10    Cuba, the United States, and the Uses of the Third World Project, 1959–1967

ERIC GETTIG

In modern international history, revolutionary states have often faced tension between engaging commercially and diplomatically with the world as it is, in order to consolidate the revolution, and seeking to transform that world by spreading the revolution’s ideals. The revolutionary government of Cuba faced this tension in its relations with the Third World after January 1959.

Historical scholarship on Cuban relations in the Third World has focused on Cuban support for revolutionary movements and governments in Latin America and Africa.1 We have very few analyses—and none based on archival documents—of Cuba’s diplomatic engagement with Third World internationalism.2 Historians have not yet conducted sustained research to determine Cuba’s role in the major forums of what Vijay Prashad calls the “Third World project,” such as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the United Nations (UN), and the Group of 77 (G-77) developing countries arising from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).3

This scholarly neglect is regrettable and surprising, because revolutionary Cuba decisively shaped the terms under which the rest of Latin America associated with the Third World project, not only through its material support for revolution, but also through its diplomacy. Cuba’s impact was both direct, by influencing how Latin American peoples and governments acted toward the Third World and its emerging institutions, and indirect, as Cuba became a primary driver of the United States’ corresponding efforts to shape Latin American engagement with the Third World.

This chapter examines the early years of revolutionary Cuba’s engagement with the Third World project. While acknowledging Cuba’s efforts to “export revolution” by inspiring and materially supporting revolutionaries in Latin America and Africa, it focuses on a neglected side of Cuban internationalism: Cuba’s diplomatic engagement in major conferences of Third World governments. In particular, it examines Cuba’s failed effort to convene a “Conference of Underdeveloped Nations” in Havana in 1960 and Cuba’s participation in the first two Non-Aligned summits, at Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1961 and Cairo, Egypt in 1964. To do so, the essay draws on documents from Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Relations (Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, abbreviated MINREX) from its archive in Havana and the private papers of a Cuban ambassador. It also uses declassified U.S. documents from the National Archives and presidential libraries, as well as documents from the archives of the British Foreign Office and the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Relations (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, SRE).

These documents, particularly the Cuban records, which are analyzed here for the first time, illuminate the extent to which Cuba and the United States worked at opposite purposes in their approach to the Third World project and Latin America’s participation. Both governments viewed Latin America’s relationship to the Third World largely—sometimes almost exclusively—with reference to their bilateral relationship to each other. Their goals for the direction of Third World internationalism and Latin America’s place therein were almost mirror images, and both parties, especially the Cubans, often saw their attempts to influence the Third World project as a zero-sum game.

From Eisenhower through Kennedy and Johnson, U.S. administrations pursued three principal goals regarding Cuba, Latin America, and the Third World. First, Washington worked to isolate Cuba from the rest of the Third World. Second, it sought to isolate Latin America from the Afro-Asian world to the extent possible, to prevent a drift toward “neutralism” that could weaken the U.S.-led “Inter-American System.” Third, U.S. administrations tried to channel the Third World project toward thematic and institutional frameworks nonthreatening to U.S. interests, and thus especially toward questions of economic development addressed through UN-sponsored forums.

The Cuban government pursued essentially opposite goals. Cuba sought, first, to maximize Third World solidarity in order to demonstrate that it was not isolated. Second, Cuba sought to draw Latin America closer to Afro-Asia, often by creating or contributing to new international forums not under Washington’s influence, a policy that positioned Cuba as a bridge between continents and a potential leader of a tri-continental movement. Third, Cuba sought to radicalize Third World internationalism, to define it as militant and uncompromising anti-imperialism, and to draw the Second and Third, nonaligned and socialist worlds together, hoping thereby to defeat U.S.-led imperialism once and for all.

Underdevelopment: Cuba’s First Foray into Third World Internationalism

The abortive “Congress of Underdeveloped Countries” has been essentially lost to history, but it was a major diplomatic initiative of the Cuban government, amidst a volatile, formative half-year period in the revolution’s domestic and foreign relations. Coming less than five years after the Asian-African Conference at Bandung and more than a year before the inaugural Non-Aligned conference at Belgrade, it was, moreover, the first significant move—by the Cuban government or any other—to draw Latin American, African, and Asian governments together under a common framework.

The new government’s first outreach to the Afro-Asian world came when Ernesto “Che” Guevara took a three-month tour of the Mediterranean and Asia, visiting Egypt, India, Burma, Japan, Indonesia, Ceylon, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia as the head of a Cuban “Good-Will and Economic Mission” between June and September 1959. At a time when Cuba’s agrarian reform was beginning to bring it into conflict with U.S. landowners and Washington, the mission had both political and economic motives. In addition to establishing or strengthening diplomatic relations with the emerging Non-Aligned world, Guevara and his team of economic advisers sought to study their hosts’ approaches to land reform and industrialization and to negotiate trade agreements to help Cuba diversify its export markets for sugar and its suppliers of capital and manufactured goods.4 In the Non-Aligned capitals of Cairo, New Delhi, and Belgrade, Che expressed Cuba’s interest in the Bandung principles and his hosts’ independent foreign and domestic policies, lamenting that Cuba, bound by the 1947 Rio Treaty and the Organization of American States (OAS), had not been able to exercise similar independence.5 In Ceylon Guevara ventured that Cuba now had more in common with the “Bandung powers” than with dictatorial Latin American neighbors such as Nicaragua. The State Department’s intelligence branch saw Che’s mission as “initiating a new phase in Cuban foreign relations.”6

State’s analysts were essentially correct. In an article published upon his return, Guevara began positioning Cuba as a model for the economic and political liberation not only of Latin America but also of Africa and Asia. Cuba, Che wrote, was “an ally across the sea” for “the hundreds of millions of Afro-Asians” struggling, like their Latin American brethren, for liberation.7 At a press conference discussing his trip, Che argued that Cuba should adopt “a third position” in the Cold War, like that of the majority of underdeveloped countries. Those countries, he said, “understand our revolution,” and their “solidarity” was an important new factor in international affairs. To strengthen these connections, Che ventured, the Cuban government should host a “Congress of Under-Developed Countries.”8

The idea for such a conference had originated with Cuba’s Foreign Minister Raúl Roa García (hereafter “Roa”), according to his son, Raúl Roa Kourí (hereafter “Roa Kourí”), himself a career diplomat who served at the time as Cuba’s alternate delegate to the United Nations. According to Roa Kourí, father and son had been “very interested” in the Bandung Conference’s potential as the basis for “a third way” between the capitalist West and communist East.9 The elder Roa, he recalls, was also inspired by the 1948 book The Geography of Hunger by the Brazilian social scientist Josué de Castro, which identified hunger and underdevelopment caused by plantation monoculture and mono-export economies as the root cause of sociopolitical upheaval in the Global South. The book provided Roa a framework to connect Cuba’s social ills, rooted in sugar monoculture, with the development problems elsewhere in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. De Castro recommended economic development through the diversification and modernization of agriculture by adjusting the terms of trade to benefit primary-product-exporting countries and fostering industrialization—an agenda consistent with that being articulated at the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and with the reformist and liberal currents of the coalition that would soon launch the Cuban Revolution.10 De Castro’s prediction that communism and capitalism would “converge” toward “organizing production to satisfy the fundamental needs” of all people likely appealed to Roa, who by this point had had a long career in leftist activism but was not a member of, or much associated with, Cuba’s Communist Party.

Roa’s appointment as foreign minister in summer 1959 coincided with Guevara’s mission and Cuba’s outreach to the Afro-Asian and Non-Aligned worlds. It also came at the peak of the Cuban leadership’s identification of the revolution as being guided by neither capitalism nor communism, but rather a vaguely defined “humanism.”11 In the fall of 1959, Roa began to put these aspirations into action. In a late September speech at the UN, Roa—echoing de Castro’s Geography of Hunger—blamed Latin America’s political problems on underdevelopment and argued that “the great problem of the world” was being forced to choose between a capitalism “that kills people through hunger” and a communism “that solves the economic problems, but suppresses freedom.” The “humanist” Cuban Revolution, he said, would transcend this dilemma, bringing (as Fidel often assured at the time) “bread with freedom, bread without terror.”

Taking stock of Cuba’s new orientation, Roa declared that “Cuba is today, for the first time in her history, effectively free, independent, and sovereign” in its foreign and domestic policies. In a world divided into two Cold War camps, there was, Roa observed, “a third group, with much more moral than material force, that hopes to serve as a bridge between the two.” Cuba, he acknowledged, “figures, through its historical tradition, its geographical location, and its international obligations, in the so-called western group.” But his government, he went on, “does not admit or accept … that it is ineluctably necessary to choose between the capitalist and the communist solution. There are other paths and other solutions of pure democratic character; and Cuba has now found its own path and its own solution to its problems, which is the path and solution of the Latin American peoples and which … connects her to the underdeveloped peoples of Africa and Asia.”12 Speaking at the UN again on 3 December, Roa officially announced his government’s intention to convene a Conference of Underdeveloped Countries in Havana “as soon as possible.”13

By late 1959 Cuba’s move toward an independent or third position had begun to concern U.S. officials, who worried also about domestic developments in Cuba. Several moderate ministers were replaced by leftists; seizures of agricultural and mineral properties accelerated; elections were postponed seemingly indefinitely; known or suspected Communists gained strong influence in managing the economy and military. The government’s denunciations of U.S. imperialism sharpened, and Cuba broke with the West at the UN by backing Algeria’s independence movement and abstaining on the annual vote to seat the Communists rather than the Nationalists of Taiwan as China’s delegation. “It is increasingly evident that the Castro Government is following a deliberate planned course hostile to the United States and apparently designed to establish a Tito-like state with an ostensibly neutral position in the cold war,” Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs Roy Rubottom wrote in late November.14 State’s intelligence bureau concluded soon after that “Cuban leaders envision the establishment of a Latin American bloc which will unite forces with the underdeveloped nations of Asia and Africa. It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that the Cuban concept of a middle road is one in which a strong stand against the western powers is coupled with an almost total lack of criticism of the Sino-Soviet bloc.”15

By mid-December U.S. officials resolved to counter Cuba’s overtures to the Afro-Asian and nonaligned worlds and to wall off the rest of Latin America. “The theme of ‘positive neutralism’ and rapprochement with the Afro-Asian bloc are all the rage within Fidel Castro’s governing clique,” Rubottom wrote to the European and Near East and South Asian bureaus, citing the commercial and diplomatic outreach in Asia and the Mediterranean, visits to Cuba by the Egyptian and Yugoslav foreign ministers, and the China vote at the UN. Moreover, he wrote, “the Cuban regime in a variety of ways is trying to promote neutralism in Latin America” by sponsoring international student, labor, and youth conferences and federations that were “Communist-infiltrated ‘neutralist’ and ‘third position’ ” in orientation and were expected to pressure Latin American governments to soften their pro-U.S. and anti-Communist positions on domestic and international issues.

