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Confronting the Youngest Revolution: Cuban Anti-Communists and the Global Politics of Youth in the Early 1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2021

Michelle Chase*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of History, Pace University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: mchase@pace.edu

Abstract

This article examines the transnational activism of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Revolutionary Student Directorate, DRE), a group of exiled Cuban anti-Castro students. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, with CIA funding, the DRE attempted to challenge student support for the Cuban Revolution in Latin America and elsewhere in the global South. This article uses the DRE's trajectory to rethink the 1960s as a period of anti-communist, as well as leftist, youth ascendancy. It challenges the idea that Cuba garnered universal youth support, stressing instead that the Cuban Revolution helped turn student politics into a key battleground of the Cold War.

Spanish abstract

Spanish abstract

Este artículo examina el activismo transnacional del Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), un grupo de estudiantes cubanos anti-Castro exiliados. En las postrimerías de la invasión de la Bahía de Cochinos, el DRE con financiamiento de la CIA trató de enfrentar el apoyo estudiantil a la revolución cubana en Latinoamérica y otras partes del Sur Global. Este artículo utiliza la trayectoria del DRE para repensar los años 1960 como un periodo de efervescencia juvenil tanto anticomunista como izquierdista. Desafía la idea de que Cuba obtuvo el apoyo universal de jóvenes, enfatizando más bien que la Revolución Cubana ayudó a convertir al movimiento estudiantil en un campo de batalla clave de la Guerra Fría.

Portuguese abstract

Portuguese abstract

Este artigo examina o ativismo transnacional do Diretório Estudantil Revolucionário (DRE), um grupo de estudantes cubanos anticastristas exilados. No rastro da invasão da Baía dos Porcos, com financiamento da CIA, o DRE tentou desafiar o apoio dos estudantes à Revolução Cubana na América Latina e em outras partes do Sul Global. Este artigo usa a trajetória do DRE para repensar a década de 1960 como um período de ascensão da juventude anticomunista e também de esquerda. Ele desafia a ideia de que Cuba conquistou o apoio universal da juventude, enfatizando, em vez disso, que a Revolução Cubana ajudou a transformar a política estudantil em um campo de batalha chave da Guerra Fria.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 ‘Protesta contra Castro en Chile’, Avance Criollo, 27 Oct. 1961, p. 3. Translations of Spanish-language sources are by the author. Unless otherwise noted, all periodicals were consulted in the Cuban Heritage Collection, Otto Richter Library, University of Miami (hereafter CHC).

2 Karen M. Paget, Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade against Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

3 Interview with Eduardo Muñiz, Miami, Feb. 2020.

4 Jesús Arboleya, La contrarrevolución cubana (Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 2000); Dan Bohning, The Castro Obsession: US Covert Operations against Cuba, 1959–1965 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005). For studies of the rise of far-right politics and terrorist tactics in some exile groups in the 1970s, see Quiroga, José, ‘The Cuban Exile Wars, 1976–1981’, American Quarterly, 66: 3 (2014), pp. 819–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McPherson, Alan, ‘Caribbean Taliban: Cuban American Terrorism in the 1970s’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 31: 2 (2019), pp. 390409CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Michael Bustamante analyses the progressive exile politics that resurged in the 1970s in ‘Anti-Communist Anti-Imperialism? Agrupación Abdala and the Shifting Contours of Cuban Exile Politics’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 35: 1 (2015), pp. 71–99.

5 Patrick Barr-Melej, Psychedelic Chile: Youth, Counterculture, and Politics on the Road to Socialism and Dictatorship (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Tanya Harmer, Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Victoria Langland, Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Vania Markarian, Uruguay, 1968: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktails (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017).

6 Pensado, Jaime, ‘To Assault with the Truth: The Revitalization of Conservative Militancy in Mexico during the Global Sixties’, The Americas, 70: 3 (2014), pp. 489521CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Luis Herrán Ávila, ‘The Other “New Man”: Conservative Nationalism and Right-Wing Youth in 1970s Monterrey’, in Jaime M. Pensado and Enrique C. Ochoa (eds.), México beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression during the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2018), pp. 195–214; Heather Vrana, This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 62–97; Stéphane Boisard and Eugenia Palieraki, ‘¿Una juventud revolucionaria? Miristas y gremialistas en la era de la “Revolución en Libertad” chilena’, in Marianne González Alemán and Eugenia Palieraki (eds.), Revoluciones imaginadas: itinerarios de la idea revolucionaria en América Latina contemporánea (Santiago: RIL Editores, 2013), pp. 123–52.

