The Cold War divided the world into two implacable blocs and made the situation in Vietnam after 1954 a major expression of that implacability. Recognizing that fact, leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi convinced themselves that success in their revolution could tip the worldwide balance of power in favor of the socialist bloc and national liberation movements throughout the decolonizing world. This conviction, combined with the fact that they had to conduct their struggle for national liberation and reunification from a position of relative military weakness, made those leaders accomplished practitioners of international politics. So, too, did the totality of their commitment to Marxism-Leninism and thus to anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism.

This chapter addresses Vietnamese communist internationalism in the period from 1954 to 1975. It considers Hanoi’s self-appointed mission to advance the causes of socialism, national liberation, and anti-imperialism worldwide as it struggled to reunify Vietnam under its aegis. It demonstrates that even at the height of the war against the United States, DRV leaders never thought strictly in terms of the national interest. Obsessed as they were with the liberation and reunification of their country, they were also committed to the wider causes of socialism, “world revolution,” and “tiers-mondisme” (Third Worldism). While Hanoi did not share the commitment to non-alignment that sometimes animated Third Worldism, it applauded and encouraged calls for unity among decolonized and decolonizing states, for both ideological and practical reasons (Figure 4.1). During the second half of the 1950s, it endorsed the peaceful “spirit of Bandung” promoted by the first generation of Third World states and leaders. The following decade, it fervently supported the second generation of states and leaders embracing a more radical, even militant, revolutionary vision inspired by the triumph of the Cuban and Algerian revolutions and the overseas travails of Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Figure 4.1 A secondary theme of OSPAAAL imagery was the political value of solidarity. Rising identification with North Vietnam and revolutionary movements went hand in hand with hostility to US interventions in the Global South. OSPAAAL, Olivio Martinez, 1972. Offset, 54x33 cm.

Image courtesy Lincoln Cushing / Docs Populi.

To be sure, the Cold War, to say nothing of the Sino-Soviet dispute, created myriad challenges for Hanoi. But the contemporaneous process of decolonization in the Third World also created opportunities it sought to exploit to enhance its legitimacy and elevate its image worldwide, meet its core goals in Vietnam, and advance its vision of human progress.

The DRV and the International Community, 1954–63

Vietnamese communist leaders learned to appreciate the merits of actively engaging the international community during their war against France – the Indochina War (1946–54). During the Party’s Second Congress of February 1951, held after a crushing defeat suffered by Vietminh forces at Vinh Yen outside Hanoi, the leadership stressed the imperative to sustain the war against France until complete victory. To meet that end in light of the difficult situation confronting their forces, Party leaders mandated better mass organization and mobilization efforts at home, on the one hand, and resort to “people’s diplomacy” (ngoai giao nhan dan) – namely, exploitation and manipulation of anti-war and anti-colonial/imperialist sentiments – abroad, on the other. The DRV would henceforth endeavor to “maintain friendly relations with any government that respects the sovereignty of Vietnam” and “establish diplomatic relations with countries on the principle of freedom, equality and mutual benefit.”Footnote ¹

Starting that year, the international community figured prominently in the strategic calculations of the leadership. The so-called diplomacy struggle became a cornerstone of the ideology and national liberation strategy espoused by Ho Chi Minh and the rest of the Party leadership. “International unity and cooperation are necessary conditions for the triumph of the national liberation revolution,” they surmised, contributing as it did to “development of the new regime, the socialist regime.”Footnote ² In order to serve the goals of that struggle, Ho and the leadership publicly downplayed their embrace of Marxism-Leninism and links to Beijing and Moscow, professing instead a commitment to nationalism and patriotism, and to national liberation across the Third World. The approach was self-serving, to be sure. At the same time, there was a clear affinity between the struggle led by Vietnam’s communist party and that waged by revolutionary nationalist leaders across the colonial and semi-colonial world. Most obviously, both struggles accentuated anti-imperialism.

In July 1954, the DRV government entered into the Geneva accords with France. The accords provided for a ceasefire; the regrouping of Vietminh forces above the seventeenth parallel and of forces loyal to France below that demarcation line; the free movement of civilians between the two zones for a period of 300 days; the return of prisoners of war; guarantees against the introduction of new foreign forces in Vietnam; and a plebiscite on national reunification within two years. Until then, the northern zone would be under the authority of the DRV regime and the southern zone under the jurisdiction of France and its local clients.

Ho Chi Minh and the Party leadership accepted the Geneva accords because they thought they were the best they could get under the circumstances and that they might be workable. That is, they believed the accords would not only end the eight-year-long Indochina War but also might bring about the peaceful reunification of Vietnam under their governance. The accords were far from perfect. Their terms, Ho and other leaders felt, could have been more generous. Still, they were satisfied because at a minimum the accords guaranteed that the United States would not intervene militarily in Indochina – in the near future, at least. Earlier that year, the Party, now called the Vietnamese Workers’s Party (VWP), had decreed that the United States constituted the “foremost enemy” of the Vietnamese revolution. By its rationale, the French would never have managed to sustain their war in Indochina for as long as they did without American backing. Washington had enabled Paris since 1950, in the wake of the recognition of the DRV by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the rest of the socialist camp. American “imperialists” had not only supported French “colonialists” materially and politically from that moment onward but in fact manipulated Paris into staying the course in a war that served Washington’s interests more than France’s own. The Americans had essentially used the French as proxies to neutralize the Vietnamese revolution and contain the national liberation cause in Southeast Asia because it threatened their own designs and ambitions in the region.

When Paris decided to negotiate the terms of its extrication from Indochina with DRV representatives in Geneva beginning in May 1954, just as the Battle of Dien Bien Phu ended, Washington turned to a new proxy, as Hanoi saw it, to do American bidding: Ngo Dinh Diem. Thanks to US patronage, in June 1954 Diem became prime minister of the State of Vietnam, the “puppet” state set up by the French under Emperor Bao Dai in 1949 to enhance the legitimacy of their struggle against the DRV-led Vietminh. Though his authority was initially tenuous at best, Diem – a staunch anti-communist with respectable nationalist credentials – became in time a major impediment to the realization of communist objectives in Indochina.

No sooner had it signed the Geneva accords with France than Ho’s government recognized the difficulties it would face in trying to implement them. While Paris seemed prepared to honor their terms, Washington, and Diem in particular, would not even endorse the Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference confirming the accords’ legitimacy. With acquiescence in the Geneva formula from neither Washington nor Saigon, the chances that Vietnam would ever be peacefully reunified under communist governance were slim.

To improve its prospects in the face of a highly problematic situation, Ho’s government turned to diplomacy, as it had in 1951 to offset the consequences of the Vietminh defeat at Vinh Yen. It mounted a major propaganda campaign emphasizing the merits of its cause, the legitimacy of the DRV, as well as its commitment to the peaceful reunification of Vietnam, and denouncing the “crimes” and nefarious intentions of Washington and its local “reactionary” allies. The central purpose of this exercise in people’s diplomacy was to draw international attention to the situation in Vietnam and, most critically, prompt other governments and influential organizations to see circumstances there as Ho’s regime saw them. Winning over world opinion – gaining wider public sympathy – would not only help muster political and moral support for the DRV’s cause; it would also make it more difficult for Washington and Saigon to violate the letter and spirit of the Geneva accords. That is, diplomatic isolation would make the revolution’s enemies hesitate to further subvert peace in Indochina. At a minimum, it would make Washington think twice before intervening militarily, a prospect Ho himself feared to the extreme and hoped to preclude at all costs. Favorable, supportive world opinion would serve as a hedge against US intervention and improve DRV prospects for success in the new context. Ho’s government effectively used diplomacy to advance its own interests at the expense of its enemies.

To meet the ends of this latest diplomatic campaign, DRV leaders and pertinent organs attuned themselves to international affairs and made concerted efforts to engage other governments, particularly nationalist regimes in the Third World and “progressive” movements and organizations in the First. Consistent with the decree endorsed during the 1951 Party Congress, they legitimated their state’s existence above the seventeenth parallel after July 1954 by seeking formal diplomatic recognition from other governments and promptly recognizing newly independent countries when suitable. As previously noted, in 1950 the DRV had obtained recognition from the PRC, the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, and North Korea. In 1954, Mongolia followed suit. That same year India, a vanguard of the Non-Aligned Movement, became the first noncommunist country to open a diplomatic mission in North Vietnam, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru visited the DRV in October. France, the United Kingdom, and Canada each had diplomatic representation in the North by then, but largely to meet their various obligations under the terms of the Geneva accords.Footnote ³

A socialist state and avowed member of that camp after 1954, the DRV publicly downplayed its ties to communism and sought to insinuate itself into other circles to gain wider legitimacy and support for its agenda. To the same end, it tried to keep under wraps the transformation of the North Vietnamese economy and society along socialist lines, in full swing at the time. Instead, it leveraged its status as a semi-colonial state and victim of French and now American imperialism to gain political and moral support from revolutionary leaders, movements, and government across the Third World, otherwise wary of strict communism with its emphasis on class struggle at the expense of national unity. To such strategic aims, labor, student, and women’s unions from the DRV regularly participated in international conventions. Those forums provided “an indispensable format for enabling successful diplomacy” while providing opportunities to network with other states and affirm DRV sovereignty.Footnote ⁴ Representatives from the DRV attended meetings of the World Peace Council (WPC), Moscow’s answer to what Soviet leaders perceived was a United Nations Organization stacked against them. Formed in 1950, the WPC acquired a measure of international legitimacy over time through its promotion of peaceful coexistence, sovereignty, nuclear disarmament, and decolonization. Unlike the United Nations, its members were not states but progressive individuals and action groups, including associations and unions representing women, students, writers, journalists, and scientists. Jean-Paul Sartre participated in the WPC’s congress of 1952. Other notable individuals who attended WPC-sponsored meetings or otherwise supported its activities included Pablo Picasso, W. E. B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Louis Aragon, Diego Rivera, and Pablo Neruda.Footnote ⁵ That made the WPC an ideal target for the DRV’s people’s diplomacy.

In 1955, Ho’s government participated in the Asian-African Conference in Bandung. This international conference offered DRV representatives a unique opportunity to meet, discuss, and fraternize with leaders and diplomats from dozens of countries outside the socialist camp sharing experiences of colonialism and embracing, to varying degrees, independent Third World nationalism. Bandung facilitated the forging of ties with other Third World governments, culminating in the exchange of diplomatic missions, among other undertakings. Indonesia, the host country, established formal diplomatic relations with the DRV immediately after the conference. Burma opened a diplomatic mission in Hanoi, as had India, as previously noted. Essentially, Bandung allowed the DRV to build networks with other Third World governments while affirming its legitimacy and Vietnam’s sovereignty. Beyond that, the conference, spurred in large part by mounting Cold War tensions in Southeast Asia and in Indochina specifically, provided a stage for mustering political and moral support for Hanoi’s national liberation and reunification struggle. For years thereafter, that is, until Vietnamese communist leaders shifted to a more militant approach to address the situation in South Vietnam, Hanoi promoted and extolled the virtues of the “Bandung Spirit” because it served the goals of its diplomatic struggle and remained consistent with its own domestic imperatives.

Bandung played a seminal role in bringing about the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), created in Cairo in 1957; the Non-Aligned Movement, formally established in Belgrade in 1961; and the Afro-Asian Latin American People’s Solidarity Organization, formed in Havana in 1966. Individually and collectively, these organizations promoted “a political consciousness against Western norms and power” that persisted and grew as more countries in Asia and Africa secured independence.Footnote ⁶ As increasing numbers of Third World states joined the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement in particular came to “have a great voice on the world stage, making great changes on the international chessboard, becoming a force that both socialist and imperialist countries wished to fight for,” according to a semi-official Vietnamese account.Footnote ⁷ The DRV’s involvement in that and other such movements supported the aims of its public diplomacy as well as its efforts to shame the United States into curbing its interference in Vietnamese affairs. It also suggested that the DRV regime was more nationalist than it was communist, beholden more to the Third World than to Moscow or Beijing. Hanoi’s Third World activism enhanced its image across the noncommunist world and invested the Party with a degree of autonomy without alienating its socialist allies.

DRV authorities, ensconced in Hanoi after completion of the French withdrawal from the city in October 1954, gradually became loud and recognizable voices advocating on behalf of “oppressed” masses everywhere. At first, the latter meant those suffering under the yoke of colonialism and neo-imperialism in the Third World. In time, it also included victims of capitalist greed generally defined, including the poor and marginalized communities in the First World. Audiences worldwide were receptive to the authorities’ message. The Indochina War, and especially the DRV victory at Dien Bien Phu, had sounded the death knell for France’s overseas empire. Events in Vietnam galvanized revolutionaries in Algeria and across the rest of the Third World including, in time, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.Footnote ⁸ Thus, the more the DRV publicized others’ causes and developed ties to them, the more those others felt sympathy for its efforts to complete the “liberation” of Vietnam. The DRV’s backing of Algerian independence, sub-Saharan African decolonization, and the African National Congress (ANC)’s anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa were especially important in that respect.Footnote ⁹ Identifying with national liberation movements solidified the bond between the DRV and other Third World governments supportive of causes championing self-determination and anti-imperialism.Footnote ¹⁰

Hanoi’s diplomacy facilitated manipulation of public perceptions of its purposes and policies and enabled communist policymakers to cultivate a favorable, broad-based, global political awareness and understanding of their aspirations. In 1958, VWP theoretician Truong Chinh elaborated on the DRV’s international obligations even as it endeavored to build socialism above the seventeenth parallel and bring about “liberation” in the South. Hanoi, he observed, must oppose “all war kindling schemes of the imperialist aggressors and their agents,” strengthen “friendly solidarity and the fraternal cooperation with the USSR, China, and [other] people’s democracies,” and “support national liberation movements in the world” and the ongoing one in Algeria in particular.Footnote ¹¹ A year later, the VWP Central Committee noted that “the problem of achieving the unification of our country, the achievement of independence and democracy in all of our country” was not only “the problem of the struggle between our nation against the American imperialists and their puppets,” but also “the problem of the struggle” between the progressive camp and the imperialist camp. The “victory of the Vietnamese Revolution,” the Committee concluded, would have “an enthusiastic effect” not only on the rest of the communist world but also “on the movement of popular liberation in Asia, Africa, [and] Latin America” to the point of precipitating “the disintegration of colonialism throughout the world.” Fundamentally, the Vietnamese revolution was “part of the world revolution.”Footnote ¹² The triumph of the Cuban revolution in January that same year marked, in the eyes of Vietnamese communist leaders, “the expansion of the scope of socialism on three continents” as well as a major defeat for imperialism and solidified their commitment to internationalism.Footnote ¹³

Through 1959 and the early 1960s, the DRV quietly asserted itself as a member of the socialist camp as it expanded its ties to the non-aligned and national liberation movements. Following the onset of the Sino-Soviet dispute in the late 1950s, Hanoi played a leading role in the effort to reconcile the two communist giants. Though that effort failed to end the dispute, the Vietnamese gained a great deal of respect from both Moscow and Beijing as well as from the rest of the socialist camp for attempting to mitigate the dispute despite being one of that camp’s youngest – and smallest – members and embroiled at the time in a serious conflict of its own. All the while, the DRV sustained its engagement with the Third World, effectively seeking to define itself as a postcolonial state, aggressively advocating for the end of colonial rule in Africa and promptly recognizing states on that continent after they gained independence. It established diplomatic relations with Guinea (1958), Mali (1960), Morocco (1961), the Democratic Republic of Congo (1961), Egypt (1963), the Republic of Congo (1964), Tanzania (1965), Mauritania (1965), and Ghana (1965). The DRV was among the first governments to recognize the new Algerian state in 1962, a logical move considering Hanoi had extended material, political, and moral support to revolutionaries there during their war against France.Footnote ¹⁴ “Despite the fact that the country was divided and invaded by the United States,” historian Vu Duong Ninh has written, “Vietnam remained trusted by many countries in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism,” and could thus “contribute significantly to national liberation movements across the world.”Footnote ¹⁵ As an act of policy, each year on the day marking the anniversary of the independence of a Third World country, Ho Chi Minh sent the head of that state a telegram wishing continued peace and prosperity on behalf of “the people of Vietnam and the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.” The gesture was effortless, to be sure, but did not go unnoticed and unappreciated by the recipients of those telegrams.Footnote ¹⁶

This tendency to associate with and engage international and transnational movements became a hallmark of DRV diplomacy and a defining aspect of its revolutionary strategy and ideology. In May 1963, for example, a meeting of African states in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa concluded with the formation of the Organization of African Unity, joined by thirty-two governments. According to an editorial in Nhan dan, the VWP mouthpiece, the conference “highlighted the humiliating defeat of and the end of the road for colonialism,” on the one hand, and “the great victory of the national liberation revolution,” on the other. “Our southern [Vietnamese] compatriots involved in a difficult and heroic struggle against the US- Diem clique are very excited about the outcome of this conference, and see the success of the African people as their own success,” the editorial concluded.Footnote ¹⁷ There was a logic to such support. Pan-Africanism, Pan-Asianism, and communist internationalism, among other movements, shared a common ideological aversion to neo-imperialism and Western capitalism. Each also sought to empower historically marginalized constituencies, to give a voice to the voiceless, and to emancipate the oppressed. More practically, these movements allowed states such as the DRV to “place their political aspirations in identity-based communities that extended beyond the formal boundaries of nation-states,” historian Christopher Lee has noted. That achievement facilitated the pursuit of their most fundamental political goals. “Frequently guided by an ambitious intellectual leadership,” Lee writes, “these transnational endeavors sought to collect and stand for the hopes of broadly defined social groups that faced political restrictions locally and globally.”Footnote ¹⁸

Vietnamese Communist Internationalism, 1964–75

Through the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hanoi regularly asserted publicly its commitment to the “world revolutionary process”; however, its words were slow to translate into direct action. It provided troop and material support to the nascent insurgency in South Vietnam but in cautious, deniable ways. Ho was adamant about avoiding the resumption of “big war” in Indochina and thus giving Washington no pretext to intervene militarily in Vietnam. During this early period, the DRV leadership felt it was best to wait on events in the South and focus on building the socialist economy in the North.