The implications, for Rubottom, were global. Pronouncing himself “disturbed” by the warmth with which Nasser and Tito had welcomed Castro into the emerging nonaligned camp, he considered it important to remind such leaders that “the ability of the United States to view neutralism in the Near East and South Asia with understanding and forbearance has been affected to an important degree by the unity of all the American Republics which has provided us with essential support on key security issues, such as the China question.” By embracing a regime that was undermining the unity of the Western Hemisphere under U.S. leadership, “the neutralists may well also be … undermining our ability to view certain aspects of their own positive neutralism with forbearance.” Rubottom asked for “measures [that] might be taken to dampen the enthusiasm of neutralist governments” for Cuba, suggesting “both informal diplomatic approaches and unattributed propaganda exposing the realities of the Cuban situation and the Communist participation in the neutralist drive.”16

The proposed Congress of Underdeveloped Nations became a focal point in this effort. Starting in January 1960, Havana and Washington engaged in a global diplomatic struggle, publicly and secretly, over the conference. High-level Cuban delegations fanned out across the world to build support for the initiative; partnering with Brazil and other Latin American governments, U.S. officials worked—successfully—to undermine it.

Four Cuban delegations visited Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the first three months of 1960 to make Cuba’s case for the conference. Roa himself led a delegation to Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, and Yugoslavia.17 Cuba’s ambassador-designate to India, Eugenio Soler, headed a mission to the Middle East and Asia.18 Carlos Lechuga and Leví Marrero, ambassadors to Chile and the OAS, respectively, visited every Latin American republic except the Dominican, Nicaraguan, Paraguayan, and Haitian dictatorships, with which Cuba had no diplomatic relations.19 In March, military officer William Gálvez led a delegation to Ghana, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast.20 These missions coincided with a move to establish relations with over a dozen African and Asian states.21 Cuban records of the Roa, Soler, and Gálvez missions are not available. But Marrero and Lechuga’s forty-seven page report to Roa on their Latin American mission gives an inside account of Cuban efforts to launch the conference, of its significance for Cuban and Latin American engagement with the Third World, and of U.S. and Latin American resistance to this project.

Publicly and in private sessions, Roa, Marrero and Lechuga, and other Cuban officials insisted that the conference was strictly economic in nature, with no political motive or the intention to create a global “third force.”22 A memo presented to the Latin American ambassadors in Havana and delivered by Lechuga and Marrero to each host foreign minister proposed seven broad and uncontroversial topics for the congress to address: stabilizing global commodity prices; expanding international trade; regional economic integration; strengthening multilateral lending institutions’ assistance to developing countries; agrarian reform; industrialization; and UN technical assistance to developing countries. The suggested goal of the congress was to draft a “Charter of Economic Rights of Peoples.” The conference, the Cubans suggested, had the approval and logistical support of the UN Secretariat.23

U.S. officials, nevertheless, were suspicious. The U.S. embassy advised in a 5 January cable that the conference “poses danger of weakening [the] fabric of inter-American cooperation and solidarity” if many Latin American governments attended. From the U.S. point of view, “It would be highly desirable to have LA governments throw cold water on [the] proposal on [the] grounds [that] their development problems [are] not comparable to those confronting Asian and African countries and [the] long tradition [in the] American family of nations to seek solution [to] their problems through mutual effort.” Such a cold reception “would be [a] serious blow” to Cuba’s government “and further isolate it in hemispheric official and public opinion.”24 Officials in Washington agreed, and on 6 January the State Department cabled its embassies in Latin America that it believed that the Cubans’ real goals were to “secure wider recognition, prestige, and status” for the revolution, to “obtain support and allies for neutral position in East-West struggle,” and to “provide [a] forum for continuation [of] charges against US of colonialism, economic exploitation, [and] political domination.” For these reasons, and the overall downward trend in U.S.-Cuban relations, the Department hoped that the congress would not be held or “that if held it will be poorly attended and result in failure.”25

Instructed to raise, at their discretion, any arguments that might persuade their host governments, U.S. diplomats abroad began working against the conference. An aide-memoire to Mexico’s foreign minister from the U.S. ambassador on 12 January—just after Marrero and Lechuga left Mexico for Guatemala—provides one example, repeating verbatim the alleged “real purposes of the Conference” from the secret cable of 6 January. A mostly Afro-Asian conference, the note also suggested, could not effectively address Latin America’s unique developmental context and challenges; holding it without UN or OAS support would “harm” both organizations and “serve only to confuse and delay” their existing development efforts.26

U.S. officials were not alone in their hostility. As early as 4 January—just after Roa left for the Mediterranean, and two days before the proposal was even presented to Latin American ambassadors in Havana ahead of Lechuga and Marrero’s departure for Mexico and points south—Brazil’s Foreign Minister Horacio Lafer had reached out to the U.S. embassy in Rio de Janeiro. Lafer explained Brazil’s opposition to a congress that, he indicated, “could benefit only Communists” and proposed that Brazil and the United States work together to discourage attendance, particularly by Latin American states.27

The United States responded to the Brazilian initiative with cautious enthusiasm. Washington cabled the embassy in Rio that the “Department shares Brazilian Foreign Minister’s concern” about the conference “and agrees on desirability of influence designed to discourage attendance.” Egypt became an early target. Hoping that Brazil could persuade Cairo that the rest of Latin America did not support Cuba’s initiative, and that if Nasser were cool to the congress other Arab and African governments would follow his lead, the cable instructed the embassy to urge Lafer to have Brazil’s diplomats express their views to the Egyptians. However, the cable acknowledged, “US Government must move carefully” given its testy relationship with Cuba, its status as an uninvited outsider, and the fact that the Cubans were likely to exploit for propaganda purposes any evidence that the United States was working to undermine the conference. It was, therefore, “of utmost importance that our concurrence in or knowledge of measures being taken by Brazil … not become known.”28 On his own initiative, Manoel Pio Correa, chief of the Foreign Ministry’s political section, spoke along these lines to Egypt’s ambassador on 7 January, but got the impression that Brazil would have more success influencing Latin American rather than Middle Eastern governments.29

By mid-January U.S. diplomats in Latin America and around the world were making what Rubottom called “a frontal attack” against the conference.30 While not commenting publicly, U.S. officials were stressing in private that the initiative threatened the political and economic interests of the United States and the entire hemisphere.31 Furthermore, they were coordinating with their Brazilian counterparts in capitals as far away as Bangkok to try to influence governments’ views of the initiative.32

Within Latin America, the contest pitted Cuba against Brazil and the Southern Cone countries, backed by the United States. Pio Correa told the U.S. ambassador in Rio that Argentina and Chile had agreed with Brazil to jointly oppose the conference and persuade other Latin American governments not to attend.33 Marrero and Lechuga perceived this influence once they reached the South American half of their tour. The Mexican and Panamanian governments had already agreed in principle to attend, while the Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans had received the ambassadors’ presentation in polite but noncommittal fashion.34 But Marrero and Lechuga wrote to Roa that upon reaching Colombia on 18 January, “for the first time in our journey we encountered in Bogotá formal objections to the initiative.… These objections, as we managed to confirm later in our visits to the Foreign Ministries of Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Santiago de Chile, seem to have a common patron.” While the government of Venezuela, the next stop on their tour, agreed to attend, they wrote, “From Brazil onwards we encountered ever-stronger resistance to the initiative, gathering furthermore the impression that in more than one previous opportunity the Brazilian Foreign Ministry had promoted the initiatives and purposes of the United States among the South American foreign ministries.”35

While Brazil and the United States were both working against the conference, it is important to note the evidence that Brazil did so for its own reasons, and not out of deference to Washington, as the Cubans believed. As noted above, it was Lafer who reached out to the State Department about coordinating against the conference, not the other way around. The Brazilians’ chief motive appears to have been concern that Cuba’s proposed congress would derail their own development initiative, Operaçao Panamericana (Operation Pan-America, OPA), which President Juscelino Kubitschek had been promoting since 1958 to a reluctant Eisenhower administration.36 Marrero and Lechuga reported that “despite all the effort of our arguments insisting that the Havana Conference supported, in a concentric manner, Operation Panamericana and that it would elevate it to the world stage, making the struggle for development on the continental level more effective,” the Brazilians saw the initiatives as contradictory, not complementary and viewed Afro-Asian commodity exporters as “competitors” rather than comrades. Several Andean and Southern Cone governments, notably those of Ecuador and Colombia, were likewise concerned that the proposed congress would undermine OPA and other development activities under the OAS aegis.37 As the controversy over the Havana conference continued, Lafer and other Brazilian and Argentine officials pressured Herter and Rubottom to move to implement OPA and other OAS activities in order to sap the energy from revolutionary movements in the hemisphere. The Havana conference had become a form of leverage.38