7 Manzano, Age of Youth; Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture during the Long Sixties (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

8 Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba (London: Pitman, 1970). Also see Anne Luke, Youth in the Cuban Revolution: Youth Culture and Politics in 1960s Cuba (London: Lexington Books, 2018); Jaime Suchlicki, University Students and Revolution in Cuba, 1920–1968 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1969); and M. Lima, ‘Reflections on the Cuban Student Movement: 1952–1961’, in Alessandra Lorini and Duccio Basosi (eds.), Cuba in the World, the World in Cuba (Florence: Florence University Press, 2009), pp. 139–50.

9 Ariel C. Armony, ‘Transnationalizing the Dirty War: Argentina in Central America’, in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser (eds.), In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 134–68; Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Casals, Marcelo, ‘“Chilean! Is This How You Want to See Your Daughter?”: The Cuban Revolution and Representations of Gender and Family during Chile's 1964 Anticommunist “Campaign of Terror”’, Radical History Review, 136 (2020), pp. 111–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Casals, , ‘Against a Continental Threat: Transnational Anti-Communist Networks of the Chilean Right Wing in the 1950s’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 51: 3 (2019), pp. 523–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ávila, Luis Alberto Herrán, ‘Las guerrillas blancas: anticomunismo transnacional e imaginarios de derechas en Argentina y México, 1954–1972’, Quinto Sol, 19: 1 (2015), pp. 126Google Scholar; Power, Margaret, ‘Who But a Woman? The Transnational Diffusion of Anti-Communism among Conservative Women in Brazil, Chile and the United States during the Cold War’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 47: 1 (2015), pp. 93119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, Em guarda contra o ‘perigo vermelho’: o anticomunismo no Brasil, 1917–1964 (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2002); Drinot, Paulo, ‘Creole Anti-Communism: Labor, the Peruvian Communist Party, and APRA, 1930–1934’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 92: 4 (2012), pp. 703–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harmer, Tanya, ‘The “Cuban Question” and the Cold War in Latin America, 1959–1964’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 21: 3 (2019), pp. 114–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moulton, Aaron Coy, ‘Building their own Cold War in their own Backyard: The Transnational, International Conflicts in the Greater Caribbean Basin, 1944–1954’, Cold War History, 15: 2 (2015), pp. 135–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weld, Kirsten, ‘The Other Door: Spain and the Guatemalan Counter-Revolution, 1944–54’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 51: 2 (2019), pp. 307–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weld, , ‘The Spanish Civil War and the Construction of a Reactionary Historical Consciousness in Augusto Pinochet's Chile’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 91: 1 (2018), pp. 77115CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin and Giles Scott-Smith describe transnational anti-communist networks as a ‘plurality of allegiances’ ranging from the socialist Left to the far Right: ‘Introduction’, Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks (New York: Palgrave, 2014), p. 2.

12 For the impact of the Cuban Revolution on anti-communists, including the far Right, see Casals, ‘Chilean!’; Marcelo Nigro Herrero, ‘El Movimiento Costa Rica Libre y la Revolución cubana’, in Iván Molina Jiménez and David Díaz Arias (eds.), El verdadero anticomunismo: política, género, y Guerra Fría en Costa Rica (1948–1973) (San José: EUNED, 2017), pp. 145–77; Padrón, J. M., ‘Anticomunismo, política y cultura en los años sesenta. Los casos de Argentina y Brasil’, Estudios del ISHIR, 2: 4 (2012), pp. 157–73Google Scholar. Also see Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba's Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017) and Hal Brands, Latin America's Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). There is an extensive literature on the Cuban Revolution's impact on the Left, often focused on the uptake of Che Guevara's doctrine of guerrilla warfare. Studies that focus on broader socio-political impacts include Harmer, Beatriz Allende; Aldo Marchesi, Latin America's Radical Left: Rebellion and Cold War in the Global 1960s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Eric Zolov, The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

13 Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

14 John M. Kirk, Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba (Gainesville, FL: University of South Florida Press, 1989); Gerald E. Poyo, Cuban Catholics in the United States, 1960–1980: Exile and Integration (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Teresa Fernández Soneira, Con la estrella y la cruz: Historia de la Federación de las Juventudes de Acción Católica Cubana (Miami, FL: Ediciones Universal, 2002).