That all changed in 1963–64. Convinced by the domestic and international situation that imperialism and capitalism were on the defensive worldwide, increasing numbers of VWP members, including members of the Politburo, demanded that Hanoi seize this “opportune moment” and adopt a more “forward” strategy in the South. If the DRV was ever to become a “vanguard” for national liberation movements across the Third World, these galvanized Party members believed, then it had to get over its fear of provoking US intervention and act decisively in the South.

That attitude was both cause and consequence of the growing influence in Hanoi of a hard-line, radical clique obsessed with moving to direct action to confront imperialism and reactionary capitalism in Indochina. Emboldened by circumstances, members of that clique proceeded to seize the reins of power from Ho and other moderates in a bloodless palace coup during the Ninth Plenum of the VWP Central Committee of December 1963. Whereas Ho and his associates had conducted their foreign policy largely based on pragmatic considerations, seeking to avoid confrontation with the United States, the men who controlled decision-making in the aftermath of the Plenum were committed ideologues with strong internationalist proclivities who were hell-bent on leaving their mark on the world. The interests of the wider socialist world and of “oppressed masses” in the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were as important to them as the liberation and reunification of their own nation.Footnote ¹⁹

Le Duan, the brains behind the coup who replaced Ho as paramount leader, personified this new consensus. From the moment Ho acquiesced in the Geneva accords, Le Duan maintained that was a mistake, that Saigon and especially Washington would never honor the terms of those accords, and that only war could solve the Party’s predicaments in Indochina. Vindicated by circumstances, Le Duan would shape DRV foreign policy on the basis of rigid ideological considerations starting in 1964. As he and his chief lieutenants were fond of Chinese revolutionary prescriptions, they became strong proponents of revolutionary militancy in South Vietnam for the sake of socialist solidarity and in the name of proletarian internationalism. Those lieutenants included VWP Organization Committee head Le Duc Tho, PAVN General Nguyen Chi Thanh, and DRV Deputy Prime Minister Pham Hung. All were members of the Politburo. As southern veterans of the Indochina War and hardened revolutionaries, they firmly believed in the merits of Marxism-Leninism – its Maoist Chinese variant to be specific – as a blueprint for revolutionary success. Inspired by the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban examples, they sought nothing less than total victory over their enemies to augur a new era in their nation’s – and the world’s – history.Footnote ²⁰

For Hanoi’s new sheriffs, the Vietnamese revolution constituted more than a component in a global movement opposing the United States and capitalist imperialism: it was a potential model for all others similarly engaged in national liberation struggles, much as their allies in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana were for them. The VWP, according to Le Duc Tho, was a “vanguard unit of the working class and capable of leading the revolution throughout the country to complete victory, thereby making worthwhile contributions to the revolutionary cause of the working class and the laboring people throughout the world.”Footnote ²¹ Tho, like Le Duan, believed that defeating the Americans and their lackeys was necessary not only to achieve Vietnamese liberation and reunification, but also to protect and advance the cause of all “peace-loving” peoples. Hanoi’s war against the United States and its reactionary allies in Saigon was “a part of the world revolution,” waged in “the cause of revolutionary forces worldwide.”Footnote ²² Under Le Duan’s regime, the diplomatic campaign initiated in 1954 to enlist foreign support for the DRV and the Vietnamese revolution developed into an ideologically driven mission to spearhead the struggle against imperialism and reactionary tendencies across the globe.

Though they remained devoted Marxist-Leninists at heart, Le Duan and his chief lieutenants publicly proffered their commitment to nationalism and anti-imperialism because it suited their purposes, especially as they concerned the DRV’s diplomatic endeavors. Relative to the previous regime under Ho, Le Duan’s was significantly more dogmatic and doctrinaire. Unlike Ho, whose hard-line comrades within the Party always questioned his commitment to Marxism-Leninism and deemed him too much of a nationalist, Le Duan’s communist and internationalist credentials were impeccable.Footnote ²³ That is, whereas Ho had had a nasty habit of prioritizing national unity over class struggle, Le Duan always knew to subsume the former under the latter. Here was a true believer in the infallibility of communism and the purposive nature of History. Here was also an individual who considered nationalism a mere tool, a means, to the achievement of national liberation under the Party’s own brand of governance, and not an actual motive force of or genuine raison d’être for the Vietnamese revolution.

The onset of the American War in spring 1965 solidified the resolve of Le Duan and other DRV leaders to make their revolution a vanguard for Third World liberation movements. As their country became a crucible and violent expression of the global Cold War, the Vietnamese revolution gained widespread notoriety. According to political scientist Tuong Vu, DRV leaders embraced their situation because it “vindicated their beliefs about the fundamental cleavage in international politics between capitalism and communism, between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries.” Beyond that, it “allowed them to proudly display their revolutionary credentials” as well as to work on “realizing their radical ambitions.”Footnote ²⁴ As an expression of the Cold War, the American War was welcomed by radical leaders of the Vietnamese communist movement and Le Duan in particular. By one account, following the onset of the American War, Le Duan became “intoxicated” with the prospect of “winning everything” on every front.Footnote ²⁵

DRV leaders marketed their “anti-American resistance” as a “just struggle” and manifestation of the global fight against imperialism for “peace and justice.” On one side of the struggle, as Le Duan put it in a characteristic formulation, was “the most stubborn aggressive imperialism with the most powerful economic and military potential”; on the other were “the forces of national independence, democracy and socialism of which the Vietnamese people are the shock force in the region.”Footnote ²⁶ Sustaining the fight against the United States was the “moral obligation” of the Vietnamese on behalf of the national liberation movement and of oppressed masses everywhere, Hanoi stressed in both its domestic and foreign propaganda. Bringing about Vietnamese reunification under communist aegis was, for its part, the DRV’s and the VWP’s duty on behalf of “the international Communist movement” and in “the spirit of proletarian internationalism.”Footnote ²⁷

Devout Marxist-Leninists as they were, Le Duan and other Vietnamese communist leaders cleverly downplayed ideology and their communist credentials in propaganda and other forms of engagement targeting nonsocialist states. Their travails against the United States and its southern “puppets” were, they affirmed, purely nationalist endeavors. The Vietnamese were heirs to a long, glorious, and heroic tradition of resistance to foreign aggression, their propaganda claimed, and the fight against the United States was but a continuation of that tradition.Footnote ²⁸ The Vietnamese resistance maintained close ties with the Soviet Union and China, Hanoi acknowledged, but that was only because circumstances warranted such ties. Everyone engaged in the struggle against American “imperialists,” from top decision maker to common foot soldier, was a nationalist at heart whose sole aspiration was to live to see the day when the nation was fully “liberated” from the clutches of foreign “invaders” and their “reactionary,” treacherous local clients. All else was inconsequential.

In repeating that line and marketing their war against the United States on such terms, Le Duan’s regime sought not only to win over world opinion but also to encourage other “oppressed masses” to take up arms and fight, to demonstrate that seemingly minor actors could play important roles in the Cold War and contribute to the world revolution and the demise of imperialism. Its conscious effort to inspire others to fight imperialism even as it attempted to rally them in support of its cause bore dividends. Its “determined stance in the face of American technological might,” historian Michael Latham has written, “became an appealing symbol of determined resistance and the power of popular revolutionary war.”Footnote ²⁹

Following American intervention, Hanoi developed intimate ties with numerous foreign governments and movements, in the socialist world and beyond, which provided much-needed political, moral, and material support. China, the Soviet Union, and other communist states supplied indispensable military hardware and other aid. Limited in their ability to provide such assistance, Third World governments aided Hanoi by heralding its troops and southern insurgents belonging to the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong, in Western parlance) as heroes fighting for the cause of national liberation worldwide. Such rhetorical and moral support proved instrumental in publicizing the “just struggle” of the Vietnamese and increasing the pressure on American policymakers to desist in Indochina. Even as the United States subjected the North to sustained bombings, foreign delegations – including many from the United States – visited the DRV and, while there or upon their return home, publicly expressed their support and admiration for the resistance of the “brave” Vietnamese. They also widely and openly condemned the American military intervention and the bombing of “innocent civilians” in the North, fueling anti-war sentiment across the world and in the United States.Footnote ³⁰

The importance of Vietnam to this global revolutionary movement was impossible to miss in January 1966, when Fidel Castro hosted the Tricontinental Conference in Havana to promote national liberation and communism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Some 600 participants representing more than eighty sovereign governments, national liberation movements, and other organizations attended the thirteen-day event, but Vietnam and its struggle against American militarism occupied a prominent place in deliberations. In a stirring “message to the Tricontinental,” Che Guevara, an architect of the Cuban revolution and world’s most famous itinerant revolutionary, noted that “every people that liberates itself is a step in the battle for the liberation of one’s own people.” Vietnam, he said, “teaches us this with its permanent lesson in heroism, its tragic daily lesson of struggle and death in order to gain the final victory.” In that country, “the soldiers of imperialism encounter the discomforts of those who, accustomed to the standard of living that the United States boasts, have to confront a hostile land; the insecurity of those who cannot move without feeling that they are stepping on enemy territory; death for those who go outside of fortified compounds; the permanent hostility of the entire population.” “How close and bright would the future appear,” Che famously concluded, “if two, three, many Vietnams flowered on the face of the globe, with their quota of death and their immense tragedies, with their daily heroism, with their repeated blows against imperialism, forcing it to disperse its forces under the lash of the growing hatred of the peoples of the world!”Footnote ³¹

The meeting in Havana spawned the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (commonly known by its Spanish acronym OSPAAAL), which staunchly supported Hanoi and the NLF’s anti-American war. Che’s message, published a year later under the title “Create Two, Three … Many Vietnams, That Is the Watchword,” became a rallying cry for revolutionary organizations and movements all around the world, increasing Vietnam’s international profile and the notoriety of its anti-American resistance. Even French President Charles de Gaulle jumped on that bandwagon through a much-publicized speech in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, in September 1966. Attempting to curry favor with former French colonies largely sympathetic to Hanoi, he condemned US military intervention in Southeast Asia and called for Washington to end the war at once. In doing so, de Gaulle also reaffirmed his intent to distance his government from the United States, a desire most blatantly expressed through his decision to dramatically curtail French involvement in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) earlier that year.Footnote ³²

Through propaganda and manipulation of foreign journalists, dignitaries, and other personalities, the DRV molded world opinion to suit the interests of its armed struggle. Thanks to Hanoi’s own fastidiousness and to the loud voices of its allies and friends, media outlets from across the world closely followed the situation in Vietnam, paying particular attention to the activities and behavior of American forces. The International War Crimes Tribunal, also known as the Russell Tribunal after its founder – the philosopher and delegate to the Tricontinental Conference, Bertrand Russell – proved meaningful in that respect. Its ideologically motivated investigation into the nature of the American war in Indochina found the United States guilty of genocide against the region’s peoples. For good measure, Hanoi created a special government agency, the American War Crimes Investigative Commission, tasked with compiling numbers and producing detailed, though quite exaggerated, reports on “illegal,” “immoral,” and “criminal” American activities in Vietnam. As developments in Vietnam or related to the war there regularly made front-page news everywhere, audiences around the world became captivated by the conflict. DRV authorities made sure those reports found their way into the hands of anti-war activists and leaders, including members of the Russell Tribunal.

This ostensible globalization of the Vietnamese revolution dramatically increased Hanoi’s stakes in the Vietnam War. Just as success stood to rouse others struggling against reactionary enemies, defeat might spell the doom of the world revolution and deject national liberation fighters across the Third World. But Le Duan and his chief lieutenants would not be deterred. That is, the small size of their country, its low level of economic development, and the daunting political challenges it faced did not preclude them from accomplishing remarkable feats and meeting their obligations to the international community. Egypt, Yugoslavia, Albania, Algeria, and, most notably, Cuba had each demonstrated that small states were capable of impacting the world, influencing the international system, and transcending or otherwise challenging Cold War bipolarity.Footnote ³³

Hanoi’s stubborn refusal to abandon its goals following the onset of the American War, its resilience, and even the mere fact that it and the NLF were not losing badly challenged conventional thinking on American military might and the merits of guerrilla warfare. Despite their technological superiority and abundant wealth, the Americans were incapable of defeating Vietnam’s “peasant armies” and halting their march to independence. The Vietminh and Algeria’s own NLF deserved praise and respect for defeating the French in their respective anti-colonial struggles after World War II; but Hanoi’s willingness to take on the United States in the Vietnam War and its successes were nothing short of remarkable.

Le Duan sought to deal the United States a coup de grâce with the Tet Offensive of January 1968. Consisting of surprise, concerted attacks on all major southern cities and towns, the campaign aimed to precipitate a general uprising of the southern masses demanding the withdrawal of American forces and abdication of the regime in Saigon. Le Duan had long hoped for such an uprising in the South, which he thought would leave Washington no choice but to abandon Vietnam unconditionally.Footnote ³⁴ As it turned out, internationalist concerns also figured prominently in his calculations. Le Duan confided in his Chinese counterparts that his regime accepted the possibility of “enormous bloodletting” to achieve total victory over the Saigon regime and the Americans because that would not only contain American neo-imperialism in Indochina but inspire other peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to free themselves from the oppression induced by Western capitalism.Footnote ³⁵ “We have to establish a world front that will be built first by some core countries and later enlarged to include African and Latin American countries,” Le Duan told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.Footnote ³⁶

The Tet Offensive and follow-up campaigns produced none of the results expected by Hanoi leaders. They were, in fact, a complete disaster, costing the lives of more than 40,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong combatants.Footnote ³⁷ However, support for the war in the United States had begun to fray, and images of American forces seemingly on the defensive only served to encourage emerging doubts. By March, events in Vietnam led Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the presidential election and set in motion a series of highly public protests that would divide the United States and further erode popular will to continue the war in Southeast Asia. Hanoi snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. That is, what looked to be a severe setback for its cause became a major triumph. That triumph was a testament to the effectiveness of Hanoi’s diplomatic struggle, a fruit of its longstanding commitment to cultivating harmonious relations with noncommunist state and nonstate actors and exploiting anti-war sentiment in the West, including the United States.

