Tricontinental Conference Research Articles

An Appeal for International Solidarity in a Time of the Cold War: Retracing Indonesia’s Participation in the 1966 Tricontinental Conference

Abstract In January 1966, Cuban President Fidel Castro announced at the Tricontinental Conference the killing of more than 100,000 people in Indonesia and the destruction of the left movement in that country. The 1965–66 massacre of members and sympathisers of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, pki) in Indonesia ushered in the authoritarian New Order regime under General Suharto, marking a realignment in Cold War politics. This article examines the battle to represent Indonesia by two competing delegations at the Tricontinental Conference and the materials left behind as traces of Cold War era social movements and tricontinentalism. The aim of the article is twofold. Drawing on archival research, oral history interviews, ego-documents, and ethnographic observations, the article consists of a partial reconstruction of the Indonesian intervention at the Tricontinental Conference, arguably the last public, international intervention by Indonesian leftists. The second part of the article examines the archives, broadly defined, used in the reconstruction and the research process itself, given the contested nature of these memories. In so doing, the article illustrates how the end of the Cold War, the rise of new media and technologies, and democratisation in Indonesia have contributed to the transmission of memories of this past to audiences in and outside of Indonesia.

Reframing Revolution and Solidarity: Photography and Visual Culture in ospaaal Poster Art (1967–1990)

Abstract This article analyses the uses of photography in the posters produced and distributed by the Organisation of solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (ospaaal) between 1967 and 1990. Founded during the Tricontinental Conference of 1966, ospaaal was active until 2019 and had as one of its main tasks the creation of propaganda materials helping promote causes supported by the Cuban government across the three continents. The organisation produced over 300 posters distributed globally along with its official magazine, the Tricontinental. We combine thematic and visual perspectives in examining how ospaaal posters published during the Cold War period made use of photography. Our goal is to understand how ospaaal contributed to a reframing of ‘solidarity’ and ‘revolution’ through tricontinental lenses. The article is structured to provide an overview of how the organisation utilised photography in its poster production, to demonstrate how this body of work is connected to inter-war photographic traditions and contemporary left-wing visual culture, and to reflect on ospaaal’s contributions to revolutionary iconography.

Oppressed, Resistant, and Revolutionary

This article analyzes the Third Worldist project of the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL) by focusing on its graphic production. OSPAAAL was founded during the Tricontinental Conference in 1966 and existed until 2019, based in Havana. I argue that the organization played a prominent role in the dissemination of images about the so-called Third World, allowing a certain interpretation of its meaning – associated with the notions of oppression, resistance, revolution, and solidarity – to be visualized at an international level. Different strategies used by artists who worked for OSPAAAL to visually approximate different contexts, in order to sustain this narrative, will be examined. This study is part of the so-called new Cold War historiography and aims to highlight the role played by actors from the Global South in the (re)elaboration and circulation of narratives about the world order in the second half of the twentieth century.