15 The phrase alludes to the progressive strand of Social Catholic thought known as ‘Jocism’ begun by the Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn, who founded the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (Young Christian Workers, JOC) movement in 1925. Acción Católica was an umbrella group of lay Catholics promoting social justice agendas.

16 Poyo, Cuban Catholics, pp. 16–22; Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 80–5.

17 Interview with Juan Manuel Salvat, Miami, Feb. 2020.

18 Poyo, Cuban Catholics, pp. 28–32; González, Augusto Montenegro, ‘Historia e historiografía de la iglesia en Cuba (1953–1958)’, Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia, 17 (2008), pp. 283307Google Scholar.

19 The Catholic intellectual José Ignacio Lasaga argued that ‘The necessary conditions to legitimize armed resistance against a usurper and tyrannical government now exist in Cuba’ (Poyo, Cuban Catholics, p. 37); also see Fernández, Con la estrella y la cruz, pp. 415–18.

20 More than half the members of JUC in Oriente Province eventually joined 26 de Julio: ibid., p. 403.

21 Kirk, Between God, p. 49.

22 Interviews with Salvat and Muñiz; Poyo, Cuban Catholics, pp. 39–49.

23 Rafael Rojas, Historia mínima de la revolución cubana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2015); Brown, Cuba's Revolutionary World.

24 Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), pp. 111–18.

25 Interview, Salvat.

26 Lima, ‘Reflections’, p. 144.

27 Suchlicki, University Students, pp. 89–91.

28 Lima, ‘Reflections’, pp. 148–9; interview, Salvat.

29 The DRE formally announced its existence in October 1960: ‘Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil del Frente Revolucionario Democrático: Primer Pleno en el Exilio’, Diario de las Américas, 8 Oct. 1960, p. 7. Also see ‘El desagravio al apóstol: inicio de nuestra lucha’, Trinchera (Miami), 10 Feb. 1963, p. 5.

30 Aaron Coy Moulton, ‘A Transnational Legion of Global Anti-Communism or the Caribbean Dictator's Cold War?: Rafael Trujillo's Legión Extranjera Anticomunista, 1959–1960’, unpublished manuscript, 2021.

31 See Maria Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 122–3.

32 Rojas, Historia mínima, pp. 129–30.

33 Most DRE members had not participated in the DR led by Echeverría, although the older brothers of some of them had. Interview, Salvat.

34 See Luis Fernández Rocha, ‘El Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil a la opinión pública continental, 1962’, in Roberto Padrón Larrazábal (ed.), Manifiestos de Cuba (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1975), pp. 280–4.

35 In a 1964 interview some members noted they followed the principles of the encyclicals of Pope John XXIII, probably Pacem in terris (1963). See ‘Estudiantes cubanos afirmaron que invadirán a Cuba a mediados de 1964’, La Nación (La Paz), 25 March 1964: news clipping included in DRE papers held in the CHC (hereafter CHC-DRE), Box 44, Folder ‘Propaganda: Cuba Economic Conditions Exhibitions: Clippings, 1964’.

36 Editorial, Trinchera, 22 Oct. 1961, pp. 2, 6.

37 ‘El DRE opina: reforma agraria’, Trinchera (undated), ca. Sept. 1962, p. 2.

38 Interview, Salvat.

39 Rojas, Historia mínima, pp. 128–9.

40 Trinchera, 19 Aug. 1962, p. 2.

41 García, Havana USA; María de los Ángeles Torres, In the Land of Mirrors: Cuban Exile Politics in the United States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

42 Brands, Latin America's Cold War, pp. 34–6.

43 Ángel González Fernández, ‘Plan de trabajo y organización de las delegaciones en América-Latina’ (undated), CHC-DRE, Box 10, Folder ‘Delegation in Mexico, n.d.’