In the aftermath of the offensive, in April, Hanoi opened peace talks with Washington. Despite what the gesture suggested, Vietnamese communist policymakers did not intend to negotiate seriously. Committed as ever to military victory, they used the talks merely to pander to world opinion, as well as to probe the intentions of American decision makers. Losses suffered by communist forces in the Tet campaign had been heavy, Le Duan recognized, but achieving unmitigated triumph over the United States remained essential to win “everything” in Vietnam, on the one hand, and contribute to the eradication of capitalism around the world, on the other. As long as capitalism existed, Hanoi’s thinking went, peace in Vietnam and elsewhere would be threatened and “peace-loving” peoples would never be truly safe. Just as the Soviet Union’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War against Fascist Aggression” had contributed to the demise of fascism as a viable political ideology, Vietnam’s victory over the United States would herald the demise of capitalism.Footnote ³⁸ By official VWP account, American policymakers were “neo-fascists” bent since 1954 on depriving the Vietnamese people of peace and freedom by keeping the country divided.Footnote ³⁹ In defeating the United States, Hanoi would discredit the ideology Washington held so dear. It would also by extension demonstrate the superiority of socialism and of socialist modernity over the capitalist, bourgeois reactionary system.

Moreover, sustaining the war effort until the United States was defeated would vindicate the forward strategy embraced by the VWP leadership since 1964 and, more broadly, the policy of active, aggressive struggle favored by orthodox Marxist-Leninists. Most overtly championed by Mao and other “radicals” in Beijing, that policy had run contrary to the policy of peaceful coexistence and peaceful resolution of East-West disputes sanctioned by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956. American actions during the Chinese Civil War and then the Korean War reinforced Beijing’s view that defiance was the only realistic way of dealing with the United States. “War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions,” Mao said, and starting in 1962 Beijing actively encouraged Hanoi to stand firm against American provocations, prepare to fight, and forego a diplomatic solution, as Moscow advocated.Footnote ⁴⁰ By continuing the war effort, the Vietnamese could demonstrate their commitment to national liberation and avoid the mistakes made by their foreign comrades over Korea in 1953, when Pyongyang and Beijing had accepted a ceasefire and consented to the continued, permanent division of the peninsula. Victory in Vietnam could show the Third World that complete liberation by force of arms was not impossible and that it could be achieved even when the Americans themselves stood in the way. Besides, a determined stance against American imperialism in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive would restore revolutionary momentum and facilitate continued mobilization of public opinion at home and abroad.

Le Duan and other core leaders made no secret of their contempt for the Soviet “revisionist” line advocating negotiated solutions to East-West conflicts, and of their partiality to Chinese revolutionary prescriptions. Moscow resented Hanoi’s insubordination, its assertion of an independent and defiant policy more in line with China’s own stance in the global Cold War, affirmed by its decision to forego a diplomatic solution and rely on armed struggle to bring about national reunification. Soviet leaders inferred from that decision that Hanoi had aligned itself with Beijing in the Sino-Soviet dispute then wreaking havoc in the socialist camp. Though they refused to take a public stance in the Sino-Soviet split, DRV decision makers subscribed to Chinese revolutionary theses because they genuinely believed they constituted the best way of meeting core strategic objectives, domestically and internationally. Besides, the Vietnamese had their own ideas on the merits of revolutionary violence. “Only through the use of revolutionary violence of the masses to break the counter-revolutionary violence of the exploitative governing classes is it possible to conquer power for the people and to build a new society,” VWP theoretician Truong Chinh advised.Footnote ⁴¹ Violent revolution was the “only just path” to victory, just as using violence against class enemies represented a “universal law.”Footnote ⁴² In continuing to pursue final triumph over the United States, Hanoi demonstrated that violent struggle was most suitable given its own circumstances at the time and silenced detractors of its strategy.

Thus, through the post-1968 period, Hanoi steadfastly adhered to its revolutionary strategy predicated on armed struggle and defeat of the American “imperialists” despite what its participation in peace talks suggested. Over the next seven years, Le Duan and his regime met the bulk of their objectives, domestically and internationally. They defeated the United States and its allies and reunified Vietnam under their governance. That success roused Third World revolutionaries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The culmination of wars for national liberation in Angola and Mozambique in the mid-1970s – just as Saigon fell to communist-led armies – and the support proffered to rebels there by the Soviet Union and Cuba, among others, were to no insignificant degree prompted by the triumph of the Vietnamese revolution and attendant American retrenchment from the Third World. In Latin America, leftist insurgents emboldened by events in Indochina and benefiting from Vietnamese moral and – in at least one instance – material support found new life and made meaningful gains in their struggles against right-wing dictatorships beholden to Washington.Footnote ⁴³ The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) drew both lessons and strength from the experiences of the Vietnamese, and in fact came to see itself as closely intertwined with them in a common struggle against Western imperialism.Footnote ⁴⁴

Hanoi’s anti-American resistance even had major ramifications in the West, where it produced great tumult. It contributed to a growing malaise there, variously dividing populations, driving a wedge between people and their governments, exacerbating socioeconomic tensions. It prompted mass protest movements from Paris to Chicago and facilitated the advent of anti-establishment radical organizations from West Germany to Canada. Most notably, the Vietnam War contributed to the emergence of a vigorous and raucous countercultural movement that seriously challenged and contested traditional sources of authority and, in some countries, brought about the collapse of governments or, at a minimum, a reassessment of the parameters governing executive power. According to historian Jeremi Suri, the countercultural movement was so disruptive in the West that it encouraged constructive engagement of the Eastern bloc by its leaders. Détente between the Soviet Union and the United States, rapprochement between Beijing and Washington, and Ostpolitik in Europe were each to varying degrees prompted by domestic challenges facing Western governments. Ultimately, East-West détente did not just reduce Cold War tensions; it indirectly helped build momentum in the Third World for national liberation causes.Footnote ⁴⁵

In the eyes of its most ardent critics, the American war in Vietnam epitomized all that was wrong with the West: the disconnect between rulers and ruled, the disregard for the rights of others, the greed of capitalist entrepreneurs, and the abuse of power by government leaders. How else to account for the decision of American and other leaders to send so many young men halfway around the world to contain a “peasant insurgency,” to stand in the way of “good” and “valiant” “freedom fighters” merely seeking their country’s reunification and independence? To many critics, the refusal of Western leaders to do more to curtail the war in Vietnam was symptomatic of a growing generational gap, of the widely contrasting values of young people with those who had authority over them, the “over 30” generation. Opposing the war was for estranged youths a way to manifest their frustration with the status quo. It served as a vehicle to articulate myriad grievances and show that the existing system was not working, at least for them and other “oppressed” demographics at home and abroad. In time, opposition to the war, to the governments that abetted it, and to Western sources of authority broadly defined served as a rallying point for activists supporting a broad range of reformist and radical causes. It even facilitated the creation of transnational terrorist networks that brought together French-Canadian separatists, African American extremists, German radicals, Italian paramilitaries, Japanese communist militants, and Palestinian nationalists. While the Vietnam War was not the main reason these elements came together, it galvanized them like no other outside event.

Conclusion

Historian Huynh Kim Khanh maintained in an influential work that from its onset the Vietnamese revolution was both “a national liberation movement, governed by traditional Vietnamese patriotism” and “an affiliate of the international Communist movement, profoundly affected by the vicissitudes of the Comintern.”Footnote ⁴⁶ To be sure, the Vietnamese revolution was never just a movement for national emancipation conducted under the auspices of dedicated rebels who were nationalists, first and foremost. Whether of moderate or hard-line persuasion, those rebels and particularly their leaders proved to be devout Marxist-Leninists and dedicated internationalists committed to class struggle and world revolution, just as they were to national liberation.

The internationalism espoused by Hanoi’s communist leaders was imbued with a clear ideological hue emphasizing the necessity of a socialist revolution to successfully resist and overcome American capitalist imperialism. In hindsight, a syncretic adaptation of Marxism-Leninism conditioned the thinking and behavior of Hanoi decision makers in the period 1954–75. That adaptation mixed a concern, an obsession really, with national liberation and Vietnamese reunification under communist aegis, on the one hand, with an aspiration to inspire and act as a vanguard for revolutionary movements across the Third World, on the other. According to Tuong Vu, the struggle waged by Hanoi after 1954 was “at heart, a communist revolution.” Leaders there were internationalists “no less than their comrades in the Soviet Union and China.” For Le Duan and his acolytes, “a successful proletarian revolution in Vietnam was a step forward for world revolution, which was to occur country by country, region by region.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Hanoi’s leaders behaved as patriotic internationalists during the period from 1954 to 1975. They were not communists in the classical sense; nor were they mere nationalists, as is often assumed by American historians of the Vietnam War. They sought to co-opt all ethnic groups, not just ethnic Vietnamese, for the sake of freeing and reunifying their country. That made them patriots. They also cared deeply about the fate of revolutionary and other progressive movements elsewhere. In fact, they considered it their duty to contribute to the global revolutionary process, to the final triumph of communism, by rousing opponents of capitalism, imperialism, and neocolonialism everywhere. And that made them internationalists. Thus, as Vietnamese communist authorities committed themselves to defeating their enemies in Vietnam to preserve their country’s territorial integrity and secure its complete sovereignty, they sought to contribute to the worldwide struggle against imperialism and capitalism with a view to becoming a model, an exemplar, of the possibilities of national liberation and socialist as well as Third World solidarity. National liberation was for them, and for Le Duan in particular, a means to even greater, nobler ends: liberation of all oppressed masses, social advancement of the underprivileged, and the demise of imperialism and global capitalism. And in that respect, Vietnam’s revolutionary struggle shared an affinity with the Third World and the ideology of tiers-mondisme informing the decision-making of its more prominent leaders.

The pursuit of class struggle, a hallmark of committed Marxist-Leninist parties, was as central in Hanoi’s strategic thinking as southern liberation itself. However, the DRV knew better than to publicly mention or discuss that aspect of their revolutionary agenda because they understood it would alienate actual and potential supporters of their struggle outside the socialist camp, and in the Third and Western worlds, especially. In the immediate aftermath of the Geneva accords and partition of the country into two distinct regrouping zones, Vietnamese communist leaders set out to complete the land reform program they had initiated during the last year of the war against France and, shortly thereafter, nationalized industry and collectivized agriculture. Class struggle mattered to them, as it did to devout communists everywhere. And it is that commitment to class struggle, reaffirmed after the fall of Saigon through efforts to transform southern society and its economy along socialist lines, that set the DRV apart from non-aligned Third World states and faithful adherents to tiers-mondisme. While one could argue that the synthesis of Marxism-Leninism with tiers-mondisme effectively constituted Maoism (stressing anti-imperialism, the centrality of peasants in revolutionary processes, small-scale industry, rural collectivization, and permanent revolution), the syncretic ideology espoused by the Vietnamese in the post-1954 period proved far more complex. Most notably, that ideology comprised a diplomatic, internationalist component entirely absent from Maoism.

Noncommunist Third World states and sympathetic Western constituencies proved useful if not indispensable allies in Hanoi’s fight against a common enemy (imperialism) in pursuit of a common goal (liberation) to a singular end (communism). Le Duan believed that his people, having gained international notoriety for their contributions to decolonization through their war against France and their dramatic triumph at Dien Bien Phu, were in an ideal position to lead the charge against American imperialism, and inspire others to do the same. It was arguably Le Duan’s greatest aspiration to make all of this culminate on his watch.

In hindsight, DRV leaders supported the Third Worldist project only to the extent that it served their own purposes and its adherents supported their war effort against the United States. Between 1954 and 1975 they variously identified publicly as nationalists, non-aligned, supporters of national liberation, members of the Afro-Asian bloc, and neutralists. Ultimately, they only consistently and genuinely embraced Marxism-Leninism as they understood and defined that ideology. They respected other Third World regimes and movements, to be sure, but not to the extent they did those similarly committed to socialist transformation and unity, such as Cuba. In Hanoi’s own understanding, “true” Third World states, that is, genuine believers in the merits and full potential of tiers-mondisme, were those that looked to Marxism-Leninism as a blueprint for achieving complete liberation, economic development, political stability, and social harmony. As a militantly anti-imperial and avowedly Marxist state, the DRV positioned itself perfectly to shape and inspire the Tricontinental movement.

DRV leaders deserve credit for meeting their goals at home and abroad. They succeeded not only in reunifying their country under their own governance, but also in inspiring and emboldening “progressive” movements and individuals elsewhere. Their war against the United States profoundly impacted the Cold War system and left an indelible mark on the world. It did not herald the end of capitalism, but it did electrify national liberation fighters in the Third World. Clearly, that all came at a cost, an exorbitant cost, which the Vietnamese masses, not the men in Hanoi, assumed.

A near cloudless morning greeted Abdulrahim Farah as he stepped onto the tarmac of the Lusaka International airport on August 17, 1969. The fifty-year-old Somali diplomat was only months into his tenure as the chairman of the UN Special Committee on Apartheid. He had left New York in the midst of an intense summer heat wave and the city behind him – like most of America in 1969 – was simmering with tension. Surrounded now by an entourage of UN diplomats, Farah probably relished the change of scenery. Zambian soil must have been a welcome reprieve from his life as an expatriate in urban America.Footnote ¹

However, turmoil was hard to escape in 1969. The Apartheid Committee Farah presided over had been established at the height of the so-called postcolonial moment, shorthand for the period when decolonization changed Africa’s political map between 1957 and 1963. The Committee had been the centerpiece of a set of initiatives that sought to use the United Nations to end white supremacy in Southern Africa, but those heady days were gone. Farah had journeyed to Zambia because he hoped to reach out to the liberation movements living there, many of which questioned the UN’s usefulness in the anti-apartheid fight, and to repair the bonds that once linked African people through Pan-Africanism.

Figure 5.1 Tricontinental movements won support by combining political and social revolution, which often promoted the liberation of women alongside national independence. This image also attests to the global movement of iconography via Tricontinental networks. The Cuban artist Lazaro Abreu adapted this poster from an Emory Douglas illustration in The Black Panther depicting African revolutions. The combination of woman, gun, and baby appeared in Asian and African revolutionary imagery, which proved popular with young leftists in Europe and the United States. Lazaro Abreu after original by Emory Douglas, 1968. Screen print, 52x33 cm.

Image courtesy Lincoln Cushing / Docs Populi.

Things did not go well. During the Committee’s initial round of discussions, the African National Congress (ANC) requested that Farah and his associates stop seeking publicity for themselves and “humbly suggest[ed]” that these self-serving vacations had outlived their utility. “In our view it would be less expensive … if the United Nations invited, at its expense, delegations from genuine liberation movements to attend meetings … and assist in discussions and decisions.” Heralded once as the anvil that would destroy apartheid, the United Nations – and specifically the Apartheid Committee – was now portrayed as useless. In another meeting, an activist argued that “concrete evidence” proved that the United Nations was “a tool of the imperialist powers, particularly the United States,” while a third freedom fighter said that the “time for the verbal, the constitutional, was passed.” The only way forward now “was to face the enemy with a gun.”Footnote ²

Members of Farah’s party were taken aback. They saw themselves at the vanguard of the revolution against racial discrimination, and they were being told they were part of the problem. A few UN delegates accused the activists of being ignorant about “the workings of the United Nations.” However, Farah responded to the criticism directly. If the ANC wanted violence, it had to recognize that “nobody would pay any attention” until its members were “killed and maimed.” Ultimately, repudiating the Apartheid Committee was an act of self-isolation. Unless there “were more Sharpevilles” – a reference to a massacre outside Johannesburg in 1960 – “there would be indifference.”Footnote ³

What explains the hostility Farah faced in 1969? Arguably, the anti-apartheid movement was the most prominent social cause of the twentieth century; it lasted decades and drew support from people in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa. But Farah’s experience reminds us that apartheid’s critics quarreled often and with considerable fervor. The anti-apartheid movement’s resilience, and eventually its ubiquity, stemmed from this fractiousness. Farah and the ANC disagreed about tactics, specifically the utility of special committees, and they articulated opposing conclusions about the United Nations’ usefulness in the worldwide decolonization movement. But both sides wanted legitimacy, and their boisterous fight, while not a zero-sum contest, made the apartheid issue harder to ignore during the second half of the twentieth century. Even as apartheid’s critics unanimously blasted the vagaries of white minority rule, they maneuvered among the subtle differences between solidarity and self-interest.

