From Havana to Belgrade and Back Again: Revolutionary Cuba Joins the Third World

Using declassified Cuban government documents and the Cuban press as well as U.S. and third-country archives, this paper traces the challenges and tensions inherent in the Cuban government's initial efforts to establish connections with the emerging Third World internationalist "project" during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Focusing on an abortive "Underdeveloped Nations Conference" that was to be convened in Havana in 1960, and then on Cuban engagement with the nonaligned movement and revolutionary internationalist movements in the subsequent years, the paper explores how Cuban officials sought to engage with different currents and institutional frameworks of Third World internationalism – development, anti-imperialism, nonalignment, socialism, racial solidarity and anti-racism, revolution – in order to channel these movements in ways that would advance what they perceived to be the interests of the nation and the Revolution, above all in its unfolding conflict with the United States. The paper argues that through the initial successes and, especially, failures of its Third-World outreach, the Cuban revolutionary government came to terms with the possibilities and the limits of a revolutionary foreign policy and of Revolutionary Cuba's place in the world, both ideologically and pragmatically.