Hands Off Korea! Women’s Internationalist Solidarity and Peace Activism in Early Cold War Cuba

This paper unearths a forgotten episode in internationalism and south-south solidarity by studying the Cuban left’s Hands Off Korea campaign (1950-51), a protest movement against the Korean War in which women played crucial roles as both intellectual authors and foot soldiers. In particular, the paper explores the important role played in the campaign by two members of the Cuban affiliate of the pro-Soviet Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), Edith García Buchaca and Candelaria Rodríguez. I argue that their experiences traveling to China and North Korea (respectively) and their insertion into global left-feminist networks facilitated by the WIDF helped them articulate conceptual links between their domestic anti-war activism and broader global issues of women’s emancipation, national liberation, and socialist revolution. These links inspired the Hands Off Korea campaign within Cuba and help explain its surprising success.

This paper makes several historiographical interventions. First, it questions the assumption that Latin American anti-imperialism in the first half of the 20th century emerged solely within the framework of US-Latin American relations. As this study demonstrates, the Cuban left drew lessons from Asian struggles for decolonization, noting parallels between their own semi-colonial experience with the US and former colonialism in Asia. Second, the paper looks beyond Latin America’s better-known liberal forms of first-wave feminism in the 1930s, highlighting the radical, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist strands we find in the often-overlooked period of the early Cold War. Finally, it argues that Cuban and Latin American feminism did not only develop historically in a national--or even regional--context. Rather, networks of transnational solidarity were also important, including links between feminists across the global south, not mediated by feminists in the global north. As such, this paper contributes to ongoing reassessments of feminism and anti-imperialism in Latin America in the 1950s.