Of the hemisphere’s leading governments, only Mexico and Venezuela agreed, along with Panama, to attend the conference, while declining to co-sponsor it. Both did so, furthermore, on the condition that a majority of Latin American states would also attend. Mexican enthusiasm diminished rapidly when it became clear that the UN Secretariat was not, in fact, supporting the conference, as Cuba had been suggesting.39 At a time when the New York Times reported that “it is an open secret at the United Nations that the United States is discouraging participation in the conference,”40 the Mexican government ignored a Cuban request that Mexican delegates at the UN lobby the secretary-general’s staff to reconsider.41

Roa visited Caracas in late March to seek further Venezuelan support. Publicly, the resulting communiqué reiterated that Venezuela “accepted [the invitation] in principle.”42 But in a private letter to his Cuban counterpart, Osvaldo Dorticós, Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt warned that his country’s attendance was conditioned on being joined by a majority of Latin American governments: “We here believe that, even if a large number of Asian and African representatives were to attend, if the majority of Latin American representatives were absent, the event would be, not a success, but rather a failure.”43 As Betancourt wrote privately to one of his coalition partners, attending as one of the few Latin Americans at a mostly Afro-Asian conference in the Western Hemisphere “would contribute to the opening of a rift among the countries of our own language, located in the American geographical orbit and having problems and preoccupations similar to those of Venezuela.”44 But the rest of Latin America either declined outright or avoided responding to the initiative. In early June, Venezuela’s foreign minister reportedly urged Roa and Dorticós to abandon the project.45

Yugoslavia’s Tito endorsed the conference, but the Cubans did not invite the nonaligned Communist state so as to avoid awkward questions about the less-developed Eastern European allies of Moscow.46 In Asia and Africa, committed support came only from the most militantly anticolonial nonaligned governments. Nasser agreed in January to co-sponsor the conference, though Egyptian enthusiasm for this step later waned.47 Indonesia’s Sukarno, the first head of state to visit revolutionary Cuba, issued a joint statement with Castro in May reiterating Indonesia’s support for the congress.48 Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sékou Touré of Guinea also indicated their support. But the other African and Asian governments that were consulted—a group that included most of the pro-Western and nonaligned states but excluded China, North Korea, and North Vietnam—remained either hostile or uncommitted.49 State Department analysts concluded that “the essentially negative response on the part of every Latin American and several Afro-Asian governments … amounts to a serious rebuff for Castro.”50

For Cuba, the lesson of the initiative was to show who the revolution’s real friends were. Marrero and Lechuga reported to Roa upon the conclusion of their tour that “our direct observation of the social and economic realities of the Latin American countries permits us to confirm that the oligarchies that govern almost all of the Latin American countries feel seriously threatened by the popularity that the objectives of the Cuban Revolution have achieved among the masses. For this reason they are reluctant to cooperate with any measure that might be considered tending to praise and consolidate our Revolution.” Politically, they wrote, “The traditional political parties of the Latin American nations move constantly against our Revolution. The only real political contribution that we have observed comes from the popular and liberal parties and most especially from their youth,” as was the case of the center-left parties in Venezuela, Peru, and Chile, and the leftist Frente Nacionalista led by presidential candidate Jânio Quadros in Brazil.51 The Mexican and Venezuelan governments, supportive in principle, proved unwilling in practice to lobby on Cuba’s behalf. Before Havana abandoned the initiative entirely in late July 1960, U.S. officials saw signs that the Cubans were moving to invite nongovernmental delegations—from opposition parties, youth or labor movements, or other groups—to represent countries whose governments opposed the congress.52

The failure of the Underdeveloped Nations Conference, therefore, distanced Cuba from other Latin American governments, pushing it toward the sort of leftist regional and tri-continental youth, labor, and “people’s” organizations and conferences that would proliferate in Havana for the rest of the decade and that would culminate in the militant revolutionary Tricontinental Conference in 1966 and the Latin American Solidarity Organization conference in 1967.53 As early as late March 1960, Castro announced that Cuba was no longer constrained by its commitments under the OAS system. “We do not feel bound by this [Rio] treaty,” he told a televised audience.54

It also revealed Cuba’s affinity with the left wing of the emerging nonaligned world, in Indonesia, Egypt, and the radical West African states. In September 1960, as U.S.-Cuban relations collapsed and Cuba went about nationalizing all U.S. property and reorienting its economy toward the socialist bloc, Castro made his celebrated visit to the UN. While he famously embraced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, he also deepened ties to the nonaligned leaders present; these talks were the seeds of Cuba’s participation in the NAM conferences.55

Cuba and the Non-Aligned Movement, 1961–1964

A comprehensive account of Cuba’s participation in the NAM, which peaked with Havana hosting the movement’s sixth summit in 1979, is not possible here. The partial declassification of relevant Cuban Foreign Ministry files, however, provides new insight into Cuba’s approach to the NAM in the 1960s.56 These documents, in the context of other available sources, reveal that Cuban objectives toward the movement from early 1961 through late 1964 were quite consistent, even as other events profoundly unsettled Cuba’s relations with Latin America and the Soviet Union.

In April 1961, Nasser and Tito included Cuba among the invitees to a conference in Cairo in June to prepare for the first Non-Aligned summit. Their interactions with the Cubans at the UN the previous autumn, when the groundwork for the summit was laid, had been positive. More spectacularly, Castro’s forces had defeated the U.S.-sponsored Cuban exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs just days before the invitations were issued on 26 April. Castro had declared the Cuban Revolution socialist, but had concluded no formal alliance with Moscow. His prestige as an independent anti-imperialist nationalist leader was at its peak.57

Perhaps due to post-invasion turmoil at home, Cuba’s preparations for the 5 June preparatory conference appear to have been haphazard. As late as 21 May the embassy in Cairo complained that it had neither instructions nor even confirmation that Cuba would attend.58 But two weeks later, Roa, leading Cuba’s delegation in Cairo, boldly proposed that Havana host the summit, since Cuba was now “the center of resistance to United States imperialism.”59 The published conference report says only that Yugoslavia was chosen as host over Egypt and Cuba “after a short discussion.”60 Writing in 1966, the Indian diplomat and journalist G. H. Jansen added that “the idea of Cuba was greeted in total silence.”61 Despite two years of outreach to the Afro-Asian world, Cuba had a long way to go before it would become a leader of the incipient NAM.

Cuban officials’ views of the Third World and Havana’s place therein are presented in a thirty-six-page MINREX paper written in August 1961, between the Cairo preparatory talks and the Belgrade summit. After tracing the history of Afro-Asian gatherings since 1955, the paper declared that Cuba’s participation in the Non-Aligned conference “marks a new era in the collaboration of the underdeveloped countries, removing it from the purely Afro-Asian framework to extend it to Latin America” and building on the “solidarity” that had grown since Cuba began voting with the Afro-Asian states on colonial and development issues at the UN in 1959. “The essential interests of the Afro-Asian countries and the Latin American countries coincide,” the paper asserted. Economically and socially, they shared problems of underdevelopment, inequality, and neocolonial exploitation by foreign capital. Politically, colonialism lingered in the Americas in Puerto Rico, the Guyanas, and the Panama Canal Zone, as it did in Africa and Asia; Cuba was punished for its independent foreign policy just as Laos and other Afro-Asian states were. Simply put, the three continents “have a principal common enemy: imperialism,” especially U.S. imperialism. Accordingly, the paper concluded, “the path to the common victory” was to strengthen diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties and mutual support among the peoples of the three continents. This emerging, united Third World, moreover, had a natural ally: “The Afro-Asian and Latin American peoples today can count on the inestimable aid of the socialist countries. No more can the imperialists determine the course of history thanks to the existence of the socialist world. If to this is joined the unified solidarity of the Afro-Asian and Latin American peoples, colonialism in all its forms will endure briefly, impotent before the forces of socialism, national liberation and peace.”62

In Cuban diplomats’ view by the second half of 1961 there was, therefore, no contradiction—as Castro’s detractors often alleged—between Havana’s close economic and political ties to the Soviet Union and the socialist camp, on one hand, and its membership in the NAM, on the other. Cuban officials saw nonalignment as synonymous with their revolution’s independence and anti-imperialism. Cuban participation in the NAM was intended to advance the process that would connect Latin America to Asia and Africa and to the socialist world. In the near term, support from both the Second and Third Worlds was desirable, even essential, to shield Cuba from U.S. efforts to isolate and destroy the revolution; in the long term, the two worlds’ shared anti-imperialism would provide the means to fully defeat U.S.-led imperialism.

For this reason, Roa had pushed successfully at Cairo to secure invitations to Belgrade for other Latin American governments, a move welcomed by the Egyptian, Yugoslav, and Indian governments for their own reasons.63 Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Brazil under its new president, Quadros—four of the Latin American governments most sympathetic toward Cuba at this time—were invited to the summit, while more hostile neighbors such as Venezuela (Betancourt and Castro having fallen out completely) and the conservative Central American governments were not. Cuba could therefore hope to demonstrate that it was not isolated as the only Latin American exponent of nonalignment and independence from the United States, without too great a risk of being openly criticized by its neighbors.64

As several historians have demonstrated, Washington vigorously opposed Latin American attendance. While the John F. Kennedy administration tended to be tolerant of nonalignment in newly independent Asia and Africa, it was hostile to any drift toward “neutralism” by established allies, especially in Latin America. U.S. diplomats assiduously discouraged Latin American governments from attending the Belgrade parley. In the end, Mexico declined to participate, while Bolivia, Ecuador, and Brazil sent observers only.65 U.S. policy thereby confirms the Cubans’ belief that Washington sought to divide Latin America from the rest of the Third World—the latest episode in a long tradition of trying to insulate the Western Hemisphere from Old World influences, going back to the conception of the Monroe Doctrine in the 1820s.

