Following the Cuban Revolution, the Cold War heated up in Latin America. To some, the Revolution was a sign of the spread of Soviet-directed Communist movements and the pressing need to stop this by any means possible. To others, Castro’s success was a symbol of hope: the United States was not all-powerful, and so radical reform was within the realm of possibility. The United States sought to undermine the Cuban Revolution and to prevent similar developments from happening elsewhere. It supported a number of initiatives to prevent the spread of Communism in the hemisphere, including the Alliance for Progress, strengthening ties with the region’s militaries, and overt and covert programs to support “friendly” governments and destabilize “unfriendly” ones. The resulting clashes led to one of the darkest periods of U.S.–Latin American relations.

The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China saw decolonization as a long-awaited opportunity to overturn the imperialist-dominated world order. Both countries saw themselves as bearing no guilt for the crimes of imperialism and the underdeveloped state of newly independent countries. Rather, they saw themselves to varying degrees as victims of imperialism and natural allies for Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, the advent of attempts to give political structure to the developing world raised the specter of a “Third World” not necessarily aligned with Moscow or Beijing. For the Soviets, the very notion of a “Third World” was a non-starter, a political and ideological dead-end that would deflect the revolutionary energies of the people. For the Chinese, the unwillingness of many in the developing countries to accept Chinese leadership kept this constituency beyond China’s reach. Consequently, the rhetoric of support for anti-imperialism and alliance between the “international communist movement” and the “national liberation movement” masked a much more complex, manipulative, and often antagonistic relationship between the “Second World” and the “Third.”

In the 1960s, Algeria and Cuba became global archetypes of revolution. Opposed to the international system, militant, and loosely allied with the Soviet Union, the two countries challenged Western security in both the Caribbean and North Africa. This similarity created an important if superficial solidarity that emphasized regional support for armed revolutionary movements as a way of safeguarding their states from US intervention. Nevertheless, the Cuban and Algerian positions in Third World affairs started to diverge in the late-1960s as the two countries politico-economic positions changed and they adopted distinct strategies for advancing a radical Third World agenda. Algeria became increasingly invested in using established structures and norms to adjust the international order. In contrast, Cuba championed a global armed militancy, sometimes targeting Third World governments associated with such groups as the G-77 but viewed as insufficiently dedicated to Tricontinental goals. This divergence in international perspectives and tactics reveals the complexity of the Tricontinental ideology, as well as the evolution of radical diplomacy as revolutionary states matured.

Cuba is well-known for its mix of radical positions and skills at brokering agreements. Cuban internationalism began as a way to build alliances to counterbalance its geopolitical asymmetry with the United States and gain allies to ensure its survival. These skills are exemplified in the Tricontinental Conference. This investigation sketches the central role that Havana played in the development and hosting of the conference, then focuses on the negotiations undertaken by Cubans to keep the talks going in a thorny political climate in which many political positions were represented. More specifically, we focus on the role of Cuba before and after the Tricontinental in negotiating the tensions and infighting between stakeholders from anti-colonial and socialist liberation movements and parties in the Third World, as well as the emerging rift between the Soviets and Chinese. Finally, honing in on the example of West Germany, we consider how Western leftist participants at the conference saw Cuba’s role in this multidimensional, avant-garde camp that included not only guerrilla movements, communist parties, and other radical organizations, but social democrats as well.

The chapter traces the development of Guevara’s revolutionary consciousness and the concurrent creation of a militant program of armed struggle on three continents (Asia, Africa, and Latin America). It places Guevara’s intellectual and revolutionary project in the context of the emerging and evolving alliance between the Cuban revolution and the Soviet Union, the simultaneous confrontation with the realities and legacies of US imperialism, and the quixotic quest for Third World solidarity. An exploration of Che’s beliefs, ideas, and actions relating to revolutionary warfare reveals a man ahead of his time. Guevara synthesized and built upon the foundation of guerrilla strategies and tactics promulgated most famously by Mao Zedong but also exhibited by Augusto Sandino, hero of the struggle to liberate Nicaragua from the US occupation. In doing so, he championed an agenda of political and militant solidarity that would continue to attract adherents long after his death at the hands of Bolivian security forces in 1967.

The chapter examines US officials’ views of and responses to the Tricontinental Conference and the OSPAAAL organization from 1965 through 1968. Using declassified US government archival documents, it argues that the US government saw the Tricontinental as both a revolutionary threat and a counterrevolutionary opportunity. The Johnson administration and the State Department responded to the conference and the OSPAAAL organization through a vigorous but largely behind-the-scenes diplomatic effort to meet the challenge and exploit the opportunities it presented. The core of this strategy was to exacerbate and exploit, largely indirectly and by proxy, the political and ideological divisions among the organizations represented at Havana, in order to undermine the tricontinental solidarity project and divide, isolate, and harass Washington’s enemies, especially the Cuban government. Through its diplomatic, economic, and intelligence and security counteroffensive, the US government largely validated the Tricontinental critique of the US role in the Third World.

Mercenaries are controversial components of contemporary warfare but became common as decolonization and the Cold War intersected to cause conflict in the Global South. Under Fidel Castro, Cuba understood mercenaries as the products of capitalism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, using the term to describe a range of intermediates that acted on behalf of the United States and other Western nations. This global projection of counterrevolutionary force legitimized Cuba’s own deployments and revolutionary fights to combat these threats. Both of these opposing forces consisted of foreign militants fighting alongside rebels or for governments, but they had different motivations and relationships to allied movements or states. The chapter examines Cuban theorizing about mercenarism and the revolutionary fighter, ranging from the events at Playa Girón to the deployment of Cuban troops to Angola in the 1970s. At the same time, Cuba championed an expansive legal definition of mercenarism that sought – ultimately unsuccessfully – to incorporate its Tricontinental critique of Western intervention into international law.

This chapter examines planned revolutions, which emerge from deliberately organized and orchestrated rebellions. Planned revolutions contain several key, interrelated elements. First, regardless of their declared ideological beliefs, all self-declared revolutionaries are essentially nationalist. Two other, related elements characteristic of planned revolutions are those of leadership and the party. Planned revolutions will not appear unless several highly dedicated individuals commit themselves to planning, organizing, and leading a takeover of power. Sooner or later, the cabal gives rise to a political party or a guerrilla organization whose chief, often only, mission is to lead a revolution. The party sees itself as the revolution’s vanguard. Among the planners involved in this vanguard, usually an individual with greater ambitions, or better organizational skills and opportunities, or through sheer chance, emerges as its leader. While planned revolutions cannot succeed without the work of an organized revolutionary party, the party’s leader becomes the face of the revolution, and, if the revolution succeeds, he then becomes the leader of the country. The October 1917 Russian revolution, and the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban revolutions belong in this category. As starkly evident by Che Guevara’s failed movement in Bolivia, not all attempts at revolutionary capture of power succeed.