Historians of South Africa have largely ignored this tension. Astute monographs by Gail Gerhart and Tom Lodge consider rifts among anti-apartheid activists, but their books focus on black power and racial pluralism.Footnote ⁴ Although Stephen Ellis and Paul Landau offer an alternative framework, their work overdramatizes Moscow’s control of the ANC.Footnote ⁵ Hilda Berstein, Hugh Macmillan, and Scott Couper provide soberer accounts, lingering on the disagreements between the ANC’s various headquarters and the generational differences among its leaders, and Arianna Lissoni and Saul Dubow illuminate the way multiracialism and non-racialism contributed to the ANC’s factionalism.Footnote ⁶ Rob Skinner and Simon Stevens have even considered the ANC’s relationship with international anti-apartheid organizations.Footnote ⁷ But the national project of South Africa has framed all of this literature, and most of these authors have probed the liberation struggle in order to historicize the country’s turmoil in the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁸

Farah’s journey provides a different sort of starting point. While past scholars have tended to attribute splits within the liberation struggle to South Africa’s internal divisions, this chapter flips that approach inside-out, arguing that external events shaped the organization’s self-understanding. At the heart of the chapter is an obvious yet underexplored paradox. Forced into exile in 1960, the ANC’s underground paramilitary wing, uMkhonto weSizwe, was defeated in 1963. This defeat effectively ended the organization’s footprint within South Africa until the 1990s. Although ANC leaders continued to present themselves as spokesmen for an authentic, anti-racist South African nation – and stayed informed about events at home – the ANC existed primarily as a diasporic entity after the mid-1960s and many of its established truths lost the power to motivate the masses in these years. How could an organization that suffered so many setbacks maintain its place at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement?

This chapter’s argument is straightforward: analogies matter. It studies the ANC’s road to and from the 1966 Tricontinental Conference and draws upon research from the ANC’s Liberation Archive to suggest that external comparisons – not internal divisions – determined how the ANC explained what it stood for and what it wanted after the Sharpeville Massacre. Critically, these analogies changed over time. During the early 1960s, the ANC equated itself to the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which historian Jeffrey James Byrne critiques in Chapter 6. Initially, ANC leaders believed they could leverage diplomatic victories to defy minority white rule in South Africa. When the Algerian analogy faltered in the mid-1960s, the Cuban revolution became an alternative model for South Africa’s future. Fidel Castro’s apparent strength contrasted with the fate of Algeria’s Ben Bella (and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah), suggesting that real freedom required guerrilla warfare, not UN General Assembly resolutions. However, the ANC’s embrace of Che Guevara’s ideas set off a regional crisis that upended the organization in 1967, leading to the chapter’s final section on Vietnam. Divided internally by the late 1960s, the ANC responded to the Vietnam War by probing the logic and purpose of Third World solidarity, which offers a useful window to explore the relationship between revolutionary talk and revolutionary action after the Tricontinental Conference.

These shifting analogies served the ANC well. They helped the organization establish alliances with foreigners who never experienced apartheid, and they assuaged ANC expatriates who feared that Europeans would always rule South Africa. But most importantly, for the purposes of this book, the ANC’s efforts provide a microcosm to consider how the Tricontinental Revolution changed the Third World project. By studying the context around Farah’s rancorous encounter with the ANC in 1969, we can explain the tension between solidarity and revolution. After all, solidarity is what Farah was looking for in Lusaka. Yet he failed to obtain it because he was not a revolutionary. This chapter scratches at this tension while exploring how ANC leaders tangled with one of this volume’s organizing questions: Was Tricontinental solidarity an end in itself or was it a means to foment violent change in the decolonized world?

Exceptionalism

As late as 1960, ANC leaders refused to compare themselves to foreigners. Because apartheid differed from European imperialism, the argument went, the ANC’s struggle for majority rule had to be explained in the context of South Africa’s past. The ANC’s exceptionalism rested on a particular interpretation of history. An earlier rebellion against colonialism, fought in the late nineteenth century, pitted Dutch and British settlers against each other, and the forced migration of South Asians to the region significantly complicated the machinations of colonialism there. South Africa fit no mold, the argument went, and apartheid, which took shape after Afrikaner nationalists won power in 1948, elaborated British racism by repudiating Anglo-American liberalism, putting the country at odds with the rest of the English-speaking world after World War II. While apartheid’s critics took inspiration from Indian independence in 1947, the ANC’s 1952 Defiance Campaign, which imported Gandhian methods of civil disobedience to South Africa, neither changed government policy nor united the country’s various ethnic groups under a common banner. By the mid-1950s, it appeared that South Africa was sui generis.Footnote ⁹

This mindset created a distinct framework for political dissent. In South Asia, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of a coherent Indian personality, channeled through the Indian National Congress. In South Africa, by contrast, the Congress Alliance, established after the Defiance Campaign’s defeat, argued that heterogeneity had to be the wellspring of anti-apartheid politics.Footnote ¹⁰ Within the Congress Alliance, the African National Congress spoke for indigenous Africans, while the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress of Trade Unions, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the Congress of Democrats represented other anti-apartheid groups. The birth of this alliance went hand in hand with a Freedom Charter in 1955 that framed South Africa as a place that “belonged to all who live in it, black and white,” accentuating the premise that South Africa would not follow the same path as India after 1947.Footnote ¹¹ Rather than creating a racially homogeneous anti-colonial nation-state, the ANC would forge a politically plural and ethnically diverse democracy. If the Freedom Charter had an audience outside the country, it was probably the United Nations, a heterogenous organization invented to combat fascism, which had authored similar statements about politics after 1945. The Freedom Charter equated apartheid with fascism while dramatizing the difference between South Africa’s near future and South Asia’s recent past.

This approach began to buckle in the late 1950s. While the Congress Alliance struggled to gain traction within South Africa, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah used Nehru’s vision to spearhead the first successful anti-colonial movement in Sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote ¹² After winning independence from Britain in 1957, Nkrumah called an All-African People’s Conference in 1958, proclaiming the need for a continent-wide “African Personality based on the philosophy of Pan-African Socialism.” Convinced that such a move would end the Congress Alliance, the ANC responded defensively. To comprehend “our aims and objectives,” ANC representatives informed Nkrumah and his supporters, outsiders needed to recognize South Africa’s “political, economic, and social development,” especially the fact that it was “the only country in Africa with a very large settled White population.” Because of “this history,” the statement continued, “our philosophy of struggle is ‘a democratic South Africa’ embracing all, regardless of colour or race who pay undivided allegiance to South Africa and mother Africa.” Although the ANC “support[ed] the cause of National Liberation,” it pointedly refused to adopt Nkrumah’s political vocabulary. The ANC faced a problem called “national oppression” – not foreign imperialism – and the remedy was not decolonization but “universal adult suffrage” within a democracy based on the Freedom Charter.Footnote ¹³ This argument not only undercut Nkrumah’s call for an all-encompassing African nationalism – modeled on Nehru’s Indian nationalism – but also reified the premise that South Africa was in but not of the African continent.

The ANC’s exceptionalism crumbled spectacularly after the All-African People’s Conference. Just a few months later, Robert Sobukwe, a former ANC Youth League leader who left the organization in the late 1950s, answered Nkrumah’s clarion call by organizing a new group called the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).Footnote ¹⁴ The organization announced its existence in 1959 and immediately attacked the ANC’s multiracialism as a “method of safeguarding white interests.” The ANC conceptualized South Africa’s future on Europe’s terms, Sobukwe argued, and failed to recognize the continuities between settler colonialism in South Africa and imperialism everywhere else. Part of the problem, in his mind, was the ANC’s relationship with the South African Communist Party (SACP), whose members seemed to take inspiration from European communists.Footnote ¹⁵ Because “South Africa [was] an integral part of the indivisible whole that is Afrika,” Sobukwe wrote in 1959, it followed that political power had to be “of the Africans, by the Africans, for the Africans.”Footnote ¹⁶ As the PAC cast the Freedom Charter aside, it attacked the presupposition that universal suffrage would end national oppression, proclaiming that a truly independent South Africa would have to belong to the “Africanist Socialist democratic order” that would soon stretch from Cape Town to Cairo. Decolonization was not only in South Africa’s future; it would arrive before 1963, Sobukwe declared in 1960. That was Nkrumah’s target date for African liberation and Pan-African unification.Footnote ¹⁷

The ANC lost control of events in early 1960. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited South Africa in February, he too attacked South African exceptionalism, albeit to critique apartheid’s architects for failing to acknowledge the “national consciousness” of non-Europeans.Footnote ¹⁸ Intended to sting Afrikaners who opposed the “winds of change,” Macmillan’s barb also challenged the ANC’s beleaguered worldview by conflating anti-apartheid activism with the movement that had recently ended British rule in Ghana. The Sharpeville Massacre, which featured so prominently in Farah’s commentary ten years later, unfolded weeks after Macmillan’s speech and culminated in the murder of almost seventy black South Africans. By April, no one on any side of the color line still believed that South Africa was sui generis. South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd insisted that the crisis had “to be seen against the backdrop … of similar occurrences in the whole of Africa,” and Nelson Mandela, who was emerging as a dynamic leader in the ANC, admitted, “In just one day, [the PAC] moved to the front lines of the struggle.”Footnote ¹⁹ Neither Verwoerd nor Mandela knew what would happen next, but they interpreted Sharpeville as tacit confirmation of Sobukwe’s worldview.

Liberation

In the aftermath of Sharpeville, the ANC took steps to reinvent itself. Verwoerd’s government declared a State of Emergency in May 1960, arresting ANC and PAC leaders and forcing both organizations underground. However, the ANC’s Deputy-President Oliver Tambo had already gone abroad, where he would prove a pivotal conduit to the outside world that year. Initially, Tambo found common ground with the ANC’s rivals, forming a United Front (UF) that included the PAC.Footnote ²⁰ Undergirding this fragile alliance was the shared assumption that the United Nations would confront apartheid because sixteen African countries joined the General Assembly that year. For the first time since 1946, sanctions seemed to be a possibility. African diplomats appeared to hold sway over the UN General Assembly’s agenda, and the All-African People’s Conference had inspired an impressive boycott of South African consumer goods in Britain and the Caribbean.Footnote ²¹ “[A] solution could only come from the outside,” Tambo quipped in May 1960. Theoretically, a General Assembly resolution, labeling apartheid a clear threat to peace and security, would force the UN Security Council to punish South Africa, since the 1950 Uniting for Peace resolution had ostensibly vested the General Assembly with the power to supersede an obstructionist Security Council veto. Military intervention was an unrealistic goal. Yet economic sanctions seemed feasible, and the UF saw the United Nations as a tool to destabilize the apartheid system.Footnote ²² ANC President Albert Luthuli explained the situation succinctly in 1960: “I feel that … when South African markets are affected, the people … might feel that they would be better off with another form of Government.”Footnote ²³

Obvious problems came into focus immediately. On the one hand, Verwoerd’s government outmaneuvered the United Front abroad.Footnote ²⁴ On the other hand, the PAC and ANC struggled to overcome their underlying differences. Sobukwe, whom Verwoerd imprisoned in May, hoped sanctions would destroy white rule, so South Africa could follow in Ghana’s footsteps. Luthuli, also imprisoned that year (and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize), still clung to the ANC’s vision of pluralist democracy, believing that sanctions would split European sentiment in South Africa.Footnote ²⁵ That mindset dwindled outside Oslo as the year progressed, and the SACP did not pull its punches when Luthuli’s underlings asked for feedback in the autumn. Most foreigners, the group explained, saw the ANC’s multiracial rhetoric as a front that “concealed a form of white leadership of the African national movement.”Footnote ²⁶ African countries in particular were suspicious of the ANC and frequently nudged Tambo to accept the PAC’s supremacy in South Africa’s anti-colonial struggle. So, the ANC could either repudiate the SACP altogether – and tacitly acknowledge the validity of the PAC’s criticism – or find a new way to frame its relationship to Pan-Africanism. Change was necessary.

Algeria offered one way forward. That country, Mandela explained in 1961, was “the closest model to our own in that the rebels faced a large white settler community that ruled the indigenous majority.”Footnote ²⁷ With help from the SACP, Mandela won support to create a paramilitary group called uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) that year and then spent most of 1962 in North Africa – his visit coincided with Algerian decolonization – where he received training from the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).Footnote ²⁸ In Mandela’s mind, the juxtaposition between Ghana and Algeria could not have been clearer. Whereas Nkrumah had won sovereignty by mobilizing Africans within Ghana, the FLN had organized at home and abroad, waging a guerrilla campaign on the ground while turning French colonialism into a cause célèbre at the United Nations. The combination was important. In Mandela’s private diary, he explained:

As the ANC adopted the FLN’s playbook, three things happened. First, the ANC took over the Congress Alliance. For the architects of the 1955 Freedom Charter, plurality went hand in hand with universal adult suffrage. However, at the Congress’s first post-Sharpeville consultative conference, held in in Botswana in 1962, ANC representatives argued that universal suffrage could no longer assure South Africa’s liberation. The country had to have a government controlled by people of African descent. To communicate this message abroad, the ANC declared it had to speak on behalf of the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress of Trade Unions, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the Congress of Democrats.Footnote ³⁰ Second, the United Front collapsed. As the ANC recast the “African image,” decoupling it from Ghana in order to dramatize Algeria’s importance, the PAC-ANC rift became unbridgeable. With the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the two organizations began to openly attack each other’s legitimacy, seeking sole support from the OAU’s newly formed Liberation Committee.Footnote ³¹ Third, Mandela moved to import Algerian-style war to South Africa. UMkhonto weSizwe took steps to begin a sabotage campaign at home while Tambo established a quasi-government abroad to raise funds and speak at the United Nations. Although the effort might last years, an internal ANC memorandum said that year, minority rule could “collapse far sooner than we can at the moment envisage.”Footnote ³² After all, the FLN had a government in Algiers, there was a UN peacekeeping force in the Congo, and African diplomats had just passed a resolution in New York that defined apartheid as a “clear threat” to international peace and security. Anything seemed possible.

But anything was not possible. Mandela was arrested immediately upon reentering South Africa in August, and MK was uprooted completely by July 1963. The ensuing Rivonia Trial has been chronicled extensively.Footnote ³³ It overlapped with equally devastating setbacks in New York and The Hague, where the Security Council rejected the ANC’s plea for sanctions, imposing a nonmandatory embargo on military weapons instead, and the International Court of Justice vacillated over the legal status of South West Africa. South African expatriates had overestimated the implications of African decolonization, and as the mid-1960s approached, it became increasingly apparent that salvation would not come through the United Nations.Footnote ³⁴ With pessimism encroaching, the ANC’s External Mission bifurcated between London, where white, Coloured, and Indian exiles clustered after 1960, and Lusaka, which attracted the lion’s share of black South African expatriates, especially after Zambia’s independence in 1964.Footnote ³⁵ Once again, the situation felt tenuous.

