The Antonio Maceo Brigade and the Politics of Cuban Émigré Radicalism in 1970s America

In the mid 1970s, an intrepid movement of young Cuban émigrés in Miami and New York defied the anti-Castro leadership of their parents’ generation to seek renewed ties to the nation of their birth. Radicalized by their experiences in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, progressive émigré youth advocated the right of exiles to travel to Cuba, which was prohibited by both the Cuban and the U.S. governments, and called for the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations. Traveling to the island as the Antonio Maceo Brigade at the invitation of Fidel Castro, the group was welcomed as the returned children of the diaspora, challenging Cuban discourses of émigrés as traitors to the nation and forming the beginnings of a Cuban American Left. Yet their re-encounters with the island, which revealed to them both the dramatic social gains of the Cuban Revolution and its authoritarianism, were sometimes ambivalent and contradictory. This paper examines the buried history of Cuban American leftism and its complex relationship with the Cuban Revolution. I argue that in the brief warming of U.S.-Cuba relations afforded by the Carter administration, the Maceo Brigade created an unprecedented political space for the emergence of Cuban American political pluralism. Examining the role of Cuban émigré youth activists in initiating an historic shift in the Cuban government's strained relationship with its diaspora and challenging the hegemony of rightwing anti-Castro militancy, this paper illuminates a little-acknowledged precursor to the growing contemporary openness in Cuban America toward the normalization of U.S.-Cuba ties.