“The War of Those Who Have Nothing Left to Lose”: (Counter) Revolutionary Violence and Anti-Castro Cuban Exile Activism in the 1960s

In the aftermath of the Cuban revolution, radical anti-Castro exiles put forth different justifications to conduct violent political action against the island’s leftist government. However, their anticommunist crusade soon acquired a transnational dimension, tying them to a global conversation about the necessity of violence for national liberation. This presentation examines how some of these exile organizations articulated a dissident platform that rendered Cuba’s revolution as nationalist and anticommunist, while seeking to frame their struggle as an expression of a broader politics of Third World revolution. In looking at Cuban exile publications that circulated transnationally, the evidence presented destabilizes the commonly held view of radical anti-Castro exiles as purely reactionary or as puppets of the U.S. government. Instead, this presentation aims at a broader reflection on how these anticommunist crusaders partook in the politics of Cold War radicalism in their own way by strategically reclaiming the national-revolutionary imagination and repertoire of action from their leftist opponents.