In 2006, a day after having denounced then-president George W. Bush as the “devil” during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez addressed an audience at Harlem's Mt. Olive Baptist Church where he announced that Citgo, the US arm of Venezuela's oil company, would provide 100 million gallons of gas for heating to the community. Supporters waving Venezuelan and American flags lined the streets outside, and the audience cheered loudly as Chavez made his pledge. A small group of protestors also gathered to denounce Chavez as nothing but the lackey of Cuban president Fidel Castro.It was not just critics who made this connection. Chavez had explicitly positioned himself as Castro's heir. Taking up the critique of US hegemony in the Americas and reviving languages of Third Worldism, he linked the “Pink Revolution” in Latin America, of which his ascendancy was one part, to a longer history of internationalism and anti-imperialism. His trip to Harlem also restaged an itinerary that Castro had modeled in 1960 and then again in 1995. But if he sought to revive the energy and enthusiasm that had greeted Castro, Chavez arrived at a moment less propitious for Third-Worldist solidarities and more committed to a defensive patriotism. While Harlem's congressman in 1960, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., had flown to Havana after Castro took power and praised the revolution's commitment to racial equality, his successor Charles Rangel chastised Chavez: “We resent the fact that he would come to the United States and criticize President Bush. . . . You don't come into my country, you don't come into my congressional district, and you don't condemn my president.”1The first of Castro's trips is the subject of Simon Hall's recent history—Ten Days in Harlem. Organized around each day that Castro spent in New York from September 19 to 28, 1960, Hall recounts the meetings, photo-ops, and soirées that cemented Castro's rise as a key leader of the Third World, reinforced hostilities between the United States and Cuba, and tied the fledgling revolutionary state ever closer to the Soviet Union. Homing in on this brief period, Hall also takes up wider historical developments, from the success of Castro's revolution to the politics of decolonization and the Cold War that framed and inflected his trip. As an entry into the growing field of global history, particularly as it relates to the themes of decolonization and the rise of the Third World, Hall's book takes a novel approach. Many of these interventions work at the scale of the transnational or global, tracing the far-flung movements of people and ideas, reconstructing networks of circulation, and attending to sites of high politics like the United Nations. Hall takes us off this beaten path through a temporal and spatial narrowing of the frame. Far from limiting our perspective, however, this zeroing in to ten days and to Castro's room in Harlem's Hotel Theresa serves to open up features of Third Worldism and Cold War politics that might be harder to glean from the sightline of the global. This approach offers two salutary interventions: first, it makes it possible to attend to the role of contingency, and second, it reveals the centrality of mass media and representation in the ideological debates of the period.Unlike Chavez's 2006 reprise of the Harlem sojourn, Castro had not expected to find himself staying in Harlem during his trip to address the United Nations. The lack as well as the expense of accommodations downtown had propelled Castro and his entourage to Harlem. This surprising and unplanned turn of events became a publicity coup for the Cuban delegation. Perched at the Hotel Theresa, Castro was able to align himself with Harlem's Black residents and make connections between the Cuban Revolution and civil rights movement in the United States. As the New York Citizen-Call put it, “To Harlem's oppressed ghetto dwellers, Castro was the bearded revolutionary who had thrown his nation's rascals out and who had then told white America to go to hell” (52). Malcolm X's visit with Castro and the subsequent iconic photograph would only cement this perception.Hall notes that, while Castro's stay in Harlem was an unplanned turn of events, the kinds of connections between Cuba and African Americans it allowed to surface can be situated in longer histories of solidarity. Beginning at the turn of the century when Caribbean and Central American economies became ensnared by the growing geopolitical and economic presence of the United States in the region, Afro-Cubans and African Americans had deployed the imperial circuits that linked them to forge new connections.2 This was a period, historian Frank Guridy argues, that Afro-Cubans believed African Americans to be the vanguard of the Black race.3 By 1960, Hall charts a reversal of the direction of inspiration with Cuba now positioned in the revolutionary vanguard. Black newspapers like the Baltimore Afro-American and political figures ranging from Congressman Powell to militant Robert F. Williams held up Cuba as a model of racial equality in the hemisphere. Hall notes that both would eventually shift their perspectives, with Powell souring on Castro's more strident communism and Williams becoming disillusioned by the wide gap between the revolutionaries’ antiracist commitments and the Cuban state's practices.Despite these shifts in perspective, the ten days that Castro spent in Harlem offered a condensation or articulation of the solidarities being forged in this period. Here is one role of contingent social and political events. While the trip did not set in motion these solidarities, it foregrounded them by creating a highly visible site in which they could be enacted and viewed by a wide range of actors from US government officials to everyday residents of Harlem. In the large crowds that gathered outside the hotel to applaud Castro, at his dinner with hotel staff, and with the litany of Third World leaders who made the pilgrimage north to see Castro, the Hotel