South-South Solidarity and the Latin American Left

Most studies of international solidarity focus on movements connecting the global North and South, sidelining the vital connections within the South. While revolutionaries have long prioritized both North-South and South-South relationships, academics have been slower to catch on. Only recently have we begun to give “South-South solidarity” the attention it merits.Jessica Stites Mor's study examines South-South solidarity movements involving the Latin American Left, primarily during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was the heyday of internationalism driven by radical visions of anti-imperialism and socialism. South-South cooperation took new form following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, and the 1966 formation of the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). Cuba in particular supported anticolonial and anticapitalist struggles across Africa and Latin America. Meanwhile, nonrevolutionary states and private institutions like the Catholic Church scrambled to fend off revolutionary change through a combination of reform and repression.Despite the book's narrow temporal frame, its scope is ambitious. It tackles four very different cases of South-South connections using archives from eight countries. The first chapter addresses Mexico's protection of Chilean political refugees after the 1973 coup. This policy followed an effort by Mexican legal scholars and certain regime officials to strengthen international asylum law by asserting the right of receiving countries to determine the validity of claims. Though some of these advocates had principled motives, the regime was also concerned with “shoring up domestic support” following the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre (p. 185n9). As many have noted, Mexico's less-than-revolutionary regime sought to boost its tarnished legitimacy by opposing some aspects of US imperialism in Latin America. It was essentially forced to practice some level of solidarity in the interest of maintaining power. And even that posture had major limits: for example, the regime simultaneously collaborated with Washington by sharing intel on Cubans and waging a brutal counterinsurgency in Guerrero state.OSPAAAL's artistic production is the topic of chapter 2. Stites Mor analyzes the organization's printed materials, which were designed in Cuba and disseminated around the world. Posters promoted solidarity with revolutionaries in Vietnam, South Africa, Palestine, Yemen, and elsewhere. Although these materials have been discussed in other studies, the visual analysis of the artists' decisions is a valuable contribution. The chapter reflects one of Stites Mor's overarching arguments, about how “representational solidarity” aimed to forge a shared revolutionary imaginary (p. 20).Chapter 3 addresses a more neglected case: the Argentine Left's solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. Unlike OSPAAAL art, which was accompanied by Cuban material assistance to revolutionary movements, Argentines' use of representational solidarity was “mostly symbolic” (p. 124). They championed the Palestinian cause largely as a way to unify the domestic Left around a common agenda. This is an example of how domestic politics informs international solidarity, which is a common thread across all four case studies. The chapter also draws an insightful contrast with the Chilean Left. Stites Mor argues that the presence in Chile of a conservative Palestinian immigrant population, including many vocal capitalists, slowed the growth of solidarity efforts as compared with Argentina.The global transmission of liberation theology, another understudied question, is the focus of the final chapter. Stites Mor shows that Latin American articulations of liberation theology had a significant impact in apartheid South Africa. Antiapartheid activists read and circulated the writings of Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, for example. The chapter says rather little about direct relationships between South Africans and Latin Americans, though it does suggest how ideas were transmitted via publications.Such a wide-ranging book is bound to have some limitations. It focuses on the discourse of solidarity emanating from top figures; it says less about the organizing of material solidarity, about how rank-and-file activists understood solidarity, or about how survivors view that era and its legacies. Oral histories might have offered insight into these questions. South-South solidarity in other times and places, such as Central America in the 1980s, is not addressed in any depth. In short, there is much research still to be done. This book's welcome reframing of solidarity should help inspire that work.

The Gathering of the Protest Songs: Cuba, Thirdworldism, and the Birth of the Protest Song Movement (1967–1970)

ABSTRACT This article explores the efforts of the Cuban government to shape the content of political songs through its cultural institution, Casa de las Américas. Influenced by the spirit of the Tricontinental Conference (1966), Casa de las Américas organized in 1967 “El Encuentro de la Canción Protesta,” a global gathering in Cuba with musicians from Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and even the United States. This event aimed to push the musicians who attended the Encuentro to define “what a protest song was” and “what was the political potential of music.” Following this international gathering, they aimed to create a playlist, a standardized set of songs that were exchanged, learned, and translated across a variety of languages yet which retained their original/vernacular sonorities. The event resulted in the configuration of an alternative left-wing global music market and the creation of a transnational network of musicians that aimed to address music as a tool to make the revolution.

Author Response

Author Response

Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left ed. by Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez

Reviewed by: Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left ed. by Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez Álvaro Ramírez Harmer, Tanya, and Alberto Martín Álvarez, editors. Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left. U of Florida P, 2021. Pp. 301. ISBN 978-1-68340-169-8. Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left is an in intriguing book that sheds new light on the Revolutionary Left, a movement that emerged in the 1960s in Latin America characterized by armed struggle, revolution, national liberation, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism. In the Introduction, the editors, Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez, lament the neglect in historical writing regarding this faction and place part of the blame on conservative national tendencies of Latin American historiography and the peripheral role historians have assigned to Latin America in recent histories of the globalized world. Therefore, Harmer and Álvarez underscore the need for new, more inclusive historical accounts elucidating the transnational interconnections which the Revolutionary Left maintained with similar movements in the international arena. The present compilation is a big step in that direction. The book is comprised of two sections. Part I, “Latin America’s Revolutionary Left in the Age of the Tricontinental,” spotlights the relations Cuba cultivated with the Soviet Bloc, China and Latin America. To this end, Michal Zourek’s “Czechoslovakia and Latin America’s Guerrilla Insurgencies,” emphasizes the important logistical support this Eastern Bloc country offered the Castro regime through Operation Manuel, set up to facilitate Latin American revolutionaries trained in Cuba to travel back to their home countries, thus revealing Czechoslovakia’s key role in fomenting Cuban-style revolution in Latin America. In “Revolutionary Diplomacy and the Third World,” Blanca Mar León gives a detailed account of the Cuban efforts to hold in Havana the First Tricontinental Conference in 1966. She highlights the skillful diplomatic maneuvering that went into acquiring the support of key Third World leaders and to fend off old-guard politicians, such as Lázaro Cárdenas, who were trying to derail the Cubans. In the “The Brazilian Far Left, Cuba, and the Sino-Soviet Split, 1963,” James G. Hershberg guides us through the internecine relations of the [End Page 313] Revolutionary Left in Brazil in 1963. We follow the machinations of the rivalry that ensued between Luis Carlos Prestes and Francisco Julião due to their opposing methods of obtaining the triumph of communism in Brazil; the first promoting the peaceful coexistence policy backed by Moscow, the second calling for armed revolt in the guise of the Cuban Revolution promoted by Castro and Beijing. The disarray of the Marxist movements operating in Brazil is made obvious. They come across as wanting to be players in a political chess game but are shown to be nothing more than peon pieces moved by the hand of Cuba, Moscow, and China. Other global connections are accentuated in the book’s second part, titled “Latin America’s Revolutionary Left and Europe.” Gerardo Leibner weaves an excellent argument in “The Italian Communist Party between ‘Old Comrades in Arms’ and the Challenges of the New Armed Left.” He notes the fine line the Italian Communist Party had to walk as it maintained tenuous relations with Latin American communist factions who vied for its support, which the PCI withdrew after Che’s guerrilla tactics began to radicalize young Italian groups who had broken off from the PCI. Leibner marks an interesting reversal in the flow of political influence: to use Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s words, it was “el retorno de las carabelas,” as young, European radicals adopted tactics perfected in Latin America, much to the chagrin of the Old Left who proposed a policy of peaceful coexistence and a legal political road to power. In “The Influence of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left in Europe,” Eduardo Rey Tristán delineates the significant role of European publishers Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, François Maspero, Nils Andersson, and Klaus Wagenbach in the dissemination of New Left ideology emanating out of the Algerian War and Cuban Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing mainly on the publishers’ background, Rey Tristán establishes them...

A revista Tricontinental e a construção do Terceiro Mundo: conceito, itinerâncias e sensibilidades

Na segunda metade do século XX, o Terceiro Mundo emergiu como uma importante categoria política, orientando formas de se estar e situar em relação ao mundo, como atestado pela Conferência Tricontinental realizada na Havana de 1966. Este trabalho estuda uma publicação fundada pelo encontro, a revista Tricontinental, com o objetivo de compreender seus esforços para tecer os laços políticos e discursivos que deveriam unir essa coletividade. Para essa construção do Terceiro Mundo, a revista mobilizou debates teóricos e figurações narrativas, além de engendrar redes transnacionais de solidariedade. Nas páginas da publicação, o conceito de Terceiro Mundo ganhou contornos multifacetados e se entrelaçou a aportes teóricos como a Teoria da Dependência e as apropriações do marxismo por movimentos de libertação nacional. Figurações compartilhadas – como o oximoro no relato dos antagonismos coloniais ou o tom heroico das narrativas sobre a luta armada e seus protagonistas – demonstram as elaborações simbólicas e dimensões sensíveis desse empreendimento. Em seus bastidores, por sua vez, o processo de edição da Tricontinental permite constatar o papel da publicação em ter engendrado itinerâncias e redes intelectuais que conectaram intelectuais e militantes ao redor do globo. O Terceiro Mundo, portanto, esteve intimamente relacionado com a Tricontinental, não só na medida em que mobilizou sua fundação, mas também por que viria a ser ele próprio construído por esse projeto editorial.