44 ‘Exposición Económica’, undated report ca. 1963, CHC-DRE, Box 44, Folder ‘Cuba Economic Conditions Exhibit 1963’.

45 Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Iber, ‘“Who Will Impose Democracy?” Sacha Volman and the Contradictions of CIA Support for the Anticommunist Left in Latin America’, Diplomatic History, 37: 5 (2013), pp. 995–1028.

46 Undated CIA report, ‘CIA Operations against Cuba Prior to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 23, 1963’, available at https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10096-10145.pdf, last accessed 22 June 2021.

47 Paget, Patriotic Betrayal, pp. 144–85.

48 Dispatch, Subj.: ‘Operational [redacted] Progress Report – July 1962’, dated 14 Aug. 1962, included in JFK Assassination Records, House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Mary Ferrell Foundation Digital Archive (hereafter MFFDA-HSCA), Segregated CIA Collection (available online at https://www.maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1093, last accessed 8 July 2021), Reel 26, Folder F.

49 Dispatch, 18 June 1961, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 26, Folder C; Dispatch, 9 March 1965, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 25, Folder U. According to Bohning (Castro Obsession, p. 135), the DRE was one of eight exile groups to receive significant CIA funding in 1963.

50 Some delegates were selected by Miami headquarters then relocated to Latin America, often registering as full-time students in local universities. Others were drawn from the growing Cuban exile communities that had emerged around the region, such as in Venezuela. Interview, Muñiz.

51 The first delegations were established just prior to the Bay of Pigs in Costa Rica, Venezuela and Mexico in March 1961: ‘Report on Labor [sic] of International Relations Section of the DRE’ (undated), ca. mid-1962, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 25, Folder X. See CIA memo ‘Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil’, ca. Aug. 1962, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 26, Folder C.

52 On the distribution of the DRE's bulletin, see monthly Operational Progress reports submitted by the CIA in 1964 included in MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 25, Folder X.

53 CIA undated memo ‘Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil’, ca. Aug. 1962, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 26, Folder C and DRE undated report, ‘Ecuador’, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 26, Folder F; also see footnote 66.

54 Van Dongen, Roulin and Scott-Smith (eds.), Transnational Anti-Communism.

55 Bohning, Castro Obsession, pp. 151–5.

56 Interview, Salvat.

57 Quoted in Bohning, Castro Obsession, p. 121.

58 Dispatch, Subj.: ‘Operational [redacted] Progress Report for August, 1962’, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 26, Folder F. Indeed, two other exile paramilitary groups provoked Soviet outrage months later when they attacked Soviet freighters near Cuban shores. García, Havana USA, p. 129; Bohning, Castro Obsession, p. 154.

59 Trinchera, 17 June 1962.

60 JMWAVE to director, 8 Nov. 1962, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 25, Folder X.

61 ‘Memorandum for the Record’, 13 Nov. 1962, MFFDA-HCSA, Reel 25, Folder X, ‘Operations’. The Ugly American is by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick.

62 Markarian, Uruguay, 1968; Pensado, Rebel Mexico; Vrana, This City; and Eric Zolov, ‘¡Cuba sí, Yanquis no! The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural Mexico–Norteamericano in Morelia, Michoacán, 1961’, in Joseph and Spenser (eds.), In from the Cold, pp. 214–52.

63 ‘Nuestra lucha en América Latina: razones y objetivos’, Trinchera, 9 Sept. 1962, p. 6.

64 Interview, Muñiz.

65 Ibid.

66 Memo, Subj.: ‘Synthesis [sic] of the Activities in the Delegation in Venezuela’ (undated), circa mid-1962, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 26, Folder D. Also see ‘Cuba (Intel.): Political/Military, The Revolutionary Student Directorate’, 1962, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 26, Folder F.

67 Tomás Reyes Cerca, ‘Dos congresos de la JUDCA en Venezuela: el II Latinoamericano y el I Mundial’, Avance Criollo, 1 June 1962, pp. 6–9.

68 ‘Chile: Democracia Cristiana, comunismo …’ Trinchera, 28 July 1963, p. 3.

