Cuba, the USSR, and the Non-Aligned Movement

Based on archival research in the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) and the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation (AVPRF), as well as on published primary source document collections, this paper argues that Cuba’s role as Soviet ally conflicted with Fidel Castro’s desire to assume a leadership role in the Non-Aligned Movement. As Castro sought to balance his aspirations for leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement with his obligations as Soviet ally, Soviet officials attempted to capitalize on Cuba’s position in the movement to achieve a closer relationship between the Third World and the socialist bloc. U.S. officials struggled to discredit Castro and delegitimize his claims to non-aligned status, but were ultimately unable to prevent the movement’s turn toward a more pronounced anti-American stance in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Brazil and Non-Alignment

Until the mid-1960s, Brazil played a leading role in inter-American affairs and the same holds true for its engagement with the non-aligned movement. This chapter attempts to shed light on the Brazilian role at the two non-aligned conferences in Belgrade 1961 and Cairo 1964. While only three years apart, the two conferences highlight two very distinctive experiences for Brazil and Latin America as a whole. In 1961, Brazilian politics teemed with reformist aspirations and expectations and this translated into a new attitude towards the emerging third world. Under the Quadros and later the Goulart government, Brazil followed an “independent foreign policy” and strengthened ties with both the socialist and decolonized countries, and participating in the non-aligned movement formed part of this new nexus of relationships. By 1964, however, this trend had been reversed, as a military coup in Brazil ushered in a new era in domestic and foreign policies.

Isolating Nicaragua’s Somoza

This chapter analyzes Sandinista transnational activism in Western Europe in the immediate lead-up to the Nicaraguan Revolution. The work incorporates a host of emerging trends in Cold War history and in international history more broadly. Engaging with nonstate actors, the chapter taps into the transnational turn while melding the transnational with the international. The chapter describes the Sandinista impulse to take their political struggle to the global stage, particularly as the tercera faction successfully engaged with European social democrats to build a strong and lasting base of support across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the chapter reveals explicit link between the nonstate activism of the Sandinistas and the Western European governments themselves.

Latin American Tercermundistas in the Soviet Union

This chapter complicates conventional understandings of Latin America’s Cold War by looking at the travels of tercermundista intellectuals and activists to all parts of the USSR. Visits of intellectuals from the global South to the Cold War Soviet Union have hardly been studied. Accounts of the history of Cold War Latin America have put the Soviet Union, as a political and intellectual point of reference, aside too readily. The early Cold War was a time of enhanced, and rather successful, Soviet attempts to present their country in a positive light towards the emerging Third World. Those Latin Americans who developed a sense of belonging with the Third World in the 1960s, this chapter demonstrates, were still susceptible to the lures of certain characteristics of the Soviet state and suggested their implementation in their home countries. The reason for the positive perception came, on the one hand, as a result of very lavishly funded and well conducted programmes for Third World visitors in the Soviet Union.

Brazil and India

This chapter analyses Brazil’s progressive opening to the Third World during the presidencies of Getúlio Vargas (1951-54) and Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira (1956-60). Throughout the 1950s, Brazil revealed a growing interest in establish and/or strengthen diplomatic and political relations with the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa. This rapprochement aimed to improve Rio de Janeiro’s leverage with the United States (in order to obtain financial aid); to consolidate Brazil’s alleged ‘regional leadership’ within Latin America; and to increase trade relations. Although committed in a political and diplomatic allegiance with Washington (and a tacit supporter of European colonialism, particularly of the French and the Portuguese one), this ‘diplomatic opening’ to the Third World marked the first attempt of starting a more autonomous and nationalist foreign policy

Chile, Algeria, and the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s

This chapter focuses on the revolutionary connections between Chile and Algeria during the years 1961-1978. It starts at the beginning of the 1960s when the first extensive references to the Algerian War appear in the Chilean Left-Wing Press and in the reports of the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ends with Boumediene’s passing in 1978, which closes the socialist parenthesis in Algeria. It describes the conditions of possibility that underlie the revolutionary connections between Chile and Algeria and thus, the revolutionary cosmopolitanism through the examination of 1° the agents, 2° the places and spaces where those links are created and maintained and 3° the ideas. These three elements are constitutive of a new revolutionary universalism, which allows a political meaning to be given to the diplomatic relations between Chile and Algeria from 1970 onwards.

Third Worldism and the Panama Canal

This chapter investigates how, between 1970 and 1977, Panama’s military regime participated in the second generation of the historical movement, Third Worldism. To insert itself into the movement, Panama emphasized that, without access to the Panama Canal, the isthmus would remain undeveloped and subservient to Washington. Third Worldism attracted a large worldwide audience. To examine Panama’s use of the movement, this chapter first analyzes the regime’s reliance on Third-World commonalities to foster international solidarity for new treaties. Secondly, the study shows how the general encouraged the blending of Third Worldism at the local level in propaganda films and theatrical productions. Lastly, the chapter evaluates the 1977 plebiscite for Panamanians to vote for the treaties as a method to legitimize the regime’s existence to isthmians and the global community.

Community Development in Cold War Guatemala

By the mid-1960s, Guatemalan newspapers regularly discussed the nation’s underdeveloped status, identifying it as a national embarrassment. However, the regions that the Guatemalan government identified as underdeveloped were largely rural and indigenous, thus presenting a unique set of cultural behaviors and practices that challenged the western development ideas the government wished to initiate. This chapter compares two development projects that different governmental institutes implemented in Guatemala between 1956-1976: the Plan de Mejoramiento de Tactic, Alta Verapaz and the Programa del Desarrollo de la Comunidad. The key sources that serve as evidence for the chapter’s arguments are anthropologists’ field notes, oral histories, and unpublished internal government documents. The chapter argues that as leftist guerrilla activity increased, the Guatemalan government capitalized upon international concerns with poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, and they used development as a peaceful means to fight the Cold War.

Anti-Imperialist Racial Solidarity before the Cold War

This chapter analyses Latin American nations’ efforts to create inter-American solidarity against U.S. military occupations in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic from the 1910s to the 1930s. In their diplomacy, anti-occupation activists from these three nations were joined primarily by Cubans, Mexicans, and Uruguayans. It traces transnational outreach to three constituencies, in ascending order of success—the League of Nations, other Latin American governments, and Latin Americans in the United States. The question it asks is: What factors brought success or failure in these transnational anti-imperialist efforts in the early 20th century? Among the factors for success were cultural affinity among Latin Americans, direct diplomacy, fear of occupation, and racial solidarity. Among the factors contributing to failure were U.S. hegemony, poverty, and racial division. This chapter explains why anti-imperialism could be effective yet remained limited, and it allows comparison and contrast to Cold War-era solidarity.

A Mexican New International Economic Order?

In December of 1974, Mexico’s president, Luis Echeverría, stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations to present the founding principles of what was to be a New International Economic Order, a project intended to address the economic crisis then wracking the Third World. The principles that the Mexican president imagined were codified a document that Echeverría had been drafting over the previous two years, the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. This chapter traces this advocacy to discover the Mexican roots of the New International Economic Order, and in so doing demonstrates how Mexican diplomats, economists, and policymakers shaped not only ideas about sovereignty, self-determination, and economic development during the twentieth century, but also the codification of those ideas in international law, agreements, and institutions.