"Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Mexico!" Anticommunist Patriotism and Solidarity with Cuban Exiles in 1960s Mexico

In the early 1960s, the Cuban revolution had an outsized impact across the Americas, with multiple and well-known effects on the revolutionary imagination of the Left, Old and New. A forgotten aspect of this impact is the role that Cuban exiles played in promoting opposition to the Castro regime all throughout Latin America, and not just in the United States. Known as a historical haven for refugees and political exiles, Mexico was a key stage for various anti-Castro groups, as local politicians, artists, intellectuals, activists, and common citizens mobilized in various ways to support their struggle. This paper examines the bonds built by Cuban exile organizations on the basis of a shared anticommunist patriotism, ideas of cultural affinity, and the memory of Mexico’s religious conflicts of the pre-Cold War era. Cuban exiles successfully inserted themselves in Mexico’s ongoing wave of anticommunist mobilization and capitalized on the anticommunist bent of the PRI’s revolutionary nationalism. Moreover, by invoking episodes of religious persecution, Cuban exiles built a sense of mutual identification with Mexican Catholics, who actively mobilized and appropriated the exiles’ cause based on the idea of solidarity as a form of “suffering together.” These bonds reveal the understudied salience of right-wing forces in Mexico’s Cold War and the understated role that Cuban exiles played in shaping Mexicans’ own sense of anticommunist patriotism.