A MINREX paper on Cuba’s objectives, written between the preparatory talks in June and the start of the Belgrade summit on September 1, develops Cuba’s goals in more detail and shows that the struggle with the United States dominated the country’s approach to nonalignment, but not to the exclusion of a wider worldview. Cuba’s “essential objective” was to “obtain the support of the Afro-Asian countries in condemning North American imperialism in its systematic policy of all types of aggression against Cuba.” The Cubans hoped to see the conference “condemn imperialism, such that the fundamental weight of this just measure falls on the United States.” Specifically, Cuba’s delegates were to secure the conference’s condemnation of U.S. violations of Cuban air and naval space; of the “subversion and harassment” the United States perpetrated against Cuba directly and by supporting counterrevolutionaries; of the U.S. policy of economic “discrimination and aggression” against Cuba; and of the presence of foreign military bases, such as the Guantánamo Bay naval station, in the former colonial world. Along with these items specific to Cuba, the ministry also hoped to secure resolutions condemning apartheid in South Africa and racial discrimination everywhere (including the United States), endorsing the People’s Republic for the China seat at the UN, and supporting the independence movements in Portuguese Guinea, Angola, Southwest Africa, British Guiana, and Puerto Rico. The concept of “peaceful coexistence,” Cuba asserted, was “one and indivisible” and should apply not just to relations among the great powers but also between them and small countries.66 Cuban objectives, therefore, were at once particular to itself and global in scope.

Dorticós and Roa, leading Cuba’s delegation to Belgrade, fought for these positions both publicly and in private sessions.67 Addressing the conference, Dorticós noted that Cuba had worked for two years to make nonaligned and underdeveloped countries’ voices heard on the world stage and took the opportunity “to draw special attention to that initiative of the Cuban Government … to convene an international meeting of the under-industrialized countries.” As head of the only full Latin American delegation, Dorticós reminded the attendees “that the problems of the struggle against imperialism and for the liquidation of colonialism and neocolonialism take place not only in Asia and in Africa, but also in Latin America.” This movement’s ultimate goal, Dorticós argued, must be “the liquidation of colonialism, of neocolonialism and of imperialist exploitation,” which could come only by abandoning “diplomatic dissimulation” and confronting their concrete expressions in the policies of the imperialist powers, chiefly the United States, whose aggressions Dorticós catalogued indignantly.68 The New York Times reported that both in tone and on specific issues, Dorticós’s address was the most confrontational toward the United States and closest to Soviet positions of all.69 This also held true behind the scenes. Roa later told MINREX officials that he and Dorticós had “moved among different delegations to slow down [Western] propaganda” against the Soviet nuclear-weapons test conducted just before the summit, helping soften speeches and avert resolutions that would have criticized Moscow’s policy.70

Cuban diplomats deemed Belgrade a success. The conference declaration stated that the Guantánamo base “affects the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Cuba. In addition to the general statement upholding countries’ right of self-determination without outside “intimidation, interference, or intervention,” Cuba secured a specific statement that “the participating countries believe that the right of Cuba as of any other nation to freely choose their political and social systems in accordance with their own conditions, needs, and possibilities should be respected.”71 A MINREX assessment concluded that on issues specific to Cuba and its struggle with the United States, Belgrade was “a scene of victory for our cause.”72

Equally encouraging were the prospects for relations between the Third World and the socialist world. The MINREX Yugoslavia desk concluded that even where some resolutions fell short due to Indian or Yugoslav efforts to moderate or block them, the general sentiments and specific positions of most delegations on Cold War and colonial issues—including UN reform, the definition of peaceful coexistence, Algerian independence, and recognition of East Germany—“coincide in their fundamentals with the points of view of the socialist camp.” The Cuban delegation’s efforts, in tandem with those of Indonesia, Ghana, and especially Guinea and Mali, were judged to have “played a decisive role in the achievement of these positive results.”73

Most importantly, “the imperialists” and their Non-Aligned collaborators, chiefly moderate India and “revisionist” Yugoslavia, “failed in their attempts to define and bind together a neutral ‘third bloc’ and to define it as being in opposition to ‘the two blocs,’ a well-known definition that would situate the USSR and the socialist camp in the same position as the imperialists.”74 This “specter” of equivalence and equidistance between imperialism and socialism, Roa reported, had been roundly opposed, as was crucial for Cuba’s interests.75 Instead, another MINREX paper concluded, “The leaders present at Belgrade made it clear that they are not in favor of the integration of the so-called ‘third position,’ that this does not apply where there are no neutral men nor neutral states. Simply put, the peoples that went to Belgrade represented but one camp, that of the peoples all over the world with no possibility but condemnation for the imperialist system, and not of adopting a neutral posture towards it.” This attitude, the author predicted, “will permit the countries present at Belgrade to unite themselves with the socialist countries and dictate the majority opinion” at future UN General Assembly sessions, where the Second and Third World anti-imperialist camp, if united, held a commanding majority. All of this, of course, represented a defeat for the United States.76

The period between the first NAM summit in Belgrade in September 1961 and the second summit in Cairo in October 1964 would, however, sorely test Cuba’s efforts to bridge the Second and Third Worlds and the four continents of Asia, Africa, (Eastern) Europe and (Latin) America. First, Cuba’s promotion of militant revolution at home and abroad soured its relations with its Latin American neighbors. In December 1961 Fidel declared that he was, and would always be, a Marxist-Leninist, an ideology that was to guide the building of a unified revolutionary party-state and the construction of socialism and eventually communism in Cuba. This ideological program combined with charges that Cuba was supporting subversive movements in several Latin American countries led the OAS to vote, narrowly, to suspend Cuba in January 1962.77

Soon after, Khrushchev proposed stationing Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, which Castro accepted both as a means of deterring an expected U.S. invasion and as Cuba’s strategic contribution to global socialism. The two governments, in secret, signed an agreement providing Cuba a Soviet guarantee against U.S. aggression, intending to make this military pact public along with the missiles once the latter were operational and Khrushchev visited Cuba at the end of 1962.78 The ensuing Missile Crisis, when exposure of the missiles by the United States revealed that Castro and Khrushchev had provocatively escalated the Cold War nuclear confrontation, further distanced Cuba’s government from those of Latin America; the OAS called unanimously for the missiles’ withdrawal, and Castro’s strongest regional critics, such as Betancourt, used the crisis to call for further action against Havana.79 The discovery in late 1963 of a cache of weapons buried on a Venezuelan beach—supplied, Betancourt said, by Havana to bolster Venezuela’s left-wing insurgency—provided the final straw for Cuba in the hemisphere: in July 1964, the OAS called on all members who had not already done so to sever diplomatic, commercial, and travel connections with Cuba. Though Mexico (and nonmember Canada) did not comply, Cuba’s isolation in the Americas had reached its most severe point.80

Meanwhile, Khrushchev’s decision—made without consulting the Cubans—to withdraw the missiles in exchange for Kennedy’s pledge not to invade Cuba and to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey infuriated the Cuban leadership and much of the Cuban public, none of whom trusted Kennedy’s word. Their secret defense pact was essentially voided without ever being announced, and the undiscovered Soviet tactical nuclear weapons and combat troops were removed, leaving Cuba indefensible against a U.S. invasion. The Cubans could never fully trust that Moscow would come to their aid from afar against the United States if it meant risking superpower war. Soviet documents reveal that the Cuban leadership continued pushing in 1963 for a formal military alliance, but Khrushchev refused, believing that Castro was too unreliable to join the Warsaw Pact or a bilateral alliance and that such a public commitment would only assist anti-Castro propagandists.81 A further source of acrimony was Havana’s adherence to a revolutionary foreign policy, whose emphasis on immediate, armed struggle in Latin America and elsewhere contradicted Moscow’s position of peaceful competition with the capitalist states and the gradual building of socialism in the underdeveloped world. Sino-Soviet competition in the Third World exacerbated this tension, as the Cubans, despite being dependent on Soviet aid and trade, were ideologically and tactically closer to the more militant Chinese. For these and other reasons, Cuban-Soviet relations remained delicate into 1968.82

Cuba therefore approached the second Non-Aligned summit in Cairo in the fall of 1964 in a precarious position. It was estranged from the United States and Latin America and branded a de facto member of the Soviet bloc because of its Marxism-Leninism and economic dependence on Moscow. But from Cuba’s point of view, Moscow’s commitment was unreliable. They shared diplomatic and political interests and trade deals; but while their military agreements provided Cuba with Soviet weapons and technical assistance, they did not bind Moscow to defend Cuba as an ally.83 Cuba’s relationship with the nonaligned and the imperative to reconcile the Second and Third Worlds and push both in a radical anti-imperialist direction, had therefore become simultaneously more important and more challenging.