For a time, Tambo bounced between Europe and Africa, maintaining a home in Britain and a headquarters in Tanzania. But criticism mounted as months turned into years.Footnote ³⁶ Voices within the ANC’s London Office called for changes after the 1964 Rivonia Trial. The organization had erred by putting so much emphasis on “the [African] majority” at the 1962 Botswana conference, respondents lamented in an internal survey in 1965, and “certain persons who [were] very important in their political organisations at home” had been sidelined since that gathering. In Zambia and Tanzania, meanwhile, black South African émigrés began to question Tambo’s fitness as a military leader. Although he kept the organization afloat – mostly with aid from the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Sweden – uMkhonto weSizwe languished.Footnote ³⁷ The relationship between the ANC and SACP remained poorly defined, and by 1965 Zambian officials were complaining among themselves that ANC freedom fighters simply wandered Lusaka’s streets with nothing to do.Footnote ³⁸

To make matters worse, Algeria’s appeal waned in the mid-1960s. As Byrne has explained, liberation proved elusive in the so-called Mecca of Revolution. By equating freedom with membership in an international organization, the FLN trapped itself in the existing nation-state system, and the same strategy that toppled French colonialism created problems after Algeria’s independence. Guerrilla warfare had been justified, the FLN told the international community, because the French had no interest in economic development and human rights but redistributing resources while safeguarding human rights proved difficult.Footnote ³⁹ It turned out that economic development required unpopular taxes and foreign loans, which nurtured domestic resentments, muddied the FLN’s reforms, and culminated in a military coup in 1965. (Ironically, Nkrumah, whose words had inspired the PAC, suffered the same fate a year later.) Mandela always recognized the Faustian bargain at the heart of the FLN’s strategy. Before his arrest, he had promised to “make [the ANC] more intelligible – and more palpable – to our allies,” implying that international recognition would somehow create the conditions for apartheid’s collapse.Footnote ⁴⁰ He had no way of knowing that postcolonial Algeria would fall apart instead. By the time the Tricontinental Conference assembled in 1966, the ANC had lost its most prominent leader and its symbolic lodestar in North Africa.

Violence

The gathering in Havana provided a different way to think about liberation, and the timing could not have been more propitious. Tambo hit a new low that year. In London, the South African Coloured People’s Congress (CPC) left the fold. “The CPC has over the past three years patiently reasoned with the ANC leadership,” but “we have had to witness” a “campaign of slander and disruption,” perpetuated from the ANC’s African headquarters.Footnote ⁴¹ At the same time, the SACP began pressuring Tambo to stop masquerading as an Africanist and ally openly with the Soviet Union. And to add fuel to the fire, key African countries on the OAU’s Liberation Committee started to question the ANC’s legitimacy as an international organization.Footnote ⁴² Looking back on this period a few years later, an ANC official wrote that the group’s enemies “would have been able to wipe us out” if “not for the stubborn fact” that the ANC had “an army housed in campuses [in Lusaka] which everybody could see.”Footnote ⁴³

However, the situation in Zambia was not ideal. Although Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda supported the ANC, his government was divided and his aides grumbled loudly about South African expatriates who paraded around Lusaka “wear[ing] fur hats,” promising a revolution they never intended to fight. “I do not see how [the ANC] could go on and fight in South Africa,” a Zambian official told Kaunda in these years. “Freedom fighters … want to retire from the struggle. Management and leadership is being questioned.” Even as Kaunda continued to blast apartheid publicly and cultivate his status within the newly created Non-Aligned Movement, his government put travel restrictions on the ANC and other organizations from Southern Rhodesia and Portuguese Africa. He supported these groups, in part, to avoid Ben Bella’s fate in Algeria and Nkrumah’s fate in Ghana. Zambia had no illusions about the ANC. After studying its operations in Morogoro and Lusaka, Zambia’s foreign ministry summarized the government’s mindset colorfully,

Cuba offered a way out of this morass. The island’s charismatic leaders – Fidel Castro and Che Guevara – positioned their revolution as a universal model for leftist anti-imperialism and armed revolt. In 1965, Guevara undertook a sojourn to Africa in a failed attempt to export this model to the Congo and Angola, and Cuban leaders retained an interest, if somewhat pessimistic, in the situation in Southern Africa.Footnote ⁴⁵ Three ANC members attended the Tricontinental Conference in January 1966. While their reflections do not survive in the ANC’s archives, the visit seems to have prompted two changes. First, ANC leaders began talking about their setbacks differently. Increasingly, they blamed neocolonialism, a term popularized initially in the OAU’s 1963 charter and then embraced by the organizers of the Tricontinental meeting.Footnote ⁴⁶ Nationalists had “gain[ed] political power through the mass anti-colonial struggle,” an ANC editorial argued in 1966, but “when the masses of the people force[d] their national governments to make socio-economic reforms in the redistribution of wealth, the imperialists then resort[ed] to military dictatorships through their agents.” Hence Algeria’s coup. The ANC had no doubt who was pulling the strings. “Experience has shown that this imperialist technique was perfected by U.S. imperialism in Latin America and has nowadays extended to Africa and Asia.” However, Cuba, “chosen by the peoples of these three continents as the seat of the Tricontinental Organisation,” proved that the “anti-imperialist revolution” could defeat neocolonialism. Although the struggle had faltered since 1960, Cuba “has remained the bane of all reactionary forces, especially U.S. imperialism.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Because Washington responded to African decolonization with an “unholy” alliance in Southern Africa, it followed that the ANC would only prevail if it remade itself in Cuba’s image.Footnote ⁴⁸

Second, the ANC updated its ideas about guerrilla warfare. Initially, Mandela’s vision for the armed struggle focused on sabotaging South Africa’s physical infrastructure since that approach seemed to have worked for the FLN. Although Mandela referred to national consciousness, he rarely explained how these methods would mobilize South Africa’s masses; he presented violence as an instrument to undercut the apartheid government’s legitimacy, which would inspire international support and divide Europeans living inside South Africa.Footnote ⁴⁹ Implicitly, Mandela always believed that change required support from some white South Africans. As historian Hugh Macmillan has noted, Che Guevara’s writings turned MK’s theory of guerrilla warfare on its head. Guevara was a celebrity by the mid-1960s. His theory of revolution suggested that cadres of fast-moving militants could focus popular discontent, which would then blossom into a widely supported national insurrection. The resulting conflict would not require foreign recognition because credibility would come from peasants and laborers within the targeted country. Violence, by extension, would be an end in itself rather than an instrument to change perceptions about the South African government’s legitimacy, and it would purge the country of neocolonial agents so that real liberation would be possible.Footnote ⁵⁰ With Tambo’s blessing in mid-1966, the ANC’s Lusaka office created a committee to implement this plan and then sent militants into modern day Botswana in June, September, and November. The goal was to “organise a machinery” to sort out “how people should be passing into South Africa.”Footnote ⁵¹

The subsequent Wankie and Sipolio campaigns, in which the ANC applied Guevara’s theories to South Africa, were divisive. “[T]he whole concept,” ANC political commissar Chris Hani explained, “was to build bridges, a Ho Chi Minh trail to South Africa.”Footnote ⁵² The Vietnam War was expanding in real-time in 1966, and Guevara’s ideas seemed to explain why Saigon’s government was starting to collapse. However, ANC forces got bogged down in modern day Zimbabwe, and they were routed by the Rhodesian military first in August and again in December 1967. Ultimately, most MK soldiers were killed; Hani barely escaped to Botswana, where he was imprisoned for a year. In his absence, the ANC halted these “lightning strikes” altogether, and when Hani returned to Zambia in 1968, he claimed to barely recognize the organization. “There was no longer any direction,” he recalled, and “there was general confusion or an unwillingness to discuss the lessons of the revolution.”Footnote ⁵³

Tambo arguably mishandled the fallout from Wankie and Sipolio. “There were no medals,” Hani’s ally Joe Matthews later remembered. “[N]o official ceremony.”Footnote ⁵⁴ But the ANC’s real problem cut deeper. Within South Africa, Verwoerd had been assassinated in 1966 and the country’s new president, John Vorster, opened a secret correspondence with Kaunda after Sipolio. Kaunda did not outline the Lusaka Manifesto until early 1969, which acknowledged Pretoria’s right to exist and asked anti-apartheid forces to negotiate with Vorster, but he disavowed violence and put severe restrictions on the ANC during 1968. For Hani, Tambo’s acquiescence to Kaunda was tantamount to neocolonial collaboration. “Professional politicians rather than professional revolutionaries” had taken control of the organization, he wrote in a widely circulated memorandum in early 1969. “Careerism,” he continued, had forestalled the revolution by creating a stagnant environment where ANC leaders attended conferences instead of waging war.Footnote ⁵⁵

Ironically, Hani’s memorandum prompted a conference. The meeting was held in Morogoro in April 1969, just before Farah’s visit to Zambia, and it resolved three issues. First, the ANC opened its membership to non-Africans. The decision directly addressed the frustrations of Indian, Coloured, and white expatriates in London and consolidated Tambo’s authority there as he confronted Hani’s backers in Lusaka. Second, the ANC shrank the size of its governing council from twenty people to nine.Footnote ⁵⁶ With considerable finesse, Tambo sidelined individuals who, in Macmillan’s words, were “not guerilla leaders in the Castro mode,” which tacitly acknowledged the legitimacy of Hani’s complaint while assuring Tambo controlled the fallout.Footnote ⁵⁷ Third, although membership in this smaller entity was still limited to black South Africans, Tambo created a Revolutionary Council that ignored racial identity altogether. The council formalized the SACP’s place within the ANC and existed, in theory, to foster consensus around the ANC’s long-term strategy. The decision had support among MK’s rank-and-file, which had long accepted non-Africans in its ranks, and it was heralded later by ANC members and the ANC’s historians as a turning point in the anti-apartheid movement. “[A]fter Morogoro we never looked back,” Hani told an interviewer.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, Jack Simons, a professor at the University of Zambia with close ties to the ANC, offered a more somber assessment. “Sometimes,” he wrote in a private letter in mid-1969, “I feel that we are involved in some great charade, a play staged for the benefit of the outside world.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Solidarity

In truth, Morogoro was neither a turning point nor a charade. The ANC did not try to infiltrate South Africa again until Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, so Hani’s conclusion is obviously incorrect; yet Simons’s cynicism misrepresents Morogoro’s impact. Before parting ways, conference attendees outlined a new set of strategic and tactical imperatives. Written by the SACP’s Joe Slovo and Rusty Berstein with assistance from Joe Matthews and Duma Nokwe, these guidelines conspicuously recycled Marxist language, and journalists like Ellis have argued that Morogoro put the ANC on a course charted by the SACP.Footnote ⁶⁰ But the document is better situated in a Tricontinental frame since its principal goal was to shift the ANC’s focus away from Cuba. In a 2010 interview, Matthews said explicitly that he wanted to reduce Guevara’s intellectual footprint after Morogoro, and with considerable subtlety, his strategy and tactics paper eviscerated the logic behind the Wankie and Sipolio campaigns, suggesting that an “armed challenge” – spearheaded by a well-trained revolutionary vanguard – would not “achieve dramatic or swift success.”Footnote ⁶¹ The ANC had to refocus attention on the masses at home, since “economic emancipation” required support from South Africa’s “large and well-developed working class.” This argument implied that Tambo had erred by sending MK soldiers into Rhodesia while shutting the door on another Hani-style intervention. Critically, the paper did not offer a timetable for South Africa’s revolution. Because the whole world was “transition[ing] to the Socialist system,” the strategy paper reasoned, the ANC did not have to rush things:

In the short-term, these words endorsed inaction, and the ensuing research program, which yielded papers on an array of topics, defended caution with considerable earnestness. Looking back on the past decade, one unnamed author lamented that the “political situation [had been] ripe” in South Africa but the ANC’s “guerilla activities” were “premature because of the backward state of [its] technical and material preparations.” Violence for the sake of violence had not accomplished anything. The paper asked the all-important question – “What then should be our approach on the question of timing?” – and argued for a flexible understanding of “what we are planning for.” Perhaps the apartheid government would be defeated in battle – like the French at Dien Bien Phu – or maybe there would be an “unexpected break in the White front making some sort of negotiations possible” – à la the Évian Accords – or maybe there would be a Congo-style UN intervention. The ANC need not engage in “useless speculation” because it did not have to precipitate events. It merely had to gird itself for “a combination of some or all of these tactics.”Footnote ⁶³

This conclusion existed in the context of a wider conversation about Vietnam. Initially, the ANC interpreted the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) success as proof of Guevara’s brilliance, hence its own campaign to establish a “Ho Chi Minh” trail from Zambia to South Africa. However, Vietnam’s lessons were changing in the early 1970s. The NLF had not defeated the American military (and a second Dien Bien Phu was not imminent), but the NLF had sapped America’s will to fight; it seemed to ANC strategists as if perseverance and public relations went hand in hand. Internally, this conclusion teed up several realizations. First, the ANC needed to align its ambitions with its capabilities. Whereas political plans were “timeless,” and not easily defeated, the ANC could be – and had been – routed on the battlefield, and “it would be unrealistic” going forward to call upon uMkhonto weSizwe to undertake a project “large enough and effective enough to transform the situation.” Second, the ANC had to distinguish fighting from the appearance of combat readiness, since planning for “guerilla operations” was “one of the most vital factors in creating a situation in which guerrilla warfare [might] take root.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Third, the ANC needed to accept that it was fighting one front in a global war to “overthrow imperialism, the reactionary ruling classes, and all other reactionaries who support the present South African regime.” Against this backdrop, ANC planners could reframe the NLF’s success as a turning point in a transnational war against neocolonialism. It followed that the United States’ defeat in Vietnam would weaken Washington’s support for apartheid, which would create a new status quo for the ANC.Footnote ⁶⁵ Even if the details were fuzzy, the logic felt credible because such talk was so ubiquitous in the early 1970s.

Tambo and his backers were essentially theorizing their way out of a third direct fight with Pretoria. Unlike Algeria and Cuba, Vietnam was in the throes of an ongoing freedom struggle. By conflating South Africa’s situation with Vietnam’s war, Tambo shored up his revolutionary bona fides without ceding ground to Hani’s supporters or Kaunda’s lackeys. Yes, fighting was necessary to mobilize the masses in the long-term – and the Revolutionary Council reiterated this point at every opportunity – but the ANC could begin by allying with the “peace and progressive forces throughout the world,” shorthand for anyone who opposed American foreign policy in those years. The NLF’s “victories over United States imperialism,” Tambo explained in 1973, would “forever be a fountain of inspiration and an example to all anti-imperialist forces.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The statement implied almost as much as it said. If the NLF’s “solidarity actions” could successfully “galvanize … large numbers of American people and [make] American imperialism’s domestic base very unsafe,” it followed that the anti-apartheid movement might mobilize those same forces “around the issue of colonialism and racism in Southern Africa.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Although South Africa’s white population was recalcitrant, the United States was seething with discontent, and the NLF’s apparent success in winning supporters there suggested that apartheid might be attacked effectively from within North America.

Mobilizing the world’s “peace and progressive forces” presented obvious challenges but the ANC was no stranger to the complexities of solidarity politics. Since the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, it had expanded its horizon line dramatically. “Our allies are not always united,” a research paper observed in the early 1970s. The Soviets and Chinese were at each other’s throats, and African, Asian, and Latin American leaders rarely “agreed among themselves” even if they denounced white minority rule in unison.Footnote ⁶⁸ Building inroads in the base of America’s imperium, among leftists who despised Washington’s support for right-wing governments, without losing credibility among socialists and nationalists would not be easy. Especially since the “malady of over-expansion” loomed over everything. “The whole world seems to be anti-apartheid,” the ANC’s Secretariat on External Affairs explained in another undated paper from this period. “Yet this world-wide campaign was diffuse, undirected and ineffective.” Hearkening back to the theme of appearances, he suggested that the ANC had to focus on “regain[ing] tactical control over this vast and diffuse campaign of solidarity.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Going forward, the essential question was how.

