Expanding our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to a New Left in Latin America (original) (raw)

Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties

The Americas, 2014

A n important shift is under way in the scholarship on Latin America during the Cold War. This special issue on the Global Sixties presents many of the leading academic voices of that historiographical movement. In part, today's shift is influenced by a new generation of historians unencumbered by the ideological baggage carried by those who witnessed and participated in the political struggles and artistic exuberance of the 1960s as they occurred. With this shift, we are finally reaching a point where more historia than memoria is being written. Without question, the numerous memoirbased narratives written by participants have helped to inform our understanding of the epoch, providing rich primary-source narratives of personal recollection and witness. 1 The new historical investigations build on these memoirs, yet are firmly grounded in archival research. In turn, this archival research has fleshed out old historical questions and brought to the forefront many new ones. The results have often been fundamentally revisionist interpretations of the prevailing assumptions of the period. This shift, however, is also being shaped by a bold reconceptualization of the period itself. We are witnessing, in Thomas Bender's terms, an expanding of the frame, 2 one that is influencing studies of the Cold War era across regional special

Cuba and the Latin American Left: 1959 – present

2017

This article is an analysis of the emergence and evolution of Cuba’s formal and informal networks and foreign policy instruments to support and influence the guerrilla movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the first section I sketch the function and significance of the ‘Departamento America’, the liaison apparatus with the Latin American and Caribbean insurgency between the 1960s and 1975; afterwards it (also) represented ‘the Party’ in Cuba’s diplomacy. I make a distinction between the 1960s (the decade of revolutionary fervour) and the 1970s-80s (when Cuba ruptured its diplomatic isolation imposed by the United States and tried to unify insurgent movements in umbrella organisations). After the implosion of the Soviet system a third ‘Special Period’ began, of austerity and drastic changes in its foreign policy. It continued in the twenty-first century, based on soft power and peace facilitating.

Solidarity under Siege: The Latin American Left, 1968

The American Historical Review, 2009

CONSIDER SOME OF THE EVENTS IN LATIN AMERICA during the third week of June 1968. In La Paz, Bolivia, students, professors, and workers participated in the "March for University Autonomy" with signs denouncing the "military boot." In Guayaquil, the port city of Ecuador, students stoned and burned buses in a protest against hikes in fares for public transportation. In Caracas, Venezuela, 25,000 students from the Universidad Central marched in protest against budget cuts. In Santiago, Chile, just weeks after a mass protest movement had been pacified, street violence erupted in the downtown area after eight students were arrested when police broke into the university television station. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1,500 students compelled the rector and the university council to listen to their views on university reform; for the next three days, thousands of students and others fought pitched battles in the streets with the police and the military. In Argentina, students engaged in mass protests in commemoration of the 1918 Córdoba Reforms, which enshrined the principle of university autonomy throughout the continent. In every major Argentinean city, when police attempted to stop the demonstrations, street fighting broke out. Throughout the country, opposition labor unions joined the protests. In Uruguay, despite a state of siege, student and worker protests continued. 1 Only the Wars of Independence and the strike wave of 1919 rival the dimensions and simultaneity of the 1968 protests. The largest and most prolonged protest movements took place in Uruguay, Brazil, and Mexico. An examination of those cases can shed light on the common characteristics of this vast mobilization. Military, conservative, and U.S. spokespeople in the late 1960s portrayed Cuban-inspired subversion as the principal threat to national security, necessitating an authoritarian response. Various policymakers and scholars since then have rationalized the necessity for military rule in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay during the 1960s and 1970s, often stressing the rhetoric and practice of the radical left as the cause of the rise of repressive regimes. 2 The "dos diablos" (two devils) thesis that emerged I would like to thank Rob Schneider for encouraging me to research and write this essay and for his suggestions. The highly perceptive commentaries of the six anonymous reviewers for the AHR were very useful, and I thank the readers. I would also like to express my gratitude to Greg Grandin and Valeria Manzano for reading drafts of the essay. Similarly, I appreciate the comments of my graduate class, who read an early draft of this article. I am also indebted to the staff of the CIESAS-DF library for their aid in obtaining and copying sources.

CALL FOR CHAPTER Latin American Literature after the Cuban Revolution

BRILL

This study will research the period 1959-2019 in Latin America, starting with the triumph of the Cuban revolution and concluding in the present day. Over the course of this 60 year long period the evolution of the relationship between violence, ideology and Latin American literature can be charted and understood, highlighting the way in which writers committed themselves to reflecting their various contexts, situations which are often characterised by dictatorship, guerrilla warfare, neoliberalism, and later - drug trafficking, migrations, gender violence and crime. Nevertheless these actionshad a decisive impact on the literary creations that emerged during the aforementioned temporal arc.