Throughout the buildup to the second summit in Cairo, Cuba’s claim to Non-Aligned status was more contested than in 1961. In late January 1964, as Nasser and Tito prepared to issue invitations, Roa wrote to Castro that “the African ambassadors [in Havana] take Cuba’s participation as a given, as do the socialist ones.”84 The Chinese ambassador told Roa’s deputy that Beijing urged Cuba and the other “countries of the left” within the NAM to participate “with the goal of encouraging the Conference toward the revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggle.”85 But officials of some NAM members, including India, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Yugoslavia, and even Ghana, questioned, sometimes obliquely and sometimes directly, Cuba’s claim to Non-Aligned status.86 The Soviet missiles, Cuba’s chargé in Cairo reported, were the main point raised in these arguments.87 In the end, the sponsors Tito, Nasser, and Srimavo Bandarainake of Ceylon decided to invite all those who had attended Belgrade, thereby grandfathering in Cuba. The decision, ratified at the preparatory ministers’ meeting in Colombo, resolved to add all other independent Arab and African states and others, including Latin Americans, on a case-by-case basis.88 The State Department noted ruefully that South American countries facing Cuban-backed or -inspired insurgencies, especially Venezuela, had the strongest case for disputing Cuba’s claim to Non-Alignment with international Communism, but that their delegates, as nonvoting observers, were reluctant to force the issue.89

The U.S. view was unambiguous. By 1964 the Johnson administration had arrived at a hierarchy of desirable thematic and institutional frameworks for Third World internationalism: it supported a Third World organized around the concept of economic development and centered on the UN, followed less desirably by what they termed a “genuine” nonalignment independent of and equidistant from both superpowers and their allies and working toward peaceful and (from the U.S. point of view) constructive solutions to the Cold War, colonialism, and underdevelopment. Militant revolutionary anti-imperialism of the Cuban and Chinese varieties, as embodied in Havana’s vision for the NAM and Beijing’s project for a “Second Bandung” conference, were to be opposed above all.90 So, too, was any drift toward “neutralism” by U.S. allies, especially in Latin America, and so U.S. diplomats again discouraged all OAS members from associating themselves with Cuba, and weakening the OAS and UN, by attending the Cairo summit. All U.S. overseas posts were instructed in July to argue that Cuba’s participation would delegitimize the entire NAM, being “a travesty on ‘nonalignment’ label” that raised “serious doubts as to real motives and validity of avowed conference objectives.”91 Despite these arguments, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela all ended up attending as observers.

For Cuba, the objectives remained mostly the same as in 1961, with a few additions given the changing international context. The fundamental objective was again securing the maximum solidarity for Cuba and condemnation of the United States for its various coercive actions in the diplomatic, economic, military, and covert spheres, reaffirming the resolutions taken at Belgrade. The new goals included gaining the conference’s condemnation of the OAS actions against Cuba and its endorsement for Cuban admission to the newly formed G-77 at the UN, where the Latin American caucus was blocking its membership.92 Having once again opposed—unsuccessfully, this time—an invitation to Venezuela, which had led the OAS charge against Cuba, Havana hoped to question the Venezuelan government’s right to attend and to secure a resolution endorsing the “national liberation movement” there, along with those in Vietnam, Portuguese Africa, the Congo, British Guiana, and Puerto Rico.93

As U.S. intelligence analysts reasoned, “Cuba’s interest in pressing its claim to ‘nonaligned’ [and not Soviet client] status and its desire to take a position of leadership among underdeveloped countries in the ‘anti-imperialist revolution’ are goals that may be difficult to reconcile.”94 In one example, Roa, unbeknownst to Washington, proposed to his Indonesian counterpart Subandrio to hold a meeting of “like-minded”—that is, militantly anti-imperialist and Communist-backed or pro-Communist—foreign ministers in Cairo to coordinate on the eve of the summit; but Subandrio, Roa reported, declined, arguing that creating a new “bloc” within the NAM was not “politically appropriate.”95 Such a leftists’ caucus would likely have alienated more moderate NAM members.

The attendance of Venezuela highlights this central dilemma for Cuba in its militant approach to the NAM at this time of maximum vulnerability. Cuba’s diplomats had made clear that they considered Venezuela’s invitation “an unfriendly act” against Cuba.96 “Our opposition [to Venezuela’s claim to nonalignment] is even more unyielding [irreductible] after the Meeting of Ministers of the OAS, in which it played the repugnant role of North American imperialism’s attack dog” in pushing for sanctions on Cuba, Roa wrote in August. He instructed that in discussing the upcoming summit with host governments, “attacking Venezuela will be the primary issue.”97

Fearing that Dorticós and Roa would disrupt the proceedings over the presence of the Venezuelan observer or the issue of the Venezuelan insurgents’ legitimacy, Egyptian, Indian, and Yugoslav diplomats all warned Cuba’s representatives in Cairo not to threaten the entire summit over what was, to them, a minor and parochial issue. “Cuba should understand,” the Yugoslavs chided one embassy official, “that [the Cubans] are not the only ones attending the Conference.”98 Upon arriving in Cairo, Roa took pains to reassure his Yugoslav and Egyptian counterparts that Cuba’s objections to Venezuela’s presence would be appropriately diplomatic. Cuba’s case, moreover, “is not local, nor even regional, but rather of global character,” Roa argued, since the OAS actions were, he alleged, preparing the ground for a U.S. invasion that would violate the UN Charter and threaten the entire postwar global order.99 In the event, Cuba’s “unyielding” opposition had its limits. Dorticós and Venezuela’s delegate each cast doubt on the other’s nonalignment; the Cubans walked out at the start of the Venezuelan’s speech, but did not quit the conference entirely, and matters escalated no further.100

Dorticós again made the case for Cuba’s view of nonalignment as revolutionary anti-imperialism. Cuba, he told the conference, had the right to participate since it was uncommitted to any military bloc. However, he explained, “this does not mean for Cuba, and should not mean for any country participating here, a neutral position” in world affairs. Rather, Dorticós elaborated, “We reject equidistance” in the binary struggles of the contemporary international scene: peace versus war; political and economic independence versus imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism; social equality versus racial discrimination; development versus exploitation. Lasting peace, he argued, would be possible only “when the last remnant of exploitation … and imperialist domination disappears from the face of the Earth.”101

The second NAM summit had a more left-leaning and militant tenor than the first, focusing more on anti-imperialism than on themes of world peace, disarmament, or development. The final declaration affirmed the Cuban positions that “peaceful coexistence is an indivisible whole” and that “imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism constitute a basic source of international tension and conflict.” It urged that “all necessary political, moral, and material assistance be rendered to the liberation movements” in Africa, Palestine, and the Arabian Peninsula. It also “condemn[ed] the manifestations of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Latin America” and upheld Latin American and Caribbean peoples’ right to self-determination, particularly in British Guiana, the French possessions, and Puerto Rico. The U.S. embargo against Cuba was criticized as “contrary to the principles of international law and peaceful coexistence,” and the Guantánamo base was unambiguously labeled “a violation of Cuba’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”102

Both the Cuban and U.S. foreign services considered the Cairo summit another success for Havana’s diplomacy. In his notes on the outcome, Roa concluded that Cuba had achieved “the approval, without objections or reservations, of the questions referring to Cuba” and, more broadly, “acceptance of all the principles and proposals supported by Cuba.”103 State Department analysts likewise concluded that the summit had a “generally anti-Western tone,” with the United States and its allies criticized explicitly for specific policies while the Soviet bloc was subjected to no similar treatment. “As presently constituted,” one analysis concluded, “the nonaligned movement should be regarded as useful from the Soviet Union’s point of view,” given the Second and Third Worlds’ convergence on anti-imperialism and the success of the NAM’s leftists—Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Algeria, Indonesia, and Cuba—in contesting the moderating influence of India, Yugoslavia, and Egypt. The Cubans, meanwhile, “probably are right in their jubilant conclusion that they have ‘arrived’ among the nonaligned,” given that their presence at the meeting was largely uncontested, their views of nonalignment were largely accepted, and their specific complaints against the United States were endorsed again.104 Choosing to look beyond Cuba’s hemispheric ostracism, Roa called U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba a “spectacular failure” and concluded that “Cuba’s international position today is more solid than ever: it not only has the fraternal support of the socialist camp, but also the active backing of the forty-seven countries that attended the Conference, formally committed to make the principles and declarations formulated in Cairo into tangible reality.”105

Conclusion

Cuba’s international position by the mid-1960s, therefore, exemplifies the tension between pragmatic engagement and revolutionary transformation. Years of diplomatic outreach to the Third World had made the country an accepted and influential voice in the NAM, whose positions on global issues of the Cold War, anti-imperialism, and peaceful coexistence and on the local issue of U.S.-Cuban relations increasingly agreed with Cuba’s. And yet, Cuba’s revolutionary fervor and Marxism-Leninism at home and support for revolutionary insurrection abroad had isolated it from practically all of Latin America and led to the failure of its Conference of Underdeveloped Countries initiative and its exclusion from the OAS and the G-77 and Latin-American caucuses at the UN.

Three conferences held in Havana between December 1964 and August 1967—the first a secret meeting of Latin American Communist parties, the second the Tricontinental Conference in January 1966, and finally the OLAS conference—demonstrated Havana’s unwavering commitment to the armed struggle, particularly in Latin America. The Tricontinental and OLAS conferences associated Cuba with the Communist-front Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), and pushed this organization, too, into yet more militant channels that made even Moscow and Cairo, to say nothing of the governments of the Western Hemisphere, uncomfortable.106

The limits of national liberation under the framework of moderate nonalignment during the early 1960s encouraged to the growth of more radical forms of anti-imperialism. In January 1966, supported by Marxist and militant revolutionary organizations throughout the Third World, Cuba launched the Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Africa, Asia y América Latina (OSPAAAL, Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America). Known as the Tricontinental, OSPAAAL brought the leaders of radical Third World states together with armed liberation movements throughout the Global South. Here on the dais sit (from left to right), Ghanaian Vice President John Tettegah; Secretary General of Egypt’s Afro-Asian Writers’ Association Yousseff El-Sebai; Cuban officials including Defense Minister Raúl Castro, Prime Minister Fidel Castro, President Osvaldo Dórticos, and Foreign Minister Raúl Roa; Pedro Medina Silva, Vice President of Venezuela’s National Liberation Army; and the second-in-command of the Vietcong, Nguyen Van Tien. (Image courtesy of Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images.)