The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic WorldFrom the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity

The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic WorldFrom the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity

Tricontinental’s International Solidarity

Abstract The Tricontinental Conference in 1966 in Havana, Cuba, marked a moment of particular import for the development of an internationalism grounded in anti-imperialist and decolonial solidarity. Tricontinental took place at the height of crisis for many nations fighting for independence. The Organization of Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) sought to promote an internationalist political perspective that interrelated global revolutionary movements through their collective opposition to imperial and colonial governance and resource extraction. This essay focuses on two affective aesthetic tactics: the mobilization of images of women represented as actors in armed struggle, as well as more commonly gendered representations of motherhood. It examines imagery and writing that centers gender and focuses on the intersection of violence against women, aspects of capitalism, imperialism, interpersonal relationships, family and women’s reproductive rights, and culture. Ultimately, it demonstrates that OSPAAAL used artistic production as a tool of political dialogue.

Argentine Left Parties and the 1967 Six-Day War through the Prism of Global Networks and South-South Connections

La guerra de junio de 1967 entre Israel y los ejércitos de Egipto, Siria y Jordania tuvo un importante impacto sobre la izquierda argentina, que se alineó con los países árabes. El Partido Comunista de Argentina (PCA), que tenía una influencia significativa dentro de la comunidad judía, defendió la política de la Unión Soviética, mientras que Política Obrera (PO) y el Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT), dos corrientes trotskistas, fueron críticos de la política soviética y vieron en el proceso político del Medio Oriente una revolución nacional en curso que se podía convertir en una revolución socialista. Aunque los tres partidos repudiaban abiertamente al antisemitismo y denunciaban los llamados a expulsar a la población judía de Israel/Palestina, no estuvieron exentos del uso de tropos antisemitas (y orientalistas). Describían a Israel como un mero ‘peón del imperialismo estadounidense’, carente de agencia y, con la excepción del PCA, ignoraron la existencia de los Palestinos como un grupo nacional en sí mismo. El debate sobre la cuestión de Israel/Palestina en la Conferencia Tricontinental celebrada en La Habana en 1966 influyó a la izquierda en su conjunto, y parece haber servido de insumo a las posiciones de PO, organización que se convirtió en el primer partido marxista del mundo en plantear la destrucción política del Estado de Israel, la cual se suponía sería llevada a cabo por la alianza revolucionaria de las masas árabes y judías del Medio Oriente. Por el contrario, tanto el PCA como el PRT defendían el derecho de Israel a su existencia.

Fidel and The Tricontinental Imagination

Fidel and The Tricontinental Imagination Aditya Nigam (bio) Recently a Left-wing music group from Delhi, Parcham, uploaded a Hindi version of the song "Guantanamera," the Cuban folk song revolutionized by the poetry of Jose Marti. In part, it was an exercise in nostalgia about what we had left behind, but in equal measure it was still a longing for a future that many of us had come to associate with the Cuban Revolution and the figures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. If Che was the perennial revolutionary, the figure of Fidel increasingly embodied for us, in our youthful revolutionary days, the "tricontinental" imagination—that is, the coming together of the oppressed peoples of three continents: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In this imagination the small Caribbean island offering dogged resistance to the big bully in the North appeared as a powerful voice of support and solidarity for us all. We knew that "Guantanamera" was not just a plaintive love song, it was a song that embodied the fighting spirit of Cuba. And clearly its resonances were felt in similar ways elsewhere in the three continents as well. In October 2016, some of us were in Johannesburg for a workshop on Democratic Marxism. The Rhodes Must Fall movement, begun in Cape Town, had galvanized the very air of Johannesburg—and indeed all of South Africa. Acquiring massive dimensions, the struggle had transformed into the militant Fees Must Fall campaign for the democratization of higher education. One evening, after the workshop, our hosts took us to a restaurant with live music. Well into the night, as we were preparing to leave, the band suddenly started singing "Guantanamera," and the effect was electrifying. Almost everyone present joined in, we were singing an inspiring collective anthem. [End Page 320] What does this have to do with Fidel? And why talk of him today, in 2017? To my mind, the tricontinental spirit embodied the spirit of decolonization and was part of a process that has acquired newer dimensions today. It has been noted by analysts that it was the first Tricontinental Conference that not only brought together towering figures like Amilcar Cabral, Salvador Allende, and Fidel Castro, but also helped, along with unwavering Cuban support, the Palestinian cause enter into Latin American consciousness. At one level, we could say that even today, in 2018, the "colonial matrix of power" (Quijano; Escobar) continues to structure our world, and imperialist bullying across the three continents continues unabated. That legacy of decolonization, therefore, continues to be important for us today. But that perhaps does not tell us the whole story. For too long have we labored under the illusion that while we fight imperialist bullying and domination we can happily continue to build capitalism "in our own way" in our respective societies. Capitalism, after all, was also supposed to be about liberating ourselves from so-called backwardness and underdevelopment. For it was the agent of history just as colonialism—its overseas adventure—was an "unconscious tool of History." Even though there were theorists who proclaimed "underdevelopment" at one pole to be structurally linked to "development" at the other, the fascination for capitalism continued to hold its seduction through the desire for development. It is only in recent times that the realization has started dawning among some sections of the Left that capitalism, in any form, is antithetical to the very existence of humankind. It is perhaps time to recognize that "capitalism" is not just an economic system (or a mode of production) ordained by history to unite the whole world into a modern cosmopolitanism. Rather, "capitalism" and "the economy" are Euro-America's poisonous gifts to humanity, for it is through the institution of bourgeois private property and the idea of "the economy" as an autonomous domain with its own self-fulfilling logic that the hegemony of the West is established over our minds. It is only now that we have seriously begun to appreciate how deeply and constitutively this hegemony is tied to the genocide of indigenous populations and racial slavery—tied to the idea that these are merely accidental by-products [End Page 321] of an otherwise emancipatory discourse through which the West colonized...

