Chapter 11 - Dispatches from Havana : The Cold War, Afro-Asian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan

Summary

Abstract

This chapter traces the journey of Abdullah Malik, a noted writer, journalist, and communist from Pakistan, to the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1968. Through Malik’s account, this chapter ties the Havana Congress to larger debates around culture, socialism, and freedom in Pakistan during the Cold War. In doing so, it documents the significance of international conferences and congresses for progressives given the tense battle of ideas in Pakistan. In that sense, the Havana Congress was not simply an isolated event organized at the behest of Cuba’s revolutionary government. Instead, it was emblematic of a post-Bandung world in which debates over culture, politics, and the future of the Third World were central to the worldview and imagination of progressive intellectuals, writers, artists, and poets.

Keywords: Cold War, Third Worldism, Pakistan, Cuba, progressive writers

For a week in January 1968, socialists from across the world convened in Cuba for the first Cultural Congress of Havana. The Congress was described by one delegate as an ‘international conference’ for ‘enlightened and independent thinkers, communist writers, journalists, artists, scientists, doctors and religious divines’. With over 400 delegates from more than 70 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas, the purpose of this august assembly was to raise a rallying cry against imperialism, and more specifically, American imperialism. Its more immediate concern, however, was to deliberate upon ways in which the ‘malign’ cultural influence of (American) Imperialism could be combatted. The attending delegates made passionate appeals to their fellow intellectuals, artists, and writers across the Third World to combat the pernicious and reactionary cultural influence of the United States and the grotesque role it had played in retarding the development of their arts and literature. Third World intellectuals were also asked to lend their support to the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people against American imperialism. After a week of intense and fractious debates, the conference eventually concluded with a fiery two-hour speech by Fidel Castro who declared the conference, ‘the first of its type’, an unqualified success.

Castro was, however, only half correct. The Congress was certainly the first of its kind to be convened in Havana. It was also, Castro claimed, unique in terms of the diversity of its representation and the unanimity expressed by its delegates against the ‘universal enemy’ of mankind: ‘Yankee Imperialism’.