It took the ANC another decade to settle on an answer, and the collapse of Portugal’s African empire in 1975, outside the scope of this chapter, arguably set the ANC’s course. However, the seeds of a coherent mindset could be seen before Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. Tapping into anti-apartheid sentiment was “inextricably interlinked with public relations,” an undated memorandum from the early 1970s explained. The ANC could not “hope to raise money unless the image of the organization as a dynamic force is projected in its programmes.” But there were too many differences among those who opposed apartheid to justify a cookie-cutter message. Critically, the organization looked outward, not inward, to determine an approach. It was “necessary to resuscitate in an intensive way the links with all the organizations we would like to raise funds from.” In short, the ANC had to “fragment [its] appeals to suit the fragmented character of the organizations” it encountered abroad. When working with trade unions, the “whole struggle” had to be explained as a “struggle of the workers [and] peasants” against “anti-worker fascist laws.” When reaching out to “political parties” from Asia, Africa, Europe, or the Americas, it was wiser to make “appeals on the basis of a national struggle.” It was “all a question of” finding the right “balance to achieve maximum results.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Conclusion

The ANC might have adopted a different strategy during the early 1970s. It could have embraced nontraditional warfare and followed the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s example, or it could have launched a third invasion of South Africa, especially in the aftermath of Portuguese decolonization.Footnote ⁷¹ Instead, the ANC embraced the blanket claim that “imperialism [was] on the retreat” and began to tinker with its public relations toward the world’s “peace and progressive forces.”Footnote ⁷² This approach did not solve Tambo’s problems overnight. Zambian officials continued to make life difficult, and while Hani rejoined the fold after Morogoro, other ANC members continued to lament that a “small clique” of non-Africans had “consolidated itself” and “reorganised representation of external missions to suit its aims.”Footnote ⁷³ Tambo sent some of his critics to the Soviet Union, where they kept out of trouble and complained about the weather, and he unfurled extensive reeducation programs at the ANC’s African camps in an effort to win the hearts and minds of his youngest followers.Footnote ⁷⁴ When criticism surged again in 1975, the ANC expelled eight prominent leaders, but the stakes felt different this time. In a private letter that year, Simons wrote to a friend that he had “no clue … what [Tambo’s opponents] would undertake if they were in charge.” They had no analogy for South Africa’s future. The faction “just wanted to be leaders,” Tambo recalled. “[T]hat is all. It was a power struggle.”Footnote ⁷⁵ One that Tambo won.

Was solidarity an end in itself or a means toward revolution? The question is useful because historical subjects offered different answers and changed their views over time. Like other diasporic organizations from the Third World, the ANC balanced solidarity and revolution in several ways as it implemented various plans and responded to events outside its control. Initially, the ANC believed that transracial unity would bring democratic reform to South Africa. When that argument crumbled in 1960, the ANC embraced the African image, or at least its Algerian variant. When that approach failed after 1963, the organization turned to Fidel Castro for inspiration. Many freedom fighters around the world venerated the NLF after 1968, but the ANC’s overall trajectory shows that perceptions of the Third World project evolved after decolonization and interacted with specific debates about liberation, violence, and solidarity. In 1960, the ANC looked to a cluster of African states at the United Nations when acclimating to the vagaries of life-in-exile. A decade later, the organization’s strategists had a sophisticated vocabulary to theorize and engage the so-called peace and progressive forces of the world.

The ANC is a useful prism through which to think about Tricontinentalism. Like other liberation movements, it adapted socialist ideas from Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam. However, the ANC did not copy these models slavishly; it charted its own path, responding to setbacks that set it apart and learning lessons as events changed. This chapter has limited itself to the road to and from the 1966 Havana conference, and, admittedly, the shifts charted here were not as final as this narrative suggests. Voices within the ANC jockeyed with some of these issues for another fifteen years. However, if analogies matter, and if they shaped the ANC’s diasporic behavior, one conclusion seems obvious. Political expediency, more than age, temperament, or doctrine, informed the ANC’s understanding of and interest in Tricontinentalism.

This conclusion should not come as a surprise. Since before the 1920s activists had appealed to Geneva and then New York, using universal claims in institutions recognized as global to establish their credibility on the world stage. The ANC’s engagement with the Tricontinental Revolution extended this tradition, even as Farah’s frustrations remind us that no one person or argument ever enjoyed a monopoly on solidarity politics. The sinews of the transnational world moved through and beyond international institutions, and it remains incumbent upon historians to recognize the diversity and opportunism that underlay this peculiar, important strand of twentieth century internationalism.

By the early 1960s, a vociferous and coordinated critique of Western hegemony dominated political discourse across the Southern Hemisphere. So, it was hardly surprising when the prime minister of newly independent Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella, addressing the United Nations General Assembly on October 9, 1962, firmly situated his country in this globe-spanning “Third Worldist” movement challenging the political and economic status quo. “In the structure of the contemporary world,” he said, “Algeria is allied with an ensemble of spiritual families who, for the first time at [the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference], recognized the shared destiny that unites them.” He vowed that Algeria would help in pursuing their shared goal of tearing up the “gentleman’s agreements” (an expression commonly used in Algerian diplomatic communications at the time) by which the victors of World War II, chief among them the United States, created the structures that formalized and perpetuated their supremacy.

Figure 6.1 A central tenet of Tricontinentalism was the interlinked revolutions of the three continents, which appeared in the iconography as unity between peoples of various non-white races. Even as states like Algeria moved away from direct invocations of militarism, the idea of multiracial struggle remained central to various political and economic challenges to the international system. OSPAAAL, Alfredo Rostgaard, 1968. Offset, 54x33 cm.

Image courtesy Lincoln Cushing / Docs Populi.

Referencing Algeria’s own long and bloody war for independence from France between 1954 and 1962, he positioned his country in the more militant wing of that “spiritual family.” Insisting that the Algerian revolution had “surpassed its national context in order to serve, henceforth, as a point of reference to all peoples still under colonial domination,” Ben Bella dedicated his government to the eradication of colonialism “in classic or disguised form,” pointing to nationalist struggles in places like Palestine and Angola as examples. He cautioned his audience against mistaking the high-minded and pacific doctrines of non-alignment and Afro-Asianism for policies of passivity; on the contrary, Ben Bella vowed, Algeria would be a responsible and engaged country “[f]or every concrete decision concerning major international problems, peace and global security.”Footnote ² As tangible proof of his active and “engaged” intent, Ben Bella traveled from New York to meet with John F. Kennedy at the White House before traversing the most dangerous Rubicon in international affairs – the 100 miles or so separating the United States from Cuba – in order to greet Fidel Castro as a revolutionary brother. Of course, nobody in the General Assembly Hall that day, least of all Ben Bella himself, realized that his first foray abroad would directly implicate his country in the incipient Cuban Missile Crisis.

Reporting on the speech and Ben Bella’s interactions with the diplomatic community in New York, Western officials expressed general skepticism about Third Worldist rhetoric in general, as well as war-ravaged Algeria’s ability to live up to its leaders’ ambitious international agenda. A British observer condescendingly attributed Algerian ardor to the “first flush of enthusiasm” after independence. He suggested that with “the spotlight of Afro-Asian attention … still very much on them … [the Algerians] no doubt feel it necessary … to live up to their reputation as fighters for freedom and to be that much more extreme in order to impress their Afro-Asian colleagues.”Footnote ³ Kennedy’s key advisor on the developing world, Robert Komer, expressed a similar tone a few days later when he briefed the president for the Algerian premier’s visit. Warning that Ben Bella “still clings to a lot of naive ideas and thinks in terms of a melange of revolutionary clichés from Marx, Mao, Nasser and Che Guevara,” Komer nonetheless judged that “basically … he’s much more pragmatic than doctrinaire.” Komer believed that a pressing need for American economic assistance and food aid would soon temper Ben Bella’s bellicosity.Footnote ⁴ United States officials felt that the Algerian government ought to dedicate itself to domestic concerns, not throw itself into ambitious plans to change the nature of international affairs.

But that is not what happened. Not only did the Algerians continue to push, fairly successfully, for an appreciable and disproportionate measure of influence in international affairs, but they were also unbowed by the diplomatic fallout from the Missile Crisis. Their warm relationship with Cuba quickly became an important – and controversial – facet of both countries’ relations with the wider world. Algiers and Havana were advocates for one another in key diplomatic contexts; they also cooperated closely in transnational revolutionary training and subversion. Their ruling cliques had many traits in common: commitment to socialism, enthusiasm for supporting armed liberation and revolutionary movements in any part of the globe, and the desire to use the many organizing themes of Third World solidarity – Afro-Asianism, Pan-Africanism, non-alignment, and others – to surmount their own sense of local confinement and ideological isolation. Algiers sought to host the Second Afro-Asian Summit, or what they referred to as “Bandung II,” in 1965, just as Havana hosted the Tricontinental Conference the following year. In fact, one of the main orchestrators of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, Moroccan leftist Mehdi Ben Barka, was an intimate ally of the Algerian revolutionaries. (Ben Barka, infamously, was assassinated in still-murky circumstances in Paris before he could preside over the Havana Conference, as intended.) When Morocco briefly attempted to alter its border with Algeria by force of arms in November 1963, Fidel Castro immediately dispatched a Cuban tank unit to buttress Algeria’s own armed forces. All told, throughout the early and mid-1960s, Cuban-Algerian Transatlanticism was one of the most substantive manifestations of Third Worldism’s much-ballyhooed expansion from Asia and Africa into Latin America.

Yet the Algerian-Cuban relationship also reflected many of the complexities and contentions within the Third World solidarity movement. In their public diplomacy, postcolonial and Third World governments tended to formulaically invoke multiple expressions of solidarity – Afro-Asianism, non-alignment, Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, and so on – which Western observers often interpreted as evidence of excessive ambition and insufficient substance. But such rhetoric reflected a desire to avoid publicly airing the many divergences of interest and priorities within the Third World; holding together a loose coalition of scores of countries necessitated some waffling diplomacy that did not always do justice to the seriousness of the participants’ intent. None were more conscious than the Algerians of the need to make Third Worldism an effective foreign policy doctrine, which by necessity entailed real disagreements as well as real accomplishments. Often portrayed as an impetuous and unrealistic dreamer, Ben Bella himself was quite aware of the need to translate sweeping expressions of transnational solidarity into concrete supranational frameworks and bilateral gestures. Prior to his trip to the Americas in October 1962, which was rightly expected to be controversial even without knowledge of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, he told Algeria’s national assembly that “[f]or it to be effective and positive, neutralism must not be limited simply to statements of principle. The non-aligned countries must establish and develop a real solidarity between them, as much in the political domain as in the economic domain.”Footnote ⁵ Privately, Algiers’s diplomats deliberated over the actual meaning and relative urgency of each of the many expressions of solidarity that they publicly committed themselves to, including Arab, African, Afro-Asian, and Maghrebi (North African) solidarity projects, among others.

The Cuban-Algerian alliance in the early 1960s was a form of revolutionary solidarity that was a direct precursor to the Tricontinental Conference. Cuba and Algeria’s willingness to cooperate closely in exporting armed revolution around the world was one of the most prominent and celebrated forms of Third World internationalism. However, it provoked criticism and controversy even within the postcolonial world. Cuban and Algerian support for armed revolutionary movements, especially those operating in African and Latin American countries that were objectively independent sovereign territories (rather than colonies), made many Third World elites nervous. India was the most prominent and powerful critic of support for guerrillas and terrorists, but other Latin America, African, and Asian governments agreed. Respect for national sovereignty and noninterference in one another’s internal affairs was arguably the core principle of all Third Worldist diplomacy, prominent in all declarations by the Non-Aligned Movement and other such entities. Many saw how slippery a slope it was when the most radical countries, like Algeria and Cuba, argued that the compromised “neocolonial” status of some independent Third World countries – such as Congo under Moishe Tshombe in the early 1960s – legitimated fostering revolutionary activity in those territories without violating the principle of noninterference.

Additionally, the focus of Third Worldist diplomacy shifted markedly in the late 1960s and early 1970s toward global economic questions, rather than anti-colonial struggle. In that respect, the Tricontinental Conference’s continued emphasis on revolution and political liberation was reflective of a concern that was gradually becoming a more marginal facet of international affairs in the Southern Hemisphere. The shift in focus toward economic affairs also brought Latin America firmly into the Third World coalition. With significant Latin American (but not Cuban) participation in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), established in 1964, tensions between Cuba and some of its regional neighbors became a more prominent dynamic in Third World politics in the late 1960s and 1970s. While Cuba had been a participant in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade in September 1961, even the Algerians discreetly, if sympathetically, recognized that Cuba was emphatically Soviet aligned in Cold War terms. Consequently, the participation of Cuba in wider Third World meetings and associations generally required some diplomatic finesse, lest it be used to discredit non-alignment altogether. Last, Cuba’s membership in the communist world was an even greater concern when the communist countries’ internecine schisms and ideological battles, above all the Sino-Soviet split, threatened to pollute and spoil all attempts at Third World mobilization. The large majority of developing countries with no investment in such doctrinal disputes came to greatly resent communist bickering in the 1960s.

Algerian-Cuban friendship and the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 must be understood in this context. In many respects, the Tricontinental Conference marked the conclusion of the romantic era of decolonization, which Cuban-Algerian solidarity from 1959 to 1965 had exemplified. While they remained important partners in various Third World initiatives, in the late 1960s, there were increased divergences between Algiers and Havana that reflected divergences within postcolonial international affairs more broadly speaking. Algeria was a fine example of a country that was invested in the system, even if it sought to dramatically reform it. Like many postcolonial countries, Algeria sought to balance its support for the ongoing process of eliminating imperialist structures with the need to support an international system that was, ultimately, the guarantor of national legitimacy. By the 1970s, the global battle against imperialism was pursued chiefly by negotiators armed with briefcases and professional degrees, arguing over the global terms of trade and seeking to cast regimes like that in Pretoria as pariahs violating received morality. Cuba, in contrast, besieged by the United States and subsisting on Soviet benevolence, remained more stubbornly revolutionary and defiant of international norms. In the 1970s, Cuba’s support for the anti-colonial struggle abroad even progressed to the deployment of Cuban troops in significant numbers to places like Angola, Syria, and the Horn of Africa. In many respects, these initiatives were tremendous successes, but the perceived necessity of those direct interventions also undermined the narrative of historical inevitability that had powered anti-colonial struggle in previous decades. The very mixed record of the nationalist movements that featured prominently in the years of the Cuban-oriented Tricontinental – including cases like Angola and Mozambique, that suffered decades of civil war, or Western Sahara and Palestine that appear, as of the time of writing, simply to have failed – is poor in comparison to the 1940s–60s. A comprehensive autopsy of the Third World has yet to be performed, but an examination of Cuban-Algerian relations in the run-up to the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 sheds some light on how the era of anti-colonial romance ended, and how various divergences within the Third World project contributed to future disappointments.

The Example of Cuban-Algerian Transatlanticism

After independence, one of Algeria’s most insightful and successful strategies was to take advantage of its position at the intersection of multiple regions and geopolitical entities. The country bridged the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa; considered part of metropolitan France for much of the colonial era, it also connected the two shores of the Mediterranean. Thus Yasir Arafat, cofounder of the Palestinian nationalist group Fateh, described Algiers in 1962 as the “window through which we appear to the West,” while a senior official in Paris advocated productive postcolonial relations on the basis that Algeria could be France’s “narrow doorway” into the Third World.Footnote ⁶ In addition to these historical connections, an activist vision of Cold War neutrality also encouraged Algeria and many other Third World countries to connect with both sides of the age’s great ideological divide. Proclaiming themselves determined socialists (for the most part), Algeria’s new leaders also decided that their country’s future prosperity necessitated deepening and diversifying (in the sense of diluting France’s overbearing role as a source of trade and development assistance) their economic ties to the West. It was entirely consistent, therefore, that Algerian diplomats called for convergence within the Third World space: for the Afro-Asian and non-aligned groups to merge, for Arabs to support Southern African liberation movements, for all Africans to support Palestinians, and indeed, for Latin America to be included fully in the Third World project. With this in mind, Algeria became probably Cuba’s most important connection to Africa in the first half of the 1960s.