Ideologically, there was no contradiction for the Cuban leadership in endorsing the via armada of revolutionary liberation and socialism, on the one hand, and nonalignment, on the other. But Cuba paid a steep price for this revolutionary ardor. The U.S. embargo and covert program continued to harass the island. Leftist militancy in Latin America empowered reactionaries to prosecute relentless counterrevolutionary campaigns against leftist enemies—real or exaggerated—from Mexico to the Southern Cone, leaving right-wing and military forces in control of most of the region by the end of the decade.107 And Cuba’s militancy continued to strain its relations with Moscow, which was seeking deeper commercial and diplomatic relations with many of the same Latin American governments Castro hoped to see overthrown. Only by winding down its support for armed revolution in Latin America, particularly after Che Guevara’s martyrdom in Bolivia in 1967, did Havana begin to repair its relations with its neighbors and with Moscow and to reverse its hemispheric isolation.108 Gradually reestablishing its diplomatic relationships in Latin America in the early 1970s would allow Cuba to take fuller advantage of its position in the NAM and to aspire to play the leading role in bridging continents within the Third World and working to unite the Global South and the socialist world in the 1970s, a role its policymakers had in fact envisioned for the country since 1959.109

Notes

  1. 1. Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1975–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

  2. 2. In the 1970s and 1980s, political scientists showed some interest in the topic. Jorge I. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 219–47; Rozita Levi, “Cuba and the Non-Aligned Movement,” in Cuba in the World, ed. Cole Blasier and Carmelo Mesa-Lago (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979), 147–51.

  3. 3. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007): xv.

  4. 4. Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 423–30.

  5. 5. U.S. Embassy (hereafter USE) Cairo, embassy telegram (hereafter embtel) 3846, 1 July 1959, Folder 350, Box 98, USE Havana Classified General Records 1940–1961, Record Group (hereafter RG) 84, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA); “Declaraciones del Che en Bombay,” Diario de la Marina (hereafter DDLM), 18 July 1959; “Negocia Guevara Relaciones Diplomáticas con Indonesia,” DDLM, 31 July 1959; Embassy of the United Kingdom (hereafter UKE), Belgrade letter 10337 to Foreign Office (hereafter FO) Southern Department, 26 August 1959; AK 10392/1, FO 371/139427, United Kingdom National Archives (hereafter UKNA); translation of article in Borba (Belgrade), 22 August 1959, Folder “Che en la ONU,” Fondo Ernesto Che Guevara, Archive of the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Havana (hereafter MINREX).

  6. 6. Department of State (hereafter DOS) Bureau of Intelligence and Research (hereafter INR), Intelligence Information Brief 187, “ ‘Che’ Guevara and Cuba’s Mission to Afro-Asian Countries,” 12 August 1959, Folder 350, Box 98, USE Havana Classified General Records 1940–1961, RG84, NARA. Had U.S. officials known that Che had met secretly with Soviet KGB officers stationed in certain cities on his tour, they would likely have taken an even weightier view of his mission. Anderson, Che Guevara, 428–29.

  7. 7. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, “América desde el balcón afroasiático,” Humanismo (September/October 1959), http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2014/01/27/america-desde-el-balcon-afroasiatico-un-articulo-del-che-poco-divulgado/#.WLIaHxiZOi4.

  8. 8. Quoted in “Lo que pretendemos es una planificación industrial,” Revolución, 15 September 1959, 1.

  9. 9. Author’s interview with Raúl Roa Kourí, Havana, 7 February 2017.

  10. 10. Josué de Castro, The Geography of Hunger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952). First published in Portuguese as Geografia da Fome in 1948, the book had been translated into Spanish, English, French, Italian, and Russian editions published abroad by the mid-1950s.

  11. 11. Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 37–134, esp. 59.

  12. 12. “Texto completo del discurso de Raúl Roa,” Revolución, 25 September 1959, 1. See also “Cuba en la ONU,” Carteles 40, no. 40 (1959): 21.

  13. 13. “En Cuba: Los países del hambre,” Bohemia 52, no. 3 (1960): 69–70; “Cuba Promoting ‘3D Bloc’ Parley,” New York Times, 3 January 1960, 7.

  14. 14. Roy R. Rubottom Jr. (Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs), memo to the Undersecretary for Political Affairs, “Developments on the Cuban Political Scene in November,” 27 November 1959, Folder “Cuba September-December 1959,” Box 1, American Republics Affairs (hereafter ARA) Assistant Secretary Subject Files, 1959–1962, Lots 62D418 and 64D15, RG59, NARA.

  15. 15. Hugh S. Cuming Jr. (DOS-INR), “The Present Situation in Cuba and Outlook through 1960,” 11 December 1959, Folder “Cuba General 1960 (2 of 2),” Box 3, ARA-Caribbean and Mexican Affairs, Subject Files 1957–62, Lot 63D67, RG59, NARA.

  16. 16. Rubottom memo to European (Kohler) and Near Eastern Affairs (Hart) Bureaus, “Cuba and ‘Positive Neutralism,’ ” December 21, 1959, Folder “Cuba September–December 1959,” Box 1, ARA Assistant Secretary Subject Files, Lots 62D418 and 64D15, RG 59, NARA, emphasis in original.

  17. 17. “En Cuba: Los países del hambre”; “En Cuba: Esfuerzo y Trabajo,” Bohemia 52, no. 4 (22 January 1960): 65.

  18. 18. USE Baghdad (Jernegan), embtel 1719, 28 January 1960, and USE Tehran (Wailes), embtel 1710, 3 February 1960, both in Folder 310 (Conf of Under-Dev Countries 1959–1960), Box 94, USE Havana Classified General Records 1940–61, RG84, NARA (hereafter cited as Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA).

  19. 19. Leví Marrero and Carlos Lechuga, letter to Roa, enclosing “Informe sobre la Misión realizada por los Embajadores Marrero y Lechuga,” n.d. [ca. 18 February 1960], papers of Carlos Lechuga, private archive of Lillian Lechuga, Havana. This report is cited hereafter as “Informe.” I am grateful to Lechuga’s daughter Lillian for sharing this document with me.

  20. 20. USE Accra (Flake), embtel 676, 10 March 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  21. 21. In December Cuba announced that it had established relations with Ghana and Tunisia, upgraded its mission in the Philippines to embassy status, and initiated talks to establish relations with Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Afghanistan, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, the Malay Federation, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. USE Havana (Daniel Braddock, Chargé a.i.) despatch 1038, 28 January, 1960, 637.00/1-2860, Box 1329, Central Files 1960–63, RG59, NARA.

  22. 22. “En Cuba: Los países del hambre”; “Proyección de la Reunión de los Países Subdesarrollados,” Revolución, 11 January 1960, 6; Marrero and Lechuga, “Informe.”

  23. 23. A copy of the memo is included in Marrero and Lechuga, “Informe.” See also USE Havana (Braddock), embtel 1571, 6 January 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA; Mexican Embassy (hereafter EmbaMex) Havana (Ambassador Gilberto Bosques) memo to Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (hereafter SRE), “Iniciativa Cubana para Conferencia Países Sub-Industrializados,” 6 January 1960, XII-606-/8, SRE Archive, Mexico City (hereafter SREMEX).

  24. 24. USE Havana (Braddock), embtel 1560, 5 January 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  25. 25. DOS (Acting Secretary C. Douglas Dillon), telegram 878 to all ARA posts, Athens, Belgrade, and twenty-five African and Asian posts, 6 January 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  26. 26. USE Mexico, “Aide-Memoire” to Foreign Minister Manuel Tello, 12 January 1960, XII-606-/8, SREMEX.

  27. 27. USE Rio de Janeiro (Ambassador John M. Cabot), embtel 981, 4 January 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  28. 28. DOS (Dillon), Department telegram (hereafter deptel) 761 to USE Rio (repeated Cairo, Havana), 7 January 1960, Folder 320 (Cuba January 1960), Box 123, USE Rio Classified General Records 1941–1963, RG 84, NARA.

  29. 29. USE Rio (Cabot), embtel 1009, 9 January 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  30. 30. Memorandum of Discussion at the 432nd Meeting of the National Security Council, 14 January 1960, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–60, vol. 6, Cuba (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991), document 423 (hereafter cited as FRUS with years, volume, and document number).

  31. 31. Memorandum of Discussion at the Department of State—Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting, 8 January 1960, FRUS 1958–60, 6:419. Operations Coordinating Board, “Activity Report,” January 11, 1960, Folder “OCB 319.1 Activity Report (File #6) (3),” Box 10, National Security Council Staff Papers 1948–61, White House Office File, Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KA.

  32. 32. DOS memorandum of conversation (hereafter memcon), Leonard Unger (DCM, USE Bangkok) with Faust Cardona (Chargé, Brazilian Embassy Bangkok), 23 January 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  33. 33. USE Rio (Cabot), embtel 1116, 28 January 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  34. 34. Marrero and Lechuga, “Informe”; SRE [Tello?], “Memorandum para información del Señor Presidente,” 12 January 1960, XII-606-/8, SREMEX; USE Guatemala City (Corrigan), embtel 278, 13 January 1960, USE San Salvador (Kalijarvi), embtel 178, 14 January 1960, USE Tegucigalpa (Newbegin), embtel 309, 16 January 1960, and USE San José (Willauer), embtel 254, 18 January 1960, all in Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  35. 35. Lechuga and Marrero, “Informe.”

  36. 36. Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anti-Communism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 108–10.

  37. 37. Lechuga and Marrero, “Informe.”

