Cross-pollinating the revolution: from Havana to Oakland and back again

Abstract

This article charts the intellectual history of the Cuban Revolution’s impact on the ideology and politics of the Black Panther Party. In doing so, it begins with a discussion of the central biological metaphor of “cross-pollination” to understand how the ideas of Che Guevara influenced Black Panther George Jackson’s revolutionary praxis. The second section of the article charts Guevara anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist arguments as well as his “foco” theory concerning the vanguard guerilla’s revolutionary tactics. It then documents the pollinations of these ideas in George Jackson’s prison writings to demonstrate how the Black Panther conceptualized internal colonization, articulated a black vanguard, and formulated new black leadership tactics. This section demonstrates how Jackson’s writings circulated and augmented Guevara’s revolutionary theses to build Black Panther ideologies about black identity, leadership, self-defense and anti-colonialism. Thus, Black Panther writers were able to successfully connect the struggle of black Americans to the struggles of Third World movements across the globe, thereby substantially altering the civil rights movement in the US. Finally, this article provides an assessment of the influence that the Black Panthers have had in Cuba, particularly on hip-hop culture, to suggest that black power activists have provided intellectual resources that re-pollinated Cuban culture.