Even before the conclusion of the war in Algeria, the Algerian and Cuban revolutionaries had formed an enthusiastic bond in a remarkably short time, and with remarkably little direct interaction or exchange between them. From the very first encounter, in Cairo in early 1959, between a representative of the new Castro regime and those of the Algerian Front, the latter spoke of an instant sense of warmth, fraternity, and mutual recognition between true revolutionaries. A year later, the FLN’s first visitor to Cuba wrote rapturously of the experience for the movement’s main newspaper, El Moudjahid. “Under the sky of Cuba, pearl of the Antilles,” he enthused, “in this Caribbean Sea lapping the equatorial shores of the South American continent, we have felt the ardent and fraternal hearts of millions of citizens, freed from the yoke of odious dictatorship, beating in unison with the Algerian Revolution.”Footnote ⁷ If the demands of propaganda urged a poetic turn, the effusive substance of his piece was in fact wholly consistent, for the most part, with the Algerian revolutionaries’ private, internal deliberations. Many cadres in the FLN’s political apparatus saw Cuba’s revolutionary project as an example for independent Algeria to follow in the social and economic spheres (albeit without going so far as to embrace outright communism), while also admiring the commitment to exporting revolution across the Latin American continent.Footnote ⁸ Could not Algeria be the “Cuba for Africa”? they asked, emphatically answering in the positive. Indeed, their widespread enthusiasm for Fidel Castro’s Cuba is all the more notable for the fact that, in reality, Havana took only modest steps to demonstrate its solidarity with the Algerian cause, for fear of stoking the hostility of France as well as the United States. While the FLN leadership celebrated Castro’s government for the largely symbolic gesture of taking in some Algerian refugees, they complained incessantly about the supposed inadequacy of the far more significant (and costly) support that they received from Arab governments such as Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Officers in the FLN’s military bases in Tunisia soon started to imitate the Cuban revolutionaries’ distinctive look by regularly wearing combat fatigues accessorized with pistols and even cigars. As would occur in student dorm rooms across the West, Cuban revolutionary posters and other paraphernalia proliferated in some of these bases. It is easy to mock these stylings, as some members of the FLN did, and to see a certain shallowness to such demonstrations of anti-imperialist solidarity and Third World internationalism.Footnote ⁹ But the early years of the Algerian-Cuban relationship show how the limits of such interactions – in truth, the two sides barely knew a thing about each other’s countries or histories – did not curtail the intensity or significance of the sentiment. The relationship, however superficial, offered a sense of solidarity and reinforced the distinct revolutionary goals of two countries forging precarious paths in hostile environments. After all, in decolonizing Africa and the Middle East, dress and affection could be fraught and contested signifiers of cultural and political loyalties, or values.Footnote ¹⁰ Notably, FLN military bigwig Houari Boumédiène and his lieutenant, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, were two of the Front’s most prominent Cubanophiles in the last years of the war. After independence, the former became the minister of defence and the latter the foreign minister, and they subsequently orchestrated the successful coup that saw Boumédiène supplant Ben Bella in 1965.

Perhaps it was partly with a mind to appeasing such constituencies that Ben Bella took the dramatic decision to visit New York, Washington DC, and Havana in sequence in mid-October 1962, thereby unintentionally enmeshing independent Algeria’s triumphant debut in world affairs with the hazardous acrimony of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was at least equally important, however, to demonstrate the sincerity of Algeria’s bold pronouncements on international affairs. While Ben Bella did not know that he would be meeting President John Kennedy at the White House on the same day that CIA analysts were poring over surveillance photographs of Soviet nuclear missiles deployed at his next port of call, he had certainly intended to flout one of the Cold War’s most heated lines of fracture. The conversations between the Algerians and Americans during this trip directly addressed the fundamental issues of the Cold War in the Global South. On the one hand, the White House hoped that the Algerians would see Cuba as a warning of the perils of “Communist capture of indigenous national revolutions.”Footnote ¹¹ But Ben Bella’s first foreign minister, Mohamed Khemisti (who was succeeded after his death several months later by Bouteflika), encapsulated his side’s outlook by defending Cuba’s right to pursue its “economic and social liberation” and criticized the United States for attacking the regime “chosen by the friendly people of Cuba.”Footnote ¹² Cuba’s choice of communism, in the Algerian view, was first and foremost an expression of national sovereignty (the questionable reality of it being a free “choice” notwithstanding). This disagreement encapsulated the perpendicular divergence of perspectives between much of the Third World and the Kennedy administration: for all of Kennedy’s genuine concern for the plight of the developing world, his sympathies could not exist outside of the Cold War paradigm. Moreover, the Cubans were greatly appreciative of their Algerian guests’ willingness to endure Washington’s ire by defying American efforts to isolate the island. Although the Kennedy administration accepted the Algerians’ innocence with regards to the nuclear threat in Cuba, Ben Bella’s trip to Havana unquestionably came at a cost.

Cooperation between Algiers and Havana flourished in the wake of the Algerian delegation’s October 1962 visit. Fidel Castro appointed Jorge Serguera to the new embassy in Algiers the following February, and Serguera arrived declaring that his role was not that of a traditional ambassador, but rather a revolutionary ally and “extra combatant in the service of Algeria.”Footnote ¹³ At Havana’s request, Ben Bella and Boumédiène agreed to take in a small group of Argentinian guerrillas-in-training who had overstayed their welcome in Prague, adding to a list that already included key leaders in African revolutionary movements from South Africa, Mozambique, and elsewhere in the continent. Shortly after, Algeria also received a delegation of the Venezuelan National Liberation Front and agreed to ship armaments to them across the Atlantic.Footnote ¹⁴ Operating under shell companies, an Algerian cargo vessel, the Ibn Khaldun, provided a circuitous yet effective supply line to Venezuela, thereby bypassing the United States’ close surveillance of Cuba’s efforts to export revolution.Footnote ¹⁵ In May, a grateful Castro sent a team of more than fifty doctors and nurses to help alleviate Algeria’s severe health crisis and shortage of medical personnel. Visiting Moscow that spring, the Cuban leader urged Nikita Khrushchev to extend support to Algeria and to see the North African country as a properly revolutionary one that could well follow the Cuban example. Algiers took further action to alleviate Cuba’s isolation by agreeing, in June, to serve as a refueling stop for Soviet aircraft bound for the Caribbean, which necessitated the enlargement of several runways with Moscow’s assistance.Footnote ¹⁶

Thus, the Cuban-Algerian relationship was quickly becoming very close in both substantive and atmospheric terms. When Guevara spent three weeks in Algeria in July, he received a rapturous reception in public and political circles alike. Essentially given license to wander at his leisure, the Argentinian enthused that “each time I see something new in Algeria, I am reminded of Cuba: there’s the same esprit, the same enthusiasm, the same inexperience too.”Footnote ¹⁷ It was a reflection of the unapologetic nature of the Cuban-Algerian friendship that US Senate Majority leader Mike Mansfield, who was also visiting Algeria at that time, unwittingly found himself attending a state function on July 5th, the anniversary of Algerian independence, that featured Guevara and Egypt’s Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer as joint guests of honor. The politically powerful senator was displeased to see his hosts fete the poster child of a revolution that, scarcely half a year prior, had threatened to obliterate his own country.Footnote ¹⁸ Unsurprisingly, Algerian requests for economic aid and commercial deals were meeting sizable and growing opposition in Washington.

By provoking Washington’s ire, the Algerian government showed that it was willing to pay a significant price for its friendship with Cuba. On more than one occasion, State Department analysts confessed to being baffled by the Algerians’ motivations, for they could see little benefit for Algeria in meddling in the controversies of another continent, half a world away.Footnote ¹⁹ Nevertheless, the Algerians’ motivations do seem to have stemmed from the principles of revolutionary and anti-imperialist solidarity that American officials found hard to accept at face value; their internal records do not contradict their public statements in this regard. There was a clear ambivalence in the Algerian government’s attitude to the United States: on the one hand, Algiers saw Washington as the most feasible alternative and competitor to France as a source of trade and development assistance; yet at the same time, Algerian officials consistently described American economic and strategic interests in the Third World as the most powerful and dangerous manifestation of “neo-imperialism.” To the extent that cooperation with Cuba was pragmatic, the leaders of both governments believed that they could defend themselves best from American hostility by encouraging revolution elsewhere in Africa and in Latin America, which distracted Washington and created new allies for them. In any case, Algeria’s friendship opened new vistas for Castro and his comrades. If Serguera was perhaps exaggerating the significance of the initial Cuban-Algerian subversive collaboration in Latin America by describing it as a breakthrough for the Afro-Asian world and a pioneering example of anti-imperialist solidarity, this unquestionably bold decision by Ben Bella’s government would lead to more cooperative ventures of a similar nature in the near future.Footnote ²⁰ Likewise, as historian Piero Gleijeses has noted, besides strengthening the two countries’ alliance, the medical mission in Algeria proved to be important to the history of Cuba’s international relations because it was the first actual implementation of Havana’s rhetorical commitment to humanitarian internationalism – the beginning of a long and proud tradition of providing assistance to other developing countries.Footnote ²¹

Probably the most significant area of cooperation between Algeria and Cuba concerned supporting revolutionary and liberation movements in one another’s continents. Algeria had a similar relationship with Yugoslavia, a country that in some respects shared Cuba’s dilemma of being relatively isolated in its own region. In this period, the Algerians brought their Caribbean and Balkan allies into the self-identified revolutionary wing of postcolonial African politics, which included the likes of Egypt, Ghana, Mali, and Tanzania.Footnote ²² Countries such as these were more unrestrained than some of their African peers in supporting armed subversive movements. Cuba and Yugoslavia could more readily provide armaments, expertise, and transport than many of the African states, most of which were critically short on the requisite material and logistical resources. Algerian diplomats facilitated introductions and served as translators (linguistically and culturally) for the Cubans. For example, Alphonse Massemba-Débat, president of the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), told Jorge Serguera that the presence of an Algerian diplomat at his side vouched for Cuba’s revolutionary credentials.Footnote ²³ Even if the sentiment was perhaps something of a diplomatic pleasantry, the fact is that geopolitically consequential relationships, crossing great distances, frequently resulted from brief and infrequent encounters such as these. Cuba was almost immediately assisting in the training of guerrilla fighters from numerous African territories, and probably also Palestine. In January 1965, the CIA reported the presence of Cuban officers at a camp in the mountainous Algerian region of Kabylia. The Algerians also assisted Che Guevara’s ill-fated mission to take a column of Cuban soldiers into Congo that year, although they did not think it advisable to participate directly in the struggles of other nations.Footnote ²⁴ The Cuban role in Africa’s revolutions intensified in the early 1970s, culminating in the dispatch of thousands of soldiers to Angola in 1975, but the basis for that massive intervention was laid in the mid-1960s. Several small movements favored by the revolutionary network that the Algerians and Cubans participated in, such as the Angolan MPLA, Palestine’s Fateh, or the Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU), later played central roles in their country’s politics.

But if these early years of Cuban-Algeria cooperation were testament to the potential and viability of Tricontinental solidarity, they also demystify the phenomenon. Indeed, the longer-term historical legacy of Cuban-Algerian cooperation is all the more remarkable for being based, in this initial stage, on scant apparatus or reciprocal knowledge. Guevara’s rash venture into Congo was the result of a simplistic, ideological reading of Africa from afar. Rapid decolonization after 1960 and the emergence of armed revolutions in South Africa and Angola convinced the inveterate Argentinian militant that the continent was in the throes of unstoppable revolutionary change that was itself part of a greater global story. In the same vein, Algerian analyses of Latin America in the early-mid 1960s often amounted to little more than rephrasing Cuban agitprop. The Algerian foreign ministry’s department for Asia and Latin America optimistically informed Bouteflika that “the revolutionary wind has blown strongly enough from Havana to have shaken up the situation in those countries where the United States’ grip is still very strong, and it threatens to substantially change things even more.”Footnote ²⁵ At that time, the “department” for Asia and Latin America was meagerly staffed by people with little familiarity with either region. The section head, who had never visited Latin America, was delighted to be reappointed to the embassy in Bamako, Mali, in early 1965.Footnote ²⁶ In comparison, a right-wing coup in Brazil in April 1964 put on hold Algerian plans to open a second embassy on the continent, after Havana, for narrow ideological reasons based on the Cuban perspective.

Still, despite the skepticism of many Western observers, leaders of both countries valued their relationship, in part for its ability to legitimize a diplomacy of revolutionary internationalism. Boumédiène’s overthrow of Ben Bella in 1965 temporarily put a damper on the alliance, as Castro and his colleagues initially assumed the coup had a counterrevolutionary character akin to that seen in Brazil. Kwame Nkrumah’s overthrow in Ghana the following February confirmed a pattern of early postcolonial regime changes. The Cuban government’s decision to put on the Tricontinental Conference therefore occurred in the context of – and partly in response to – the loss of several valued allies as well as systemic, worsening schisms within the global anti-imperialist milieu. A key goal of the conference was to reinforce and formalize the kinds of alliances Cuba and Algeria had been forming in the early 1960s in light of these worrying trends.

Schisms in the Global Anti-Imperialist Front

The 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana took place in the context of intense divisions within what could be thought of as the worldwide “anti-imperialist front” – that is, those Third World countries and communist countries that claimed that anti-imperialism was a core tenet of their international relations. From the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade in September 1961 to the late 1960s, heated debate reigned over the nature, purpose, and organization of the Third World project. A moderate/radical divide emerged among the Afro-Asian countries, chiefly over how militant a position to take toward violent crises of decolonization such as the war in Algeria and the complex conflict that consumed Congo in late 1960. The Belgrade Conference did not constitute a simple and harmonious sequel to Bandung: it was largely an initiative of countries that took a more militant stance toward those two crises than the likes of India and the Colombo countries, and the Non-Aligned Movement in these years actually had a more provocative and subversive tenor than the neutralism celebrated at Bandung.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time, certainly the greatest impediment to the Third World’s unity was the intensifying ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the USSR and the PRC. The Algerians and others saw competition between great powers as a boon for smaller countries, and the FLN had indeed already exploited Sino-Soviet tensions in the latter stages of their independence struggle. But after Belgrade, the Sino-Soviet split became a tedious obstacle even for those accustomed to profiting from such rivalries. China tried to squeeze its European rivals – the Soviets and Yugoslavs – out of the Third World coalition by emphasizing a more racially exclusive Afro-Asianism at the expense of a Non-Aligned Movement that the Chinese saw as a tool of the Yugoslavians and the Indians, the latter the primary antagonist in a fierce border dispute. As Nehru complained to Nasser regarding the extension of that territorial dispute into Third World affairs, “China’s main purpose seems to be disrupt the policy of non-alignment which has gained widespread support, not only among the Afro-Asian countries, but also from the Great Powers. I think our own conflict with China should be seen against this background.”Footnote ²⁸

Therefore, when Cuba attended the Belgrade Conference in 1961, it entered a Third World coalition already beset by complicated, overlapping tensions. China pitted Afro-Asianism against the NAM; India defended the NAM against China but also feared that the NAM was dominated by those too eager to support guerrillas and insurgencies in places like Congo. At the same time, China also had the sympathy of many leading NAM participants because of its own aggressive stance on supporting violent revolutionary struggles, which compared favorably in their minds to the Soviet Union’s accommodating pursuit of “peaceful coexistence” with the West. As a further complication, some of the most militant Arab members of the NAM, notably Egypt and Algeria, worried that China’s racial definition of the Third World might distance them from the rest of Africa. Therefore, Cuba, Algeria, Egypt, and Yugoslavia shared a willingness to directly assist violent anti-imperialist struggles, mostly in Africa, and shared a desire to emphasize a more expansive, diverse, and inclusive sense of Third World solidarity. While visiting Belgrade in March 1964, Ben Bella told Tito that Algeria’s preference was to unite all “progressive forces” regardless of geographical, ideological, or racial distinctions, and the Yugoslav premier agreed wholeheartedly.Footnote ²⁹

It was the emergence of this more assertive, revolutionary faction within the left wing of the Third World coalition that informed the articulation of Tricontinentalism. The proposal for a “Tricontinental Conference” issued from a January 1961 meeting of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), headquartered in Cairo. The organization had started out three years prior as a Soviet initiative to harness the evident energy of the Bandung movement. But by proposing in 1963 to host this Tricontinental event, the Cuban government was hoping to formally extend the Afro-Asian bloc into Latin America, to blur the lines between the NAM and the AAPSO, to diminish its own isolation in Latin America as much as strengthen its connections further afield, and to reinforce its credentials as an autonomous Third World actor rather than a Soviet satellite. Indeed, regarding the final consideration, the Soviets initially preferred that Brazil host the Tricontinental – before the right-wing coup there in 1964.Footnote ³⁰

The Cuban desire to host the Tricontinental Conference reflected smaller and medium-sized countries’ efforts to institutionalize Third Worldism in the face of the bigger powers’ disruptive feuds. Yugoslavia and Egypt had mostly driven the founding of the NAM, despite Indian and, especially, Chinese and Soviet wariness of the project. While the Bandung Conference had been the product of a short-lived understanding between the two giants of Asia – India and China – Yugoslavian publicity material happily described the Belgrade summit as “a conference of small and medium-sized countries.”Footnote ³¹ In that spirit, the likes of Algeria (still a liberation movement in 1961), Cuba, and Ghana enthusiastically came on board. Likewise, Nasser’s government hosted a succession of Third World-related meetings after Belgrade – AAPSO meetings, non-aligned meetings, and the second summit of the Organization of African Unity in 1964. At the same time the Cubans were bidding to host the Tricontinental, the Algerians proposed, successfully, to hold the second Afro-Asian heads of state summit, or “Bandung II,” in 1965. Smaller countries saw the institutionalization of solidarity as a means to magnify their influence, especially if they achieved even greater prominence (and a real, though limited degree of influence over the agenda) by hosting major meetings and permanent secretariats. On the other hand, by dint of their sheer size, India, China, and the Soviet Union had little need of institutions that they could not closely control, with perhaps their ideal example being the interwar-era Communist International, or Comintern, through which Moscow had dominated communist parties worldwide. As a result, one constant dynamic of Third Worldist diplomacy in the 1960s was the tension between smaller organizing powers and the feuding major powers that wanted to weaponize organizing themes and institutions against one another.