  38. 38. DOS memcon, “Operation Pan America and XI Inter-American Conference,” Herter, Rubottom, and Boonstra with Lafer and Brazilian Ambassador Moreira Salles, Washington, 18 March 1960, Folder 311 (“Operation Pan America 1959–60”), Box 95, USE Havana Classified General Records 1940–61, RG84, NARA; ARA briefing paper, “President’s Good Will Trip to South America: Quito Conference and the Alternatives,” 11 February 1960, Folder “Briefing Papers Cuba 1960 (2 of 3),” Box 2, ARA/Coordinator of Cuban Affairs Subject Files, Lot 63D91, RG59, NARA

  39. 39. SRE [Tello?] “Memorandum para Información del Señor Presidente,” 12 January 1960; Tello letter 120590 to Roa, 12 January 1960, Jorge Castañeda (Dirección General de Organismos Internacionales), memo 120419 to Chargé, Misión Permanente of Mexico at UN, 25 January 1960, and Amb. Eduardo Espinosa Prieto (Rep. Alterno, EmbaMex UN), letter to Tello, 2 February 1960, SRE circular telegram (hereafter cirtel) 120468 to all Latin American embassies, 5 April 1960, all in XII-606-/8, SREMEX; USE Mexico City (Hill), airgram G-124, 13 January 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  40. 40. Thomas J. Hamilton, “Most Latins to Shun Cuban Economic Parley,” New York Times, 7 March 1960, 1.

  41. 41. Amb. Eduardo Espinosa y Prieto (Chargé, EmbaMex UN), despatch 560 to SRE, 16 May 1960, Espinosa telegram 85 to SRE, 18 May 1960, and despatch 569, 19 May 1960, enclosing Manuel Bisbé (Cuban Ambassador to UN), note #184 to Luís Padilla Nervo (Mexican Ambassador to UN), 17 May 1960, and SRE (Castañeda) instruction #122486 to Espinosa, 26 May 1960, all in XII-606-/8, SREMEX.

  42. 42. “Declaración Conjunta de los Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores de Cuba y Venezuela,” Caracas, 31 March 1960, Folder “Venezuela 1960 Ordinario,” Fondo Venezuela, MINREX.

  43. 43. Rómulo Betancourt letter to Osvaldo Dorticós, 30 March 1960; Tomo XXXVII, Complemento D, Rómulo Betancourt Papers, Fundación Rómulo Betancourt, Caracas.

  44. 44. Betancourt letter to Rafael Caldera, 30 March 1960; Tomo XXXVII, Complemento D, Rómulo Betancourt Papers, Fundación Rómulo Betancourt, Caracas.

  45. 45. USE Caracas (Sparks), embtel 968, 10 June 1960, 737.00/6-1060, Box 1603, CDF1960–3, RG59, NARA.

  46. 46. USE Buenos Aires (Ambassador Willard Beaulac), memcon, Cecilio Morales (Economic Director, Pan American Union), with Beaulac, 1 February 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  47. 47. USE Cairo (Anschuetz), embtel 2192, 19 January 1960, Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA; UKE Havana letter 11212/60 to FO-A, April 5, 1960, AK 11316/3, FO 371/148247, UKNA.

  48. 48. Marrero, cable #129 to Cuban Embassy in Washington and Cuban missions to OAS and UN, 16 May 1960, with text of joint communiqué signed by Castro and Sukarno on 13 May, Legajo 35, Expediente 639, Fondo MINREX, Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana; “Coinciden Indonesia y Cuba en su posición anticolonialista,” Revolución, 14 May 1960, 1; “Cuba no está sola,” Revolución, 14 May 1960, 2;

  49. 49. DOS-INR, paper “INR Contribution to NIE 85-2-60 Subject: The Situation in Cuba,” 2 May 1960, U.S. Declassified Documents Online, http://tinyurl.gale.com/tinyurl/C44TH9.

  50. 50. DOS-INR, paper “INR Contribution to NIE 85-2-60 Subject.”

  51. 51. “Conclusiones del informe de los Embajadores Carlos Lechuga y Leví Marrero,” in Marrero and Lechuga, “Informe.”

  52. 52. DOS (Herter) circular telegram 989, 6 February 1960 (no addressees appear on this copy of the cable, but it likely went to all ARA posts and most African and Asian posts), DOS (Henderson), airgram CA-8872 to all ARA posts, 26 April 1960, both in Folder 310, Box 94, RG84, NARA.

  53. 53. On these conferences see Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 216–22.

  54. 54. Castro quoted in Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 117.

  55. 55. G. H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 283–84.

  56. 56. These documents were created at the working and planning levels, by ambassadors in the field and, mostly, by regional bureaus and vice-ministers in Havana, the ministry’s policy-planning section (the Instituto de Política Internacional), and Foreign Minister Roa and his assistants. Documents created by and for senior figures including Fidel and Raúl Castro, Dorticós, and Guevara either remain classified at the MINREX or are in the archive of the Council of State, which is not open to researchers.

  57. 57. Jansen, Afro-Asia, 280–84. On the foundations of the first summit, see Lorenz M. Lüthi, “Non-Alignment, 1946–1965: Its Establishment and Struggle against Afro-Asianism,” Humanity 7, no. 2 (2016): 208–10.

  58. 58. Cuban embassy (hereafter EmbaCu) Cairo (Ambassador Armando G. Rivera), despatch 94 to MINREX, 21 May 1961, Fondo Asuntos Multilaterales, Serie 22: Movimiento de los Países No Alineados, MINREX. The three boxes from this series dealing with the period 1961–64 are unnumbered. Documents are often undated, and folders often untitled. More precise citations are not possible.

  59. 59. “Roa Asks Neutrals to Meet in Havana,” New York Times, 7 June 1961, 5.

  60. 60. “Informe Final de la Reunión Preparatoria de la Conferencia de Jefes de Estado o Gobierno de Países No Alineados,” 12 June 1961, Serie 22, MINREX. This document is also published as “Report, Preparatory Meeting of Representatives of the Non-Aligned Countries, Cairo, June 5–12, 1961,” in The Third World without Superpowers: The Collected Documents of the Non-Aligned Countries, ed. Odette Jankowitsch and Karl P. Sauvant (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1978), 1:33–39.

  61. 61. Jansen, Afro-Asia, 289–90. Jansen’s based his book on his experience in India’s foreign service and on interviews with fellow nonaligned diplomats.

  62. 62. MINREX, “Informe Sobre el Colonialismo y el Neocolonialismo,” 16 August 1961, Serie 22, MINREX.

  63. 63. Whereas Havana hoped that Belgrade would pull Latin America to the Left, India’s Jawaharlarl Nehru saw broad Latin American participation as a way to moderate the conference’s politics. Ryan A. Musto, “Non-Alignment and Beyond: India’s Interest in Latin America, 1961–72,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 29, no. 4 (2018): 613–37.

  64. 64. Cuba’s role here is synthesized from Jansen, Afro-Asia, 286–90; Vanni Pettiná, “Global Horizons: Mexico, the Third World, and the Non-Aligned Movement at the Time of the 1961 Belgrade Conference,” International History Review 38, no. 4 (2014): 741–64; CIA Office of Current Intelligence (hereafter OCI) Weekly Summary OCI #0287/61, 6 July 1961, CIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79-00927A003200110001-6.pdf; CIA, OCI, memo, “The Nonaligned Nations Conference,” August 7, 1961, Declassified Documents Reference Service database (hereafter DDRS).

  65. 65. Pettiná, “Global Horizons”; James G. Hershberg, “ ‘High-Spirited Confusion’: Brazil, the 1961 Belgrade Non-Aligned Conference, and the Limits of an ‘Independent’ Foreign Policy in the High Cold War,” Cold War History 7, no. 3 (2007): 373–88; Robert B. Rakove, “Two Roads to Belgrade: The United States, Great Britain, and the First Nonaligned Conference,” Cold War History 14, no. 3 (2014): 337–57; Robert B. Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Non-Aligned World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 70–72.

  66. 66. “Objetivos de Cuba en la Conferencia de Países No Alineados,” n.d. [August 1961], Serie 22, MINREX.

  67. 67. The available Cuban documents do not address why Dorticós, rather than Prime Minister Castro, the Revolution’s dominant leader, represented Cuba at Belgrade in 1961 and Cairo in 1964. Concerns over domestic security in Cuba and/or Castro’s safety abroad may have been factors. A Cuban diplomat in Europe told the CIA that Roa had told him that Castro canceled his plans to attend the Cairo summit for fear that Cuban exiles and the CIA would stage an attack in Cuba in order to influence the upcoming U.S. election; CIA Intelligence Information Cable, “Fidel Castro’s Concern that Cuban Exiles Will Mount a Provocative Attack against Cuba before the United States Election,” 13 October 1964, Document 69, Folder “Cuba Exile Activities, Volume 1 11/63-7/65 (2 of 3),” Box 22, National Security Files (hereafter NSF), Country File, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter LBJL). It is also possible that the sober, lawyerly Dorticós was considered a better advocate in speeches and working sessions for Cuba’s intended self-presentation—as an aggrieved and unbowed, but dignified and reasonable, socialist and anti-imperialist country—than the charismatic but mercurial Castro, and a better complement to the often pugnacious Roa. As historian Hugh Thomas observed a few years after these events, Dorticós gave the revolutionary government “stability, continuity, and formality on the occasions that such things were needed”; Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1234.

  68. 68. “Texto del discurso pronunciado por el Presidente de Cuba, Doctor Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, en el debate general de la Conferencia de Países no Alineados, en Belgrado, el 2 de septiembre de 1961,” Serie 22, MINREX.

  69. 69. Paul Hofman, “U.S. Is Denounced by Cuban at Talks,” New York Times, 3 September 1961, 3.

