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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2021/6/4/u85y8kepg2ifbsmepsdx9vulmedngb">borderlines-cssaame.org</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">A Cosmovisión of Solidarity: Anticolonial Worldmaking in Havana, Palestine and the Politics of Possibility<br></h1>
<h2 style="text-align:center;white-space:pre-wrap"><strong>Sorcha Thomson</strong></h2>
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<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div id="gmail-block-yui_3_17_2_1_1623011072237_18402"><p><em>Borderline inaugurates the first essay in its </em><a href="https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2021/3/9/call-for-pitches-another-worldmaking-art-culture-and-thought"><em>Worldmaking</em></a><em> forum on the politics of anti-colonial solidarity across and beyond the Middle East.</em></p></div><div id="gmail-block-yui_3_17_2_1_1623011072237_20954">
<a href="https://palarchive.org/item/16298/long-live-the-friendship-between-the-palestinians-and-the-cubans-a-poster-by-the-palestinian-cuban-friendship-society/" id="gmail-yui_3_17_2_1_1627147421507_70">
<p><img alt="A color poster showing two faces; one with a beard and wearing the traditional hat of Cuba and holding the Cuban flag, and the other is masked with a Kufiya and holding the Palestinian flag. Courtesy the Digital Archive of the Palestinian Museum." src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a612946dc2b4ac411a7a831/1623011589253-FLND51UOZL5GLTEJLL39/17360_ca_object_representations_media_7326_large.jpg?format=750w" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="304" height="435">
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<p>A color poster showing two faces; one with a beard and
wearing the traditional hat of Cuba and holding the Cuban flag, and the
other is masked with a Kufiya and holding the Palestinian flag. Courtesy
the Digital Archive of the <a href="https://palarchive.org/item/16298/long-live-the-friendship-between-the-palestinians-and-the-cubans-a-poster-by-the-palestinian-cuban-friendship-society/">Palestinian</a> Museum.</p>
</div><div id="gmail-block-137aff46076c07c039c5"><p>In
June 1961, as part of the campaign against illiteracy during Cuba’s
‘Year of Education,’ a delegation of young people and student leaders
from 43 countries arrived in Havana to build a school for the children
of Cuba. The Cuban Federation of University Students (FEU) received
representatives from student unions across the Arab world – from
Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco – alongside their comrades
from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. <a href="https://search.iisg.amsterdam/Record/ARCH00655/ArchiveContentList"><span>The brochure marking the event</span></a>,
titled ‘Cement, Water, Sand, and Unity,’ articulated the students’
reactions to the transformations occurring on the revolutionary island:
“The whole of Cuba is a beehive, where changes have been made in two
years of Revolution which seem unbelievable to anyone who has not been
able to see them personally.”</p><p>Two years earlier, on 1 January
1959, the triumph of the Cuban revolution shook the world and ignited
the revolutionary transformations of an era – making possible what
before had seemed impossible: the defeat of imperialism through popular
struggle. In the following decade, Havana would become a hub and a
school for tricontinental revolutionaries from Africa, Asia, and Latin
America – a place where colonialism’s <a href="http://metalib.ie.edu/ayuda/PDFs_PIB/The-Nation-and-Its-Fragments-Colonial-and-Post-Colonial-Histories.pdf"><span>‘rule of difference’</span></a>
was contested through new ways of doing and imagining solidarity across
continents. Cuba’s transnational role in this period has been
understood in relation to the diplomatic dynamics of the Cold War, with
its support for national liberation struggles viewed as defined – and
limited – by Soviet foreign policy. Yet, Cuba acted as a key pillar in
the transnational networks of thought and action that connected the
revolutionary movements of the era – as a model and an actor in an
anti-colonial struggle. The island became a hub for the traveling
revolutionaries of that time period, who came together at landmark
meetings and moments to develop relations of collaboration, mutual
support, and friendship, in their efforts to build a world beyond
imperial division. </p><p>In this way, Havana emerged as a global city
of anticolonial worldmaking. An integral part of its worldmaking
extended to the liberation movements and the revolutionaries of the Arab
