From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Judging from the cover of this book, the reader might expect to learn about solidarity among guerrilla movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The dust jacket features a cover illustration from Tricontinental magazine of three armed fighters representing those continents. However, the author focuses not on armed insurrection but on the cultural activism of Afro-Cuban intellectuals and of African American and Latino activists in the United States. They took up not arms but typewriters, film cameras, and paintbrushes. Their protests and critiques of race relations drew inspiration from the Tricontinental Conference and from that organization's publications examining the injustices of racial capitalism worldwide. “The Tricontinental played a pivotal role in generating international solidarity with the US civil rights movement as well as with the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa,” Anne Garland Mahler says (p. 3).Mahler shows that linkages existed between African Americans and Afro-Cubans long before the Havana Tricontinental Conference of 1966. For example, novelist and essayist Richard Wright attended the 1955 Bandung Conference for Asian and African solidarity. It had promoted nonviolent activism, and the host, President Sukarno, had invited to Indonesia other heads of state such as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. Afro-Cuban writer Walterio Carbonell joined Wright in suggesting that the Americas join this international organization. Fidel Castro added Latin America to the solidarity organization and dedicated the new Tricontinental to armed revolution. No heads of state came to its 1966 conference, although the future president of Chile Salvador Allende did attend.For the Tricontinental Conference, Castro invited to Havana more than 500 delegates from countries and liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Cubans never revealed the guest list in order to protect the security of the attendees. Mahler demonstrates that the conference brought out disputes within the socialist bloc between the Soviets, the Cubans, and the Chinese Communists. Delegates from the socialist powers argued over the export of revolution and the proper role of violence in bringing down capitalism.However, the author prefers not to pursue research on the call to arms by the person most closely identified with Tricontinentalism, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In a 1967 edition of Tricontinental magazine, Che famously called for “two, three, many Vietnams.” He urged guerrilla fighters throughout the global South to rise up to confront imperialism, as Che himself was doing in Bolivia. Castro also encouraged armed uprisings at both the Havana Tricontinental Conference and its successor conference on Latin American solidarity in 1967. These two forums had brought together numerous radical leaders who would subsequently die in the struggle for global revolution, including Luis Augusto Turcios Lima of Guatemala, Mario Roberto Santucho and Alicia Eguren of Argentina, and Carlos Marighella of Brazil.One thing that does not escape Mahler's notice is the hypocrisy of Cuban Communism. It promoted racial inclusion throughout the global South while denying it to Cuba itself. Castro decried US racism and offered haven to Robert F. Williams, Josephine Baker, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver. Each of these American exiles became disillusioned with the revolution's denunciations of racism abroad while doing little to remedy discrimination at home.Mahler also points out that many Afro-Cuban intellectuals challenged the ideological rigidities of Cuban Communism as they wrote about and documented the plight of people of color within the revolution. Carlos Moore, Roberto Zurbano Torres, and Carbonell himself are examples. Mahler presents convincing evidence of how the writing and filmmaking of Afro-Cubans aroused the ire of the state censors. She also indicates that while Cuban soldiers of color participated in helping to defeat apartheid armed forces in South Africa, blacks accounted for only 7 percent of the Communist Party membership back home. “The legacy of prerevolutionary colonialism and slavery is still firmly entrenched in communist Cuba,” Mahler concludes (p. 183). It is refreshing to have a scholar unafraid to demonstrate the racism of socialism as well as of capitalism.