  70. 70. MINREX, Dirección de Asuntos Afro-Asiáticos, “Recuento de la charla de Raúl Roa sobre las interioridades de la Conferencia de Belgrado—Despacho del Ministro,” 30 October 1961, Serie 22, MINREX.

  71. 71. Quotations from “Declaration: First Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries,” 6 September 1961, in Jankowitsch and Sauvant, Third World, 3–7. Cuba’s main obstacle in securing these specific resolutions was India. MINREX, Dirección de Asuntos Afro-Asiáticos, “Recuento de la charla de Raúl Roa.”

  72. 72. MINREX paper, “Conferencia de los Países No Alineados en Pactos Militares (Belgrado, Septiembre de 1961),” n.d. [between 5 and 19 September 1961], Serie 22, MINREX.

  73. 73. Dirección de Países Socialistas, Departamento A (Yugoslavia), “Informe Semanal: Conferencia de Países No Alineados en Bloques Militares,” n.d. [ca. 5 September–mid-September 1961), Serie 22, MINREX.

  74. 74. Dirección de Países Socialistas, Departamento A (Yugoslavia), “Informe Semanal.”

  75. 75. MINREX, Dirección de Asuntos Afro-Asiáticos, “Recuento de la charla de Raúl Roa.”

  76. 76. MINREX paper, “Conferencia de los Países No Alineados en Pactos Militares.”

  77. 77. Schoultz, That Infernal, 174–75; Thomas C. Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 60–61.

  78. 78. James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), esp. 35–43 (on the 1962 military pact). Blight and Brenner’s account is based largely on the text of a secret speech that Castro made to the Cuban party leadership in 1968, explaining the origins and course of the Missile Crisis and the vagaries of Cuban-Soviet relations, in which Castro included the text of the pact.

  79. 79. Renata Keller, “The Latin American Missile Crisis,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 2 (2015): 195–222.

  80. 80. Schoultz, That Infernal, 226–29; Wright, Latin America, 60–61.

  81. 81. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1998), 325–34.

  82. 82. Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days; Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 73–101. On the Sino-Soviet context see Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 60–147.

  83. 83. Dorticós reminded the MINREX during preparations for the 1964 NAM summit that “Cuba is a non-aligned country in the sense that it does not have military pacts with other countries. The military agreements with the USSR cover technical assistance. Cuba has no commitments to any bloc of any sort”; Roa, letter to Ambassador Armando Entralgo (EmbaCu Accra), 17 March 1964, Serie 22, MINREX.

  84. 84. Roa, memo to Fidel Castro, 24 January 1964, Serie 22, MINREX.

  85. 85. Vice-Ministro Arnol Rodríguez Camps, memo to Roa, “Conferencia Afro-Asiática, Conferencia de Países No Alineados,” n.d. [ca. May 1964], Serie 22, MINREX. This undated document refers to events as late as the 10–15 April preparatory meeting for the Afro-Asian conference.

  86. 86. EmbaCu Belgrade (Hernández), embtel 17, n.d. [late January/early February 1964], and embtel 30, n.d. [February 1964], EmbaCuba New Delhi (Ortega), embtel 3-C, n.d. [late January/early February 1964], Agustín Canoura Valdés (Chargé a.i., EmbaCu Colombo), despatch to Roa, “Entrevista con el Embajador de la República Árabe Unida,” 4 September 1964, all Serie 22, MINREX.

  87. 87. José Antonio Arbesú (Chargé a.i., EmbaCu Cairo), confidential despatch to Roa, “Conferencia de Países No Alineados,” 10 August 1964, Serie 22, MINREX.

  88. 88. “Preparatory Meeting for the Cairo Summit: Report and Communiqué, Colombo, 23–28 March 1964,” in Jankowitsch and Sauvant, Third World, 65–71.

  89. 89. Thomas L. Hughes (Director, INR), memo to Rusk, INR-40, “The Non-Aligned Conference, the Communist Powers, and the US,” 2 October 1964, DDRS.

  90. 90. Eric Gettig, “ ‘Trouble Ahead in Afro-Asia’: The United States, the Second Bandung Conference, and the Struggle for the Third World, 1964–65,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 1 (2015): 126–56.

  91. 91. DOS, cirtel CA-1212 to all posts, 30 July 1964, enclosed in William J. Jorden memo to Robert Komer, 30 July 1964, Document 23, Folder “Non-Aligned Conference Cairo October 1964,” Box 44, Robert W. Komer File (hereafter RWKF), NSF, LBJL.

  92. 92. Cuba failed to join the G-77 at its founding in June 1964, and the Latin American states, which excluded Cuba from their caucus at the UN after the OAS resolution of July 1964, thereafter blocked its adherence. Cuba’s representative to the UN organs in Geneva called Cuba’s exclusion from the G-77 “dangerous” and even “fatal insofar as international congresses and conferences go”; MINREX memcon, “Reunión Celebrada en el Hotel Nilo Hilton el 29 de Septiembre para Conocer los Puntos de Vista de los Compañeros Presentes en Relación con la II Conferencia de los Países No Alineados,” Roa, Enrique Camejo Argudín (Cuban representative to UN in Geneva), José Luís Pérez (Ambassador, Belgrade), Luís García Guitar (Ambassador, Cairo), Arbesú, and Luís Rodríguez Chaveco (First Secretary, EmbaCu Cairo), September 29, 1964, Serie 22, MINREX. Cuba did not join the G-77 until 1971; Domínguez, To Make a World, 222.

  93. 93. “Proyecto de Objetivos en la Segunda Conferencia de Países No Alineados,” n.d. [ca. 25 August, as indicated by the date-received stamp], Serie 22, MINREX.

  94. 94. Hughes, Research Memorandum INR-41, “Latin American Participation at the Cairo Non-Aligned Conference,” September 28, 1964, Document 19, Folder “Non-Aligned Conference Cairo October 1964,” Box 44, RWKF, NSF, LBJL.

  95. 95. “Entrevista del Dr. Raúl Roa con el Dr. Subandrio, Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de Indonesia,” n.d. [ca. 30 September 1964], Serie 22, MINREX.

  96. 96. “Informe Sobre la Reunión Preparatoria de la Conferencia de Países No Alineados,” 6 May 1964, enclosed in Ricardo Alarcón (chief, Latin America Division), letter to Ambassador Carlos Olivares Sánchez (EmbaCu Moscow), May 6, 1964, Serie 22, MINREX.

  97. 97. Roa letter to Olivares Sánchez, August 6, 1964, Serie 22, MINREX. Identical instructions were sent on this date to Cuba’s embassies in Brussels and Cairo, and most likely to all other posts as well.

  98. 98. MINREX, memcon, “Reunión Celebrada en el Hotel Nilo Hilton el 29 de Septiembre para Conocer los Puntos de Vista de los Compañeros Presentes en Relación con la II Conferencia de los Países No Alineados,” Roa, Enrique Camejo Argudín (Cuban representative to UN in Geneva), José Luís Pérez (Ambassador, Belgrade), Luís García Guitar (Ambassador, Cairo), José Antonio Arbesú (Counselor, EmbaCu Cairo), Luís Rodríguez Chaveco (First Secretary, EmbaCu Cairo), 29 September 1964, Serie 22, MINREX.

  99. 99. “Informe de la Entrevista del Dr. Raúl Roa con el Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de la RAU,” n.d. [ca. 30 September 1964] (quotation), “Conversación con el Ministro Yugoslavo Kocha Popovich,” n.d. [ca. 30 September 1964], both Serie 22, MINREX.

  100. 100. Dorticós said that Venezuela and other OAS members except Mexico were “accomplices of imperialistic strategy” for supporting U.S. policy against Cuba; “Speech of Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, President of Cuba,” in Conference of Heads of State and Government of Non-Aligned Countries, Cairo, 5–10 October 1964 (Cairo: Ministry of National Guidance Information Administration, 1964), 228–38. The Venezuelan observer stated that Cuba had “aligned herself with an ideological and political system which differs from our own concepts”; “Speech of Octavio Lapage, Venezuela,” in Conference of Heads of State and Government of Non-Aligned Countries, Cairo, 5–10 October 1964 (Cairo: Ministry of National Guidance Information Administration, 1964), 322–23. The walkout was reported in Sergio Pineda, “Apoya México las Metas de Libertad y Justicia de los Países No Alineados,” Hoy, 10 October 1964, 1.

  101. 101. “Speech of Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado.”

  102. 102. “Second Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries: Program for Peace and International Cooperation, Cairo, 5–10 October 1964,” in Jankowitsch and Sauvant, Third World, 44–59.

  103. 103. Untitled document, n. d. [ca. 11 October 1964], Serie 22, MINREX (hereafter Roa, “Notes”). This document—which includes typed and handwritten notes on the conference—is unsigned, but the author lists the rest of Cuba’s delegation before ending the list with “y este prójimo [and this fellow],” and reports Roa’s declarations to the press in the first person.

  104. 104. Hughes, memo to Rusk, INR-50, “The Non-Aligned Conference at Cairo,” 16 November 1964, Document 4, Folder “Non-Aligned Conference Cairo—October 1964,” Box 44, RWKF, NSF, LBJL.

  105. 105. Roa, “Notes.”

  106. 106. On these conferences see Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 216–22; David Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement: Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World (New York: Halstead Press, 1973), 126–213.

  107. 107. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World; Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 59–174.

  108. 108. Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days; Tanya Harmer, “Two, Three, Many Revolutions? Cuba and the Prospects for Revolutionary Change in Latin America, 1967–1975,” Journal of Latin American Studies 45, no. 1 (2013): 61–89.

  109. 109. The evidence reviewed here makes the argument that Cuba did not begin trying in earnest to actively draw the nonaligned world closer to the Soviet bloc until the 1970s untenable. See Levi, “Cuba and the Non-Aligned Movement.”