69 Eduardo Muñiz (Miami) to Nelson Amaro (Santiago), 6 Dec. 1961, CHC-DRE, Box 8, Folder ‘Delegation in Chile, 1961–2’.

70 However, the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (Party for National Action, PAN) might have been a more obvious partner. On contact between the DRE and the MURO, see ‘El MURO se extiende a través de la provincia’, Puño: Para golpear con la verdad, no. 6, March/April 1963, p. 6, kindly made available by Luis Herrán Ávila. On the history and politics of the Sinarquistas and MURO, see (respectively), José Gustavo González Flores, ‘Los motivos del sinarquista: la organización y la ideología de la Unión Nacional Sinarquista’, Época II, 3: 1 (2015), pp. 49–76 and Pensado, ‘To Assault with the Truth’.

71 Luis Herrán Ávila, ‘La guerra por los caminos del mundo: Transnational Anti-Communist Violence and Latin America's Counterrevolution after 1959’, paper presented at the conference Transnational Counterrevolutionaries: Ideas and Practices of the Right in Latin America's Cold War, Columbia University, New York, 9–10 Nov. 2018.

72 Catarino Rodríguez, Ciudad Mante, Tamaulipas [Mexico], 25 March 1963, CHC-DRE, Box 10, Folder ‘Delegation in Mexico, 1963’.

73 Jesús López Cabrera to Ángel González, 2 Dec. 1964, CHC-DRE, Box 10, Folder ‘Delegation in Mexico, 1964’.

74 ‘Breve informe de las actividades del “DRE” […]’, CHC-DRE, Box 10, Folder ‘Delegation in Mexico, n.d.’

75 ‘Informe de la Comisión de Propaganda’ (undated), CHC-DRE, Box 10, Folder ‘Delegation in Mexico, n.d.’

76 ‘Ecuador: en cuanto a la propaganda’ (undated), CHC-DRE, Box 9, Folder ‘Delegation in Ecuador, 1961–2’.

77 Memo ‘Exposición económica’, CHC-DRE, Box 44, Folder ‘Cuba Economic Conditions Exhibit 1963’.

78 José Lasa to Roger [sic], 10 Oct. 1961, ‘Asunto: Labor realizada por el Sr. Amado Oscar Egues’, CHC-DRE, Box 7, Folder ‘Bolivia’.

79 Unsigned (Miami) to ‘Rafael’ (Ecuador), 28 Oct. 1961, CHC-DRE, Box 9, Folder ‘Delegation in Ecuador, 1961–2’.

80 Ibid.

81 Enrique Mesa (Miami) to Rodolfo Ríos (Montevideo), 16 April 1963, CHC-DRE, Box 12, Folder ‘Delegation in Uruguay, 1963–4’.

82 DRE Delegación de Venezuela, Informe, April 1962, CHC-DRE, Box 12, Folder ‘Delegation in Venezuela, 1961’.

83 Ángel Delgado to Luisa Sánchez de Pérez (Medellin), 10 March 1965, CHC-DRE, Box 10, Folder ‘Delegation in Mexico, 1965’.

84 DRE Delegación de Venezuela, ‘Informe’, April 1962, CHC-DRE, Box 12, Folder ‘Delegation in Venezuela, 1961’; DRE interview Manuel Fernández [former Cuban labour minister], April 1962, CHC-DRE, Box 12, Folder ‘Delegation in Venezuela, 1962’.

85 Pedro Ynterian García, ‘Informe de Secretaría de Relaciones Internacionales’, 22 Oct. 1961, CHC-DRE, Box 58, Folder ‘Congreso Latinoamericano de Estudiantes (CLAE), 1961’.

86 Patrick William Kelly, Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

87 Moyn, Christian Human Rights.

88 I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this parallel. On the ‘captive nations’ campaign, see Martin Nekola, ‘The Assembly of Captive European Nations: A Transnational Organization and Tool of Anti-Communist Propaganda’, in van Dongen, Roulin and Scott-Smith (eds.), Transnational Anti-Communism, pp. 96–112.

89 CHC-DRE, Box 62, Folder ‘Human Rights’.

90 Dispatch, ‘Transmittal of Report on DRE Appearance before OAS Committee on Human Rights’, 18 Oct. 1961, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 26, Folder D (DRE); ‘Nuestra lucha en América Latina’, Trinchera, 5 Aug. 1962, p. 5.

