Havana Up in Harlem: LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse and the Making of a Cultural Revolution

Abstract

During the 1960s the Cuban Revolution was a seminal influence on black Americans. In July 1959, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Harold Cruse traveled to Cuba, where they witnessed the Rebel Army becoming the new Cuban government. That trip shaped Cruse’s and Jones’ ideas about the relationship between First World protest and Third World revolution. Jones’ participation in the Black Arts Movement and Cruse’s ideas in Rebellion or Revolution? and The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual were informed by their comparison of African Americans to colonized peoples and their assertions that cultural production was central to the forging of oppositional identities. Consideration of their political and cultural activism lends critical insight into the U.S. Third World Left, a group of African—American, U.S. Latino/a, and U.S. Asian writers, artists and activists who created cultural, material and ideological links to the Third World in order to challenge U.S. economic, racial and cultural hierarchies.