“This Is Why We Fight”: The Cuban Revolution, the Argentine Left, and the Politics of Childhood, 1959–76

For Latin America’s New Left, the Cuban Revolution transformed the fate of the child into a decisive choice between capitalist oppression and socialist revolution.  The striking contrast between Cuba’s dedication to the welfare of its youngest and their own nations’ abandoned offspring gave the child new symbolic weight for anti-imperialist movements.  This paper shall examine the transnational politics of childhood in Argentina and Cuba, two countries with historic links despite their geographical and cultural distance.  Throughout the sixties and seventies, Argentine radicals—most notably Che Guevara—praised the revolution’s redemption of the peasant child through literacy campaigns and health initiatives, a perception that Cuba actively promoted through cultural exchanges and its news service, Prensa Latina. Meanwhile, employing cultural representations of the country’s mestizo and indigenous countryside to connect the supposedly “European” Argentina to Third World anti-colonial struggles, the left posited non-white shanty and rural children as a metaphor for a dystopian and backward nation.  The images of the non-white, starving child functioned as a symbol of Argentina itself: victim of capitalism, US imperialism, and environmental degradation.  They both presented a break with liberal narratives of Argentina’s cosmopolitan whiteness and, simultaneously, a problematic racialization of poverty.  Using Argentine and Cuban archival sources, this paper shall explore the notions of race, gender, and class embedded within literary, photographic, and cinematic works.  By doing so, the reader will gain a greater understanding of how the politics of childhood functioned within transnational solidarity movements during the era of the Cuban Revolution.