world and, in particular, the Palestinians at a time when, <a href="http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/about"><span>in the words of Karma Nabulsi</span></a><span> and Abdel Razzaq Takriti</span>,
the Cuban revolution was to Latin America what the Palestinian
revolution was to the Arab world. These iconic movements of the 1960s
and 1970s, each holding a special place in the anticolonial imaginary of
the global Left, developed strong mutual relations of support and
revolutionary exchange. Located within the revolutionary entanglements
of Cuba and Palestine are forms of solidarity – in student, cultural,
and women’s forums and international organizations – that created
lasting institutional and affective ties. These forms of solidarity
reveal the transformative practices of a Havana-based anticolonial
worldmaking, characterized by building solidarity across boundaries and a
shared belief – in a historical moment of hope – in the possibility of a
future beyond imperial domination. </p><p><strong>Cuban Internationalism: A Tricontinental Infrastructure</strong></p><p>From
the outset, the Cuban revolution set about building the institutional
framework for developing its diplomatic and cultural relations with the
tricontinental world. The publishing house-cum-cultural institution <a href="http://www.casadelasamericas.org/casa.php"><span>Casa de las Américas</span></a>
was established in April 1961 with the aim to disseminate Cuban
culture, literature, and ideas to audiences across Latin America, the
Caribbean, and the rest of the world. <a href="http://www.icap.cu/"><span>The Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP)</span></a>,
founded in December 1960, had the explicit purpose of facilitating and
organizing reciprocal links of solidarity with the different regions of
the world. Alongside the other instruments of organization developed on
the island in the early years of the revolution, these institutions set
the foundations for a structured model of international solidarity with
broad popular participation. </p><p>Havana confirmed its place in the
heart of the Third World imaginary when it hosted the January 1966
Tricontinental conference. Hailed as the<a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1966/01/15.htm"> largest </a>gathering
of anti-imperialist leaders the world has ever seen, more than 500
representatives from national liberation movements, guerrilla groups,
and independent governments of 82 countries, including a PLO delegation,
gathered to discuss anti-imperialist strategy, resulting in the
founding of the Afro-Asian-Latin-American Peoples’ Solidarity
Organisation (OSPAAAL). The meeting announced itself as the coming
together of two historic currents of world revolution – that which
started with the 1917 Russian Revolution and the parallel current of the
revolution for anti-colonial national liberation. The USA State
Department, deeply<a href="http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/tricontinental.htm"> concerned </a>
by this coming together, denounced the meeting as the “biggest threat
that international communism had ever posed to the free people of the
world.”</p><p>This landmark event celebrated Cuba’s role as an icon of
revolutionary victory while recognizing the challenges that lay ahead
for the global anti-colonial struggle. Che Guevara’s <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm"><span><em>Message to the Tricontinental</em></span></a>
– delivered to the conference hall in his absence as he led another
insurgency in Bolivia – outlined the nature of the solidarity to be
forged between the gathered revolutionaries: “It is not a matter of
wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate;
one must accompany him to his death or to victory.” He asks his audience
“what role shall we, the exploited people of the world, play?” to which
he responds with the famous call – “create one, two, many Vietnams.” If
Guevara set out the tricontinental vision of solidarity as a
coordinated action, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm"><span>Amilcar Cabral’s contribution to the meeting</span></a>
addressed the need for a theoretical underpinning to this action: in
particular, how to connect national liberation struggles against
colonialism with a Marxist theory of revolution. He emphasized the need
for the forum to elaborate an ideological coherence to the global
anti-colonial movement, whilst recognizing that “national liberation and
social revolution are not exportable commodities: they are… determined
by the historical reality of each people.” Whilst this ideological