The Global South in the Belly of the Beast: Viewing African American Civil Rights through a Tricontinental Lens

In January 1966, delegates from the liberation movements of eighty-two nations came together at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, to form an alliance against imperialism. This alliance, called the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de África, Asia y América Latina, OSPAAAL), quickly became the driving force of international political radicalism and the primary engine of radical cultural production throughout the world. I argue that this influential political movement, which has been the subject of surprisingly few scholarly studies, forms the ideological backbone of current conceptualizations of global subalternity, such as the increasingly circulating notion of the Global South. Through close analysis of documents from OSPAAAL’s propaganda apparatus, namely the Tricontinental Bulletin and a newsreel by Santiago Álvarez called Now (1965), I examine how OSPAAAL, through its engagement with the African American Civil Rights Movement, presents a theory of transnational subaltern political resistance that is resurfacing in the contemporary notion of the Global South.

Revolution Beyond the Sierra Maestra: The Tupamaros and the Development of a Repertoire of Dissent in the Southern Cone

In July 1967, while Che Guevara was trying to create—with limited success— a rural foco (guerrilla cell) in Bolivia, the first conference of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) was taking place in Havana. The conference was presented as the application of the decisions made at the Tricontinental Conference, which had taken place in January 1966. For the first time, members of different organizations on the Latin American left met to agree on a collective response to the question of how to develop solidarity among countries such as Cuba that had defeated imperialism and those that had embarked upon but not yet won a definitive battle.

Revolution Beyond the Sierra Maestra: The Tupamaros and the Development of a Repertoire of Dissent in the Southern Cone

In July 1967, while Che Guevara was trying to create—with limited success— a rural foco (guerrilla cell) in Bolivia, the first conference of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) was taking place in Havana. The conference was presented as the application of the decisions made at the Tricontinental Conference, which had taken place in January 1966. For the first time, members of different organizations on the Latin American left met to agree on a collective response to the question of how to develop solidarity among countries such as Cuba that had defeated imperialism and those that had embarked upon but not yet won a definitive battle.

Postcolonial Times: Lock the Gate or Pull Down the Fences? A special Monograph Edition

