The Sound of Internationalism in Socialist Song Festivals

During the Cold War, socialist states demonstrated a vested interest in promoting political ideas through cultural projects. This interest, naturally, included the organization of live musical performances. While these performances took place at every scale, from the local to the global, it is through an examination of large, international song festivals that we can best understand differing conceptions of internationalism through sound. This paper will focus on song festivals hosted in Cuba, the German Democratic Republic, and Nicaragua, with minor consideration given to Chile, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. It will not only compare state cultural production between Eastern Europe and Latin America, but, whenever possible, reconstruct a transnational history by centering the experiences of Eastern European musicians performing at Latin American festivals, and vice versa. Revealing several dichotomies, this paper will argue that Eastern Bloc states curated a tokenistic kind of internationalism in their large song festivals, bordering on kitsch performance—Latin American (as well as African and Asian) musicians frequently appear as agents of second-world solidarity. However, Bloc states did not send musicians to Latin America at the same rate. Festivals in Latin America, as well as Yugoslavia, fostered cohesive regional identities instead. Eastern European festivals broadly were more likely to be heard on vinyl recordings, which were produced for domestic audiences. Recordings of Latin American festivals, when they were made, often sought a more international listenership. Finally, there is the question of identity beyond the inter-national, outside the hierarchy created by the state. While it is harder to hear these identities within the context of state-produced cultural events, they do appear, particularly in relation to understandings (or lack thereof) of Indigeneity.