Theresa was briefly a focal point that attuned audiences to the hemispheric and global connections that characterized the dawning decade.In Hall's narrative, contingency does not only work by providing a condensation of existing and more subterranean formations. It can also help exacerbate and escalate political developments. An important lesson of Hall's book is how quickly and decisively US–Cuba relations soured. In the immediate aftermath of Castro's seizure of power, “it was not inconceivable that some sort of modus vivendi with the United States could not be worked out,” Hall writes (126). But even before Castro's trip to the United States, relations between the two countries had already taken a turn for the worse, as Cuba began a program of land redistribution and nationalized American companies. As US–Cuban relations frayed, the Soviet Union made forays, with Khrushchev sending a trusted representative to Cuba in February 1960. Still, Hall argues, “[T]he close relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union was not foreordained” (126).The trip to New York, however, would mark the beginning of “the honeymoon between Fidel and the Russians” (131). Khrushchev visited Castro at the Hotel Theresa and later hosted him at the Soviet Union mission where they exchanged gifts. During his address to the UN General Assembly, Khrushchev singled out “Courageous Cuba” for special recognition and concern given the threat of US intervention (126). More symbolically, when their Cuban jet was impounded as collateral for American businesses nationalized by the Cuban government, leaving Castro and his delegation stranded, they flew home on a plane loaned to them by the Soviet Union. This sequence of events stemmed from a “classic case of bureaucratic incompetence,” Hall notes (196). A public aircraft could not be seized, but as authorities were getting this sorted out in a Brooklyn court, the Soviet Union stepped in. Castro's exit from New York “provided a striking illustration of the deteriorating relationship between the United States and Cuba” and “also foreshadowed his country's growing reliance on Moscow for economic and military support (196, 195).The point here is not to suggest that, in the absence of Castro's time in New York, the growing rift with the United States, which culminated in the Bay of Pigs invasion the following year, would have been avoided. Instead, what Hall's focus on this trip illuminates is the accretion of events, the calcification of rhetorical positions, the character of interpersonal relations that cemented these divisions. One lesson of this approach is that, even when examining large-scale geopolitical forces like those of the Cold War that seem entirely overdetermined, an examination of micropolitics can be a useful angle to illuminate the multiple forces that produce an escalation and entrenchment of conflicts over time.Central to Hall's story of the power and significance of Castro's accidental stay in Harlem is the role of mass media. Castro's visit was such a publicity success that many believed it was orchestrated from the beginning. The role of mass media adds to our understanding of the period's rhetorical and ideological battles, which played an important part in the project of decolonization. For this reason, capturing the UN and transforming it into an arena for legitimizing the project of decolonization was strategically significant to anticolonial nationalists beginning with India's case against apartheid South Africa in 1946. Castro's four-and-a-half-hour speech on September 26 (still the longest speech at the UN) participated in this strategy of circumventing America's institutional creation for purposes its founders never intended. From the podium, he delivered a detailed defense of the Cuban Revolution and positioned it in the context of the wider Third World project. After the speech, one Latin American diplomat remarked, “T]he presence of Cuba has disrupted the geography of America. The Caribbean island now seems like a continent, and the continent seems like an island” (169).As important to this shifting of hemispheric geography was the transformation of New York's diplomatic map. Suddenly, there were more than one forum for global politics. Castro's outpost at the Hotel Theresa became another venue for the performance of Third Worldism—one that trafficked in the currency of parties and photos rather than speechmaking. With Castro's presence, the hotel became a magnet for state dignitaries, countercultural intellectuals, and journalists who sought either to be part of the spectacle or capture it for posterity. In one seventy-two-hour period, for instance, Castro had “enjoyed high-profile meetings with three men—Nasser, Nehru and Nkrumah—who were icons of the global struggle against colonialism and leading lights among the non-aligned nations” (188).Each of Hall's chapters begins with a photograph and caption taken during the period, while other images appear throughout. These visual texts highlight the work of spectacle, performance, and iconography in the fledgling revolutionary's effort to secure his position in the world and in the wider project of the Third World. Here too the micropolitical plays an important role—as Hall notes, the likes of Nasser and Nkrumah, used to monopolizing the limelight, were taken aback at being upstaged by Castro. Still, they made sure they appeared alongside the Cuban leader, who had become the man of the hour. We are accustomed to thinking of these statesmen through the ideas and politics they espoused. But as Hall highlights, we might also attend to the ways they navigated the complex politics of representation, as they sought to employ images as much as words in their political and ideological battles.Bringing our sightline down to Harlem's Hotel Theresa and focusing in on the ten days Castro took New York by storm, Hall illuminates the mundane, contingent, but also surprisingly spectacular moments through which solidarities are forged, alliances are built, and conflicts escalated.