The development of a rural coal seam gas industry in regional Australia, together with its key technology, fracking, has been met by a very active, lively and vocal social protest movement. This 2013 Tricontinental Lecture in Postcolonial Studies reflects on this protest movement from two perspectives. First, it examines what a postcolonial studies perspective may bring to further understanding the relationships and dynamics between the industry and the protest movement. Secondly, it considers what postcolonial scholars themselves may be able to bring to critiques of social issues such as this environmental contention. The example described in this lecture also reminds us that postcolonial studies concerns more than the three continents of the Tricontinent, Latin America, Africa and Asia, and that it is centrally concerned with access to environmental resources. Building on the history of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, and the growth of postcolonial political philosophy and studies that focus on power, equity and access in postcolonial societies, this essay considers the power differentials between industry and government on the one hand, and the protest movement on the other. By examining the role of language and its control, a key social process in the wielding of power, it is shown that the coal seam gas development debate is couched in terms of industrial or governmental language, and not in the language of the community. This has three important consequences. First, opponents are forced to express concerns about technical matters or scientific matters, thus legitimising the proposed activity. Secondly, opponents are not authorised, within the formal sphere, to express their own feelings through their language of social anxiety, of love of the country, of being in the community, of history. Thirdly, both sides find themselves in a typical cross-cultural dilemma: either speak an inadequate form of language that the other party understands but that does not actually express what you mean, or speak your own language and risk the other party not understanding what you mean. Copyright © Bill Boyd 2013. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. Coolabah, No.12, 2013, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians, Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona 2 From a postcolonial studies perspective, this example reminds students of two key processes. First, students need to master the intellectual skills of the humanities in order to provide critical analysis of social situations. Secondly, students need to know that, as western scholars, they are as much part of any postcolonial problem as those in power, and therefore need to develop good reflective skills and to learn to think ‘otherwise’. This invited monograph is the text of the lecture, supplemented with further comments and illustrations, delivered to second year Humanities students at the University of Barcelona, Catalonia, on Monday 8th April 2013

La OLAS y la crisis política en América Latina

The creation of the Latin American Organization of Solidarity (OLAS) during the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in January 1966, and its formal constitution in the First Conference of the Latin American Organization of Solidarity in August 1967, also in Havana, represents the beginning of a new stage within the process of the revolutionary left in Latin America in search of a line and a political conduct appropriate to the new world circumstances. The purpose of this article is to analyze the "OLAS doctrine", understood as the set of ideas that inform its ideological foundation, its organic structure and its action program, as they emerge from the study of the documents emanating from the conferences, from the public presentations and reports and from the written views of its most representative ideological spokespersons.

‘Locking horns with the Northern Empire’: anti-American imperialism at the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 in Havana

In January 1966 Havana hosted a ‘tricontinental’ conference that aimed to address the role of US imperialism in the Cold War world as well as the invasions of Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. This article examines some of the themes discussed in 1966 and the immediate impact of the conference on liberation movements around the world, most notably in Portuguese Africa, Vietnam and the Middle East. The conference also had a long-lasting impact on the democratic future of many Third World countries.

The Story of a Testimonio

A zeal for transcendence was the sentiment Rigoberta Menchut transmitted to me at our first meeting in Paris one January afternoon in 1982. She was accompanied by Marie Tremblay, a Canadian doctor and collaborator of the guerrilla group Organizacion del Pueblo en Armas (Organization of the People in Arms-ORPA). To understand our encounter, one has to go back to another, also in January, but in the year 1966, during the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. The aim of the Tricontinental had been to coordinate the armed struggle on the three continents in what was then known as the Third World: Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Rigoberta Menchui, of course, was not among the participants; at the time she would only have been seven years old, and one must suppose that she could not have imagined the future that awaited her. Nevertheless, her destiny was set in motion in Havana during that memorable gathering. I myself had just been expelled from Venezuela, my homeland, to which I had tried to return after a year-long stay in Bolivia. Also attending the conference was an important Guatemalan delegation under the young guerrilla leader and ex-army officer Luis Turcios Lima. Together with the Guinean leader Amilcar Cabral, they were the conference's stars. There are encounters that lay out and determine the course of a life, and such was the case of my encounter with a Guatemalan couple who were also at the Tricontinental. Ricardo Ramirez and Aura Marina Arriola were their real names, and right away we became inseparable friends. Both were leaders of the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo (Guatemalan Labor party-PGT). Intellectually and in human terms they were an exceptional pair. Aura Marina, an anthropologist, was an advocate for the participation of indigenous people in Guatemala's revolution, which she argued was crucial for its success. The most suitable model for Guatemala's armed struggle, she

The Tri-Continental Conference and the Ben Barka Affair

The Tri-Continental Conference and the Ben Barka Affair