coherence may have remained elusive to the broad movement, the search
for a unified strategy fostered creative and transformative exchanges
between those who came to Cuba and sought to build solidarity in their
common struggles. </p><p><strong>The Way of the Third World </strong></p><p>Two
years after the Tricontinental meeting, in January 1968, over 400
intellectuals from 70 countries arrived for the Cultural Congress at the
Hotel Havana Libre, with the stated aim to advance <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Voices_of_National_Liberation.html?id=k45BAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y"><span>“the development of the revolutionary ideology of the national liberation movements of the Third World.”</span></a>
Taking place before a growing polarization in the global Left’s support
for Cuba triggered by events later that year, the gathering marked a
high point of the tricontinental spirit. The congress, in its
deliberations over the role of the intellectual in the anti-colonial
movement, aimed not just at expanding the scope of intellectual
production, but also at re-conceptualizing the intellectual as one that
combined thought and action in worldmaking, in opposition to the
character of the academic or professional specialist produced by the
capitalist West and detached from the popular struggle. This was an
intellectual activity derived from a belief in the possibility of
changing the material world in which they lived, inspired in many ways
by the Cubans who themselves represented a revolutionary culture of
hope. </p><p>For the writer <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/globalsouth.13.1.04?seq=1"><span>C.L.R. James, </span></a>whose presence at the congress was his first visit to the island<span>,</span>
the gathering marked the end of one era and the opening of another,
adding the Cuban leader to the list of those responsible for paving an
alternative path: “The world ushered in by Christopher Columbus and
Martin Luther no longer exists. Lenin, Gandhi, Nehru, Mao Tse-tung,
Nkrumah, and Fidel Castro have shattered its foundations.” <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/FROTOT-3">Aimé Césaire,</a>
the Martinique anticolonialist, declared to the meeting “Cuba has
invented a new way that will be the way of the Third World… you start
from zero and you create.” He elaborated on the special quality of the
revolutionary in this context – as one dialectically driven to act from
the perspective of the future, engendering a dynamic that advances
reality, in such a way that “they appear to belong to a world that does
not yet exist.” From this perspective, he explained, even the perceived
‘failures’ of leaders like Guevara – who had by then been assassinated
in Bolivia – act as a major catalyst for revolutionary transformation,
in so far as their actions make manifest in the present the ideas of the
future. </p><p>The gathering’s attendees – poets, doctors, lawyers,
militants, scientists, actors – mirrored this conception of the
worldmaking intellectual. Present amongst them were <a href="https://catalogue.georgepadmoreinstitute.org/records/CCH"><span>numerous speakers from the Arab world</span></a>,
including Gisele Halimi, the Tunisian lawyer famous for defending
members of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), who
presented a paper on how to build cultures of emancipation against
imperialism, and Dr. Galal A. Amin, the Egyptian economist who spoke on
the role of the university in relation to revolution. From the outset,
the Cuban revolution’s internationalist imagination had extended to the
liberation movements of the Arab world, with <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/157991?seq=1"><span>assistance to the Algerian revolution</span></a><span> </span>–
in the form of arms and doctors – one of the first acts of Castro’s
foreign policy, motivated by the ‘spontaneous brotherhood’ that existed
between their struggles. The 1967 June war – <a href="https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/81430?show=full"><span>understood as a setback for the Third World project as a whole</span></a>
– had focused Arab and international revolutionary attention on
anti-imperialism in the Middle East, with Fatah emerging in the
aftermath of the Arab armies’ defeat as the new front of the struggle.
Fatah, who had already produced pamphlets studying the Cuban
revolutionary experience, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00263201003590300"><span>sent its representatives to the Cultural Congress</span></a>
to highlight their integral role in the Third World struggle.
