemala, U.S. policy makers could not credibly claim to reject armed intervention. The United States became more openly supportive of dictatorships and authoritarian governance in order to fight against Communist infiltration. Power was once again central. The predominance of security over all else bred dissatisfaction in Latin America. In part to counter U.S. influence, Latin American governments supported the creation of hemispheric pacts and organizations. Latin American citizens protested against poverty and U.S. domination. U.S. policy makers targeted reformist movements because they assumed that they were too weak to resist Communist domination and they threatened business interests. Revolutionary fervor with a distinctly anti-U.S. bent was developing during the early Cold War, though it would not fully flower until the Cuban revolution. This chapter examines how the early Cold War brought national security and self-interest once again squarely to the fore.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Latin America was a region of immigration, where people moved from one country to another and/or people came from other continents, mostly from Europe. But by the 1960s, when many Latin American countries were suffering economic downturns, and the 1970s and 1980s, when state repression intensified, immigration turned to emigration, and many began making their way to the United States. Today, Latin Americans continue to migrate to the United States; people from all over the globe migrate to Latin America; and people move within the region. It is one of the most complex challenges confronting the United States and Latin America, and remains a very divisive issue in most countries of the region, especially the United States. This chapter looks at the push and pull factors that lead people to move from their home countries to resettle elsewhere.

From 1962 to 1966, exiled African American revolutionaries Robert and Mabel Williams broadcast a weekly English language radio program from Havana, Cuba. As its name suggests, Radio Free Dixie was aimed primarily at African Americans in the U.S. South, for whom radio, of all the mass media, was key for information sharing and consciousness raising. But the show’s potent blend of music, news, literature, and commentary quickly garnered audiences throughout the Americas. Scholarship on Radio Free Dixie has focused on Robert Williams’ printed or transcribed editorials while marginalizing Mabel Williams. By studying the program as both text-based archive and performative repertoire – drawing on performance studies scholar Diana Taylor – I amplify the Williamses’ overlooked Black radio arts. Moreover, I show that Radio Free Dixie’s women co-hosts, Mabel Williams and Jo Salas, ostensibly relegated to minor roles, in fact maximized radio’s capacities to re-articulate revolutionary internationalism through Black women’s histories and experiences.