91 Mario Pita to ‘Estimados Delegados’, 11 Nov. 1963, CHC-DRE, Box 10, Folder ‘Delegation in Mexico, 1963’.

92 See ‘Noticiero’, Trinchera Latinoamericana, 15 June 1961, p. 2, for a list of governments and student federations that agreed to send requests for clemency to the Cuban government.

93 UPI, ‘Three Killed in Havana’, New York Times, 12 Dec. 1961, p. 26.

94 CHC-DRE, Box 42, Folder ‘Propaganda: DRE Scrapbook, n.d., 1961–2’ [sic].

95 Luis Fernández Rocha to Mário Brockmann Machado, 14 Oct. 1962, CHC-DRE, Box 7, Folder ‘Delegation in Brazil, 1961–2’.

96 [Fernández] Rocha to Ángel González, 1 Nov. 1961, CHC-DRE, Box 10, Folder ‘Delegation in Mexico, 1961–2’.

97 Pedro Ynterian García, Informe de Secretaría de Relaciones Internacionales, 22 Oct. 1961, CHC-DRE, Box 58, ‘Folder Congreso Latinoamericano de Estudiantes (CLAE), 1961’.

98 ‘Manifestación estudiantil anticomunista en Costa Rica’, Avance Criollo, 6 Oct. 1961, p. 35; ‘Report on Labor [sic]’.

99 Flyer ‘Al pueblo en general, al estudiantado en particular’ (undated), CHC-DRE, Box 9, Folder ‘Delegation in Ecuador, 1961–2’.

100 CHC-DRE, Box 42, folder ‘Propaganda: DRE Scrapbook, n.d., 1961–2’ [sic].

101 Laura Graciela Rodríguez, ‘Los estudiantes reformistas y su proyección latinoamericana: los congresos internacionales (1921–1957)’, Revista del IICE, 44 (2018), pp. 11–24.

102 ‘Que es el CLAE’ [sic], Trinchera en el Exilio: Número especial sobre IV CLAE, 19 Nov. 1961, p. 1.

103 ‘Resolutions on the Cuban Revolution of the IV Student Latin American Congress (IV CLAE) Celebrated in Natal, Brazil in the month of October, 1961’, typed manuscript, CHC-DRE, Box 58, Folder ‘Congresses and Events: Congreso Latinoamericano de Estudiantes (4:1961 Brasil)’.

104 On Cuba's growing involvement in Africa, see Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, pp. 30–56.

105 Casal, Lourdes, ‘África ante el problema cubano’, Cuba Nueva, 1: 10 (1962), pp. 1117Google Scholar; ‘Report on Labor [sic]’.

106 Notes on trip to Africa, ca. June 1962, CHC-DRE, Box 58, Folder ‘Conferencia Internacional de Estudiantes, 1964–5’.

107 Casal, ‘África’.

108 ‘Dear Fellow Students’, undated ca. May/June 1962, signed José Rodríguez, Lourdes Casal and Raul González, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 25, Folder T.

109 I thank Michael Bustamante for insight on this point.

110 On Casal's extraordinary life and legacy, see the dossier edited by Iraida López and Laura Lomas in Cuban Studies, 46 (2018).

111 Casal, ‘África’.

112 Garland Mahler, Tricontinental.

113 Memo from Secretaría de Asuntos Internacionales [Juan A. Rodríguez Jomolca] to Secretaria General, ‘Asunto: Informe Viaje a Suramérica’, hand-dated May 1965, CHC-DRE, Box 64, Folder ‘Other Topics: Latin American Students, n.d.’

114 Bohning, Castro Obsession.

115 Dispatch, 9 March 1965, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 25, Folder U.

116 Memo, 3 Jan. 1967, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 25, Folder W Operations.

117 Dispatch, Subj.: ‘[illegible] operational [illegible] project’, 28 Jan. 1966, MFFDA-HSCA, Reel 25, Folder U.

118 In reference to the Platt Amendment of 1901 in which the United States imposed significant limitations on Cuban sovereignty.

119 Rojas, Historia mínima, pp. 129–30.

120 Quiroga, ‘Exile Wars’; McPherson, ‘Caribbean Taliban’.

121 Grandin, Greg, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Iber, Neither Peace.