Discussion at the congress focused on the Zionist occupation of
Palestine and the role of the tricontinental movement in advancing
Palestinian national liberation. The collective voice of the meeting
called for the integration of Palestinian liberation into the
revolutionary ideology of Third Worldism. </p><p>Support for the Palestinian struggle would feature increasingly in Cuban internationalism: in the <a href="https://www.palestineposterproject.org/poster/palestine-crisis-and-liberation"><span>cultural and intellectual production of OSPAAAL</span></a>, in the<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17541328.2017.1389556"><span> activities of Cuba in international diplomatic forums</span></a>,
and in the invitation of delegations to the island. Following Cuba’s
break of official ties with Israel in 1973, in 1974, Yasser Arafat made
his first visit to the island, and the permanent Palestinian diplomatic
office was established in Havana. The same year, the Second Congress of
Cuban Women turned its focus to the international struggle, receiving
delegations of activists from a number of national women’s unions,
political movements, and the International Democratic Federation of
Women (WIDF). May Sayegh, head of the General Union of Palestinian Women
(GUPS), traveled to the island to take part in the meeting. She
participated in a press conference, told the audience the history of the
Palestinian struggle, and made the call for renewed and increased
solidarity with the liberation of her people. Sayegh formed a close
friendship with Vilma Espín, the leader of the Federation of Cuban Women
(FMC), and <a href="http://learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk/uploads/sources/58c693de66652.pdf"><span>the two worked together</span></a>
to transform the international institutions charged with advancing the
position of the women of the world. Their aim to get more women from
Africa, Asia, and Latin America elected to leadership positions within
the WIDF, so they could shape the agenda not just participate in it, was
successful, with Sayegh herself later elected as Vice President of the
organization. In their collective efforts to transform, rather than
simply join, the political institutions of the era, the women
successfully promoted the interests of the national liberation movements
and struggles of the Third World on the international stage. </p><p><strong>Ruptures and Traditions of Revolutionary Transformation</strong></p><p>If
the high point of tricontinentalism can be located in the late 1960s to
the mid-1970s, in the years that followed the international
infrastructures and networks of diplomatic and financial support that
held together the global anti-colonial movement came under increasing
pressure. Institutions such as the WIDF became <a href="https://journals-sagepub-com.ep.fjernadgang.kb.dk/doi/full/10.1177/0141778920941871"><span>defunct by the mid-1980s</span></a>,
with funding and participation significantly reduced. In the
historiography of anticolonialism, the worldmaking potential of
international solidarity is generally recognized to have collapsed, as
the pitfalls of postcolonial independence and a global
counter-revolution shattered and reshaped political frameworks and
hierarchies of global interaction. Within the global Left, a sense of
defeat and pessimism grew to characterize the networks of optimistic
collaboration that had structured the high point of anti-colonial
solidarity. </p><p>For Cuba too, international disillusion with their
revolutionary model increased and reached a culmination following Cuban
support for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When Castro was elected
head of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1979, following a long-run campaign
for leadership, the organization of the states previously loosely allied
around an opposition to imperial intervention and domination was
polarized to the point of paralysis. However, despite the closure of
institutions – <a href="https://nacla.org/news/2020/01/16/hasta-siempre-ospaaal-havana-cuba"><span>such as OSPAAAL in 2019</span></a>
– and the collapse of official networks, the Cuban model of
revolutionary transformation through education has continued to present
an alternative to the futures of imperial despair heralded by the
collapse of a coherent Third Worldism. </p><p>As with the understanding
of the intellectual at the 1968 Cultural Congress, Cuban
internationalism extended a conception of education premised not only on
the accumulation of knowledge but also on the application of that
knowledge to advancing revolutionary society. This vision took form in
the extension of invitations through scholarships to students from
across the tricontinental world to study on the island, beginning in the
1960s. The philosophy behind the granting of these scholarships and the
reception of students was that they use the training they received on
the island by contributing to the revolutionary development of their
home countries. </p><p> In her book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cruzadas-amor-cubanas-oriente-d-fernandez-gonzalez/dp/9590906788"><span><em>Crusades of Love</em></span></a>,
Regla Fernández González, Chief of the Political Department of OSPAAAL
in the 1970s, wrote about the students – from Yemen, Oman, Western
Sahara, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine – who came to Cuba to learn, and
who made deep impressions on the Cuban people and their history. She
describes the Arab students as having arrived with a deep “revolutionary
consciousness” and committed themselves to political organizing on the
island alongside their studies. She tells the story of Issam, the son of
the leader of one of the left Palestinian organizations, who came to
Cuba and immediately upon arrival took up responsibilities in the Cuban
and Palestinian student unions on the island, the FEU, and the GUPS. He
was eager to make the cause of his people known and would speak in
meetings, conferences, and conversations about the history of his
occupied homeland. Issam met, fell in love, and eventually married a
fellow medical student from Cuba, Rosa. He is one of the many
Palestinian students who forged strong links with the Cuban people and
culture, building friendships, marriages and families that would either
return to the Middle East or stay in Cuba to practice medicine,
representing the tradition of educational and social exchange that
connected the revolutionary struggles. </p></div><div id="gmail-block-yui_3_17_2_1_1623011072237_24781">
<p><img alt="Pamphlet from the 1961 international student camp in Havana and part of Cuba’s campaign against illiteracy during the ‘Year of Education’." src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a612946dc2b4ac411a7a831/1623012127276-TM2NIAED2BPLCJAL9WP4/IMG_5890.JPG?format=750w" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="435" height="327">
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<p>Pamphlet from the 1961 international student camp in
Havana and part of Cuba’s campaign against illiteracy during the ‘Year
of Education’.</p>
</div><div id="gmail-block-yui_3_17_2_1_1623011072237_26846"><p><strong>Afterlives and Futures of Anticolonial Worldmaking</strong></p><p>To
this day, Palestinian students who have received their medical training
in Cuba continue to return to the Middle East to practice their
profession. These students are represented in the League of Graduates
from Cuba in Lebanon, the Jose <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Nossa_Am%C3%A9rica/wYR8nQEACAAJ?hl=en">Marti</a>
Solidarity Organisation, and the League of Graduates from the Latin
American Medical School (ELAM) in Jordan, Palestine, and Syria. Dr.
Mohammed Abu Srour, a current DFLP representative in Cuba and graduate
of the Havana University of Medical Science, set up a free medical
clinic in his home of Aida camp in Bethlehem. He describes this as a way
of “practicing the Cuban tradition of medicine – of serving the people
without seeking profit, as a way to pay back the historic solidarity of
Fidel.” Other Palestinians who graduated from Cuba have been
instrumental in organizing transnational solidarity campaigns, for
example, the successful campaign for the release of the Cuban Miami
Five, unjustly incarcerated in US prisons in 1998. This tradition of
educational exchange continues in Cuba today, most visibly in the Latin
American School of Medicine (ELAM), which offers thousands of
scholarships each year to students from Africa, Asia, Latin America –
and left political organizations in the USA – to study and practice
medicine. The afterlives of the 1960s recognition that popular education
was necessary for the advancement of the anti-colonial struggle, and
the commitment to making this necessity practical, demonstrates the
forward-looking model of worldmaking located in Cuba’s revolutionary
internationalism. </p><p>Tracing the encounters of traveling
revolutionaries in Havana during the 1960s and 1970s reveals a
worldmaking moment that connected the Cuban revolution to anti-colonial
struggles across the world in a period of global transformation,
characterised by a shared determination and hope to transform categories
of thought and action. Reading national revolutionary movements as part
of this global history offers a transnational model of solidarity with
creative collaborations and interventions, whether in the dominant
concepts of intellectual production, the structures, and agendas of
international organizations, or in visions of education and health.
Beyond acting as an example of the possibility of success in challenging
imperialist domination, Cuba’s reception of tricontinental
revolutionaries transformed its capital into a global city of
solidarity. For the Palestinians, it was a place where connections were
built, connections that would support the ascent of the movement on the
global stage, and outlast the high era of tricontinentalism, in an
enduring model of reciprocal solidarity between anti-imperial
struggles. </p><p>These historic practices of optimistic anticolonial
solidarity may appear alien to a contemporary world not imagined or
accounted for by the revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s, a world
characterised by political languages and frameworks that have
undoubtedly changed. But the traces of an earlier worldmaking remain in
the institutional memories and intergenerational revivals of
revolutionary forms and horizons. Researching this history, retrieving
its traditions, and tracing its afterlives – of collaboration,
friendship, and mutual exchange – offers lessons for the meaning of
worldmaking today, as a collective practice of transformative
solidarity, grounded in a shared belief in the possibility of
alternative futures. </p><p><br><em>Sorcha Thomson is a Ph.D. Fellow at Roskilde University in the project </em><a href="https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/projects/entangled-histories-of-palestine-and-the-global-new-left-1967-198"><span><em>Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left</em></span></a><em>.
Her research examines Palestinian solidarity entanglements with the
global New Left in the 1960-the 80s, through the cases of Cuba and the
UK. She holds an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the
University of Oxford (2018).</em></p><p><em>-Prepared with the editorial assistance of Nishat Akhtar </em></p></div></div></div>
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