The Sino-Soviet split, and related intra-communist schisms, damaged the vitality of AAPSO badly, even fatally. The animosity between Moscow and Beijing spilled out into the open in dramatic fashion at AAPSO meetings in Moshi, Tanganyika, in February 1963 and Algiers in March 1964.Footnote ³² Chinese and Soviet delegates belligerently strove to assert their ideological supremacy over one another while also competing, somewhat paradoxically, for the loyalty and support of the attending Third World governments, who were for the most part disinterested in and perplexed by the jargon-laden vitriol the communist delegates subjected them to. As one African attendee of the Algiers meeting memorably groused,

If the Chinese scored points by criticizing the Soviet espousal of peaceful coexistence – which the Algerians, Yugoslavs, and Cubans, among others, suspected meant Moscow’s conceding that Latin America was in the United States’ “sphere of influence” and parts of Africa in Britain and France’s – they also suffered from the increasingly off-putting, indecorous intensity of their attacks.Footnote ³⁴ Other members of the anti-imperialist world now regularly complained of the “doctrinaire states,” seeing them as losing their credibility as revolutionary vanguards through their preoccupation with insular arguments, even if the Soviet Union and China remained necessary allies for many developing countries. Indeed, general enthusiasm for AAPSO waned: after a discordant meeting in Ghana in 1965, the next one did not take place until 1972. Seeing opportunity in crisis, the Cuban government founded the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) at the 1966 Tricontinental meeting as a substitute for the foundering AAPSO.Footnote ³⁵ However, the association with AAPSO helped limit the new organization’s appeal, for the most part, to those nations that openly identified with communism, especially in its Maoist, peasant-oriented form. This lean to the left would become a defining element of revolutionary Tricontinentalism, eventually driving a wedge in the broad solidarity envisioned by Algerian ambitions for the Third World project.

Additionally, the Chinese government’s willingness to use racial tensions against its Soviet and Yugoslavian rivals strained ambitions for an expanded Third World unity. The Chinese argument, expressed bluntly by officials and in propaganda material that primarily targeted sub-Saharan Africa, was that white Europeans like the Russians and Yugoslavs were simply not part of Asia and Africa. Moreover, questions of basic racial-geographic eligibility aside, Beijing argued that by dint of their mentality and experiences, white countries simply could not relate to or understand the problems of the non-Western world. “[W]hen we talk to you,” Mao Zedong told Africans, “there is no feeling that I bully you or you bully me, nobody has a superiority complex, we are both of a colored race.”Footnote ³⁶ Showing their fear of China’s racial arguments, a Soviet official fretted that Africans “now relate to all whites with suspicion,” while Tito railed against the notion that “all blacks are good and all whites bad.”Footnote ³⁷

This racial line of attack within the communist world’s schism was especially worrying for some of the most enthusiastic participants in the Third World scene, above all the militant wing that included Algeria, Egypt, Yugoslavia, and Cuba. Each of those four countries was a prime mover in the Non-Aligned Movement as well as the transnational network of support for liberation movements and armed revolutionary groups. The latter activity was especially focused on Central and Southern Africa in this period, given the continued existence of Portuguese colonialism and other forms of white minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia. The racial question also bore directly on the ongoing crisis in Congo-Léopoldville, which was one of the most pressing concerns for the NAM. Moishe Tshombe, the Western-backed leader of Congo who was loathed by the militant countries, strikingly protested against Algerian and Egyptian support for the rebels in his country by staging a reenactment of Arab slave raids in the main football stadium in Léopoldville (Kinshasa).Footnote ³⁸ So, as Che Guevara prepared to lead a Cuban column into Congo in 1965, Nasser warned that he might appear like “another Tarzan … a white man coming among black men, leading them and protecting them.”Footnote ³⁹ It was a revealing indication of how leading the international revolutionary vanguard could resemble a new sort of imperialist civilizing mission.Footnote ⁴⁰

China’s rather brutal willingness to sow division on such profound lines also informed the Algerian and Cuban approaches to the two upcoming Third World meetings that were so important to them both: Bandung II in Algiers in 1965 and the Tricontinental in Havana in January 1966. The leaders of both countries sought to subsume the racialism that threatened to emerge from either cultural or geographic delineations of an Afro-Asian alliance within a secular, revolutionary solidarity that stretched across the Atlantic. They, as well as like-minded allies, advocated inclusive programmatic and political criteria for admission to the worldwide anti-imperial coalition. Ben Bella conceded to Tito that “we [Algerians] are white like you, maybe a little more brown,” and agreed with the Yugoslav’s contention that “the wrongheaded idea of divisions according to race merits the [Non-Aligned states’] strongest censure.”Footnote ⁴¹ Ben Bella’s government favored including the Soviet Union in Bandung II and also desired expanding the NAM and the Afro-Asian group to include Latin America and beyond. Ben Bella told Tito that he desired “an enlargement of the circle of nonaligned states … [I]n addition to Asian countries, Latin American and European countries … [should] participate in the conference too. We also think that ideas about continents and skin color need to be overcome because progressive forces exist all around the world.”Footnote ⁴² At the heart of this emerging ideology was an attempt to renegotiate historic inequalities between Global North and South, as well as countries great and small, by mobilizing a broad political coalition across all continents.

In the end, schisms within the Third World might well have ruined Bandung II, even if Boumédiène and Bouteflika had not chosen to overthrow Ben Bella on the eve of the conference in June 1965. China fought tooth and nail to prevent the Soviets from attending, while many African countries were inclined to stay away because the war of rhetoric between the communist countries gave rise to increasingly polarizing discourse. Boumédiène and his associates had removed Ben Bella from power before Bandung II took place because they feared, if the conference were successful, his augmented power and prestige would render him untouchable. The timing of the coup reflects how important postcolonial diplomacy was in bestowing political legitimacy: if hosting the conference might have made Ben Bella untouchable, those who deposed him likewise hoped that their hosting the conference instead might confirm and secure their assumption of power. Accordingly, the new government in Algiers attempted to hold the postponed conference a few months later, in November 1965, in order to enjoy the legitimization of the Third World. But China’s disputes with the Soviet Union and with India, as well as the seeming loss of its Indonesian ally due to anti-communist massacres there, induced Beijing to successfully obstruct multilateral efforts to keep Bandung II alive.Footnote ⁴³ In the skeptical view of the Indian delegation, China belatedly discovered “that Asian and African countries had a mind and will of their own … As the Conference could not be bent to its will, China set about scuttling it.”Footnote ⁴⁴ As a meaningful organizing theme in Third World affairs, Afro-Asianism effectively died in Algiers in June 1965.

The same vicious factionalism greatly limited Cuba’s success in ensuring that the expanded theme of Tricontinentalism might provide a genuine successor to Bandung. In many respects, the January 1966 Tricontinental Conference was a less ambitious and more narrow-minded event than the canceled Algiers conference had been intended to be. Castro’s firm embrace of communism and the conference’s origins in AAPSO, an organization created in order that Moscow might capture the energy of Afro-Asianism, meant the Tricontinental became a distinctly ideological event. Though it assembled representatives from all continents including both Europe and North America, the 612 delegates came mostly from communist parties or avowedly leftist organizations, including political parties, unions, liberation movements, and the like. An emphasis on militant, armed revolutions became a central component of the emerging philosophy guiding the conference. This characteristic alienated old guard Third Worldists even as it provided a platform for socialists such as Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary nationalist from Portuguese Guinea who came to Havana in search of military and diplomatic support.Footnote ⁴⁵ Communist infighting naturally influenced the proceedings greatly; the Soviets and Chinese fought over the invitation list beforehand, each trying to stack the crowd in its favor. At Chinese insistence, Yugoslavia was excluded, though the Egyptians subsequently facilitated the attendance of a Yugoslavian delegation with “observer” status, which was a particularly inconsequential achievement at a nongovernmental conference.Footnote ⁴⁶

All told, the Tricontinental’s efforts to expand the geography of anti-colonial revolution met severe challenges. Chinese objections greatly limited the actual participation of sympathetic Latin American movements, since these tended to be pro-Soviet rather than pro-Chinese. For the same reason, China opposed Cuba’s proposal to institutionalize the Tricontinental by creating a new secretariat in Havana in the form of OSPAAAL. In this China failed but, in time, the influence of the new OSPAAAL would prove to be curtailed by more prosaic regional rivalries. Egypt was loath to see AAPSO, headquartered in Cairo, supplanted altogether. Many African attendees were also wary of Afro-Asianism acquiring too heavy a Latin American focus. The conference’s emphatic emphasis on denouncing Yanqui imperialism in the strongest terms, with only cursory reference to European colonialism, encouraged their fears. The observing Indian chargé d’affaires concluded that,

His analysis was itself an example of schism within the Third World, with Indian diplomacy eager to see Chinese ambitions foiled and the influence of militant revolutionary factions curtailed. In that respect, his report is doubly proof of the roiling rivalries within the anti-colonial solidarity movement, a mere decade after Bandung.

Conclusion

In the 1960s, the similarity of views and closeness of cooperation between Algeria and Cuba led many to equate the two revolutionary countries. Indeed, it was common for senior Algerian cadres themselves to describe their country as the “Cuba of the Maghreb” or even the “Cuba of Africa.” The Soviet Union’s increased economic and military assistance to Algeria reflected the hope, at least in Khrushchev’s time, that it would follow the Caribbean country’s political progression toward a full commitment to “scientific socialism.” Such close association of the two countries concerned some sympathizers, such as the Yugoslavian ambassador in Algiers who fretted that “[t]he importance that the USSR wants to give to the Algeria-Cuba analogy has dubious value … [because] the West and the reactionaries [will] use and amplify [it] in order to isolate Algeria.”Footnote ⁴⁸ His fears were well founded. However, rather than economic and ideological concerns, it was Algeria and Cuba’s collaborative support for armed revolutionary movements that most displeased Washington. After all, there was no consensus in the Third World on openly supporting and abetting violent movements. The American official in charge of Algerian affairs admitted to a British colleague that “[t]he further up the State Department hierarchy you go, the more you hear the view that [Ben Bella] is ‘no better than Castro’.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Kennedy had not wanted to concede Algeria to the Eastern bloc altogether, but by 1965, Algerian-Cuban cooperation in fomenting revolution in Latin America and Congo led many American national security officials to categorize Algeria as a hostile entity.

Nevertheless, the Cuban and Algerian positions in Third World affairs started to diverge somewhat in the second half of the 1960s. In part, this divergence was diplomatic fallout from the coup against Ben Bella, to which Castro initially reacted furiously. Assuming, as many did, that the military-orchestrated coup was a rightist counterrevolutionary development, Castro publicly warned that “events in Algeria affect us all, [Boumédiène and the coup’s other instigators] have harmed the revolutionary movement in Africa and in all the world.”Footnote ⁵⁰ But the more fundamental cause of the growing distance between Algeria and Cuba was the fact that the former was more invested in the established structures and norms of the international order, while Cuba continued to act in more provocative, insurrectionary ways. Algeria continued to aid revolutionary movements opposed to colonial and minority regimes much of the world viewed as illegitimate, especially in Southern Africa and Palestine, but in the late 1960s, Algiers increasingly focused more on diplomatic approaches to addressing systemic economic inequalities. The presence of some Black Panthers in Algiers at the end of the decade attracted a lot of attention in the United States, but in practice the Algerian authorities were becoming more selective in their support for revolutionaries: they were increasingly skeptical of the Panthers’ seriousness and secretly irritated that Algiers had become a destination of choice for hijackers.Footnote ⁵¹ As one of Algeria’s senior diplomats explained to his colleagues in 1965, “Today, [the new nations’] essential goal is [to] gain access to the international responsibilities at the heart of the United Nations, and to make sure that their interests and economic imperatives are no longer subject to the whim of a few great powers.”Footnote ⁵² There was no open schism between the two allies, who continued to collaborate on numerous issues, but Algeria began to place greater emphasis on broader-based Third Worldist cooperation, especially in the economic realm, and showed greater respect for the principle of noninterference in other developing countries’ internal political affairs.

The January 1966 Tricontinental Conference, therefore, ran somewhat against the prevailing current of the Third World’s general progression to more peaceful, more inclusive, and more economically oriented modes of collaborative mobilization. The UNCTAD and G-77 groups featured strong Latin American representation from the outset, not least in their intellectual and organizational apparatus, so the majority of the continent’s governments voted for the initial exclusion of Cuba from these new entities, just as they also voted to expel it from the OAS around this time. Consequently, Cuba riposted by using the Tricontinental as an opportunity to promote a narrower and ideologically purer form of solidarity. Many of the Latin American delegates at the Havana Conference, being representatives of communist parties and other opposition groups, kept their identities secret. Unlike the core Afro-Asian, Non-Aligned, UNCTAD, or G-77 events, the Tricontinental was a nongovernmental, nonofficial gathering. Key Third World countries like India and Algeria were represented by ambiguously titled, nongovernmental entities such as the Algerian Committee for Afro-Asian Solidarity. The latter included at least one senior diplomat but kept an uncharacteristically low profile.Footnote ⁵³ Western officials were not far off in portraying the Tricontinental as a communist gathering, for the event did have an overwhelmingly communist and like-minded fellow-traveling constituency. Prior to his abduction and assassination, Ben Barka himself had said that the conference “would blend the two great currents of world revolution: that which was born in 1917 with the Russian Revolution, and that which represents the anti-imperialist and national liberation movements of today.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Full-forced revolutionary resistance against Yanqui imperialism was the central theme of the Tricontinental’s discourse, with Guevara’s memorably blood-curdling appeal to create “many Vietnams” representative of the tenor of proceedings.Footnote ⁵⁵

In contrast, the first G-77 ministerial meeting, held in Algiers in October 1967, gave Boumédiène’s government the opportunity to position itself as a prime mover in the more consensual, legalistic, and institutional campaign to reform global economic structures that was quickly growing to encompass practically all the governments of the developing world. Though the G-77 group of developing countries had been formed at the first UNCTAD in 1964, it developed a permanent institutional structure at the first ministerial meeting, and Algeria’s profile clearly benefited from the G-77’s founding statement of principles being known officially as the “Charter of Algiers.” This set out a program of action (including commodity cartels, price controls, and trade liberalization) that became the basis for the agenda of the New International Economic Order in the 1970s.Footnote ⁵⁶ With its significant deposits of natural gas and oil, Algeria possessed commodities of significant value that were already the subject of intense political and intellectual scrutiny, and the North African country was thereby much better integrated into the mainstream of economic life in the Global South than its Cuban ally was.Footnote ⁵⁷ The architect of Algeria’s development project and hydrocarbon nationalization plans, Minister of Industry and Energy Belaïd Abdesselam, presented Algeria’s critique of the global economic system at the 1967 meeting, and thereby exerted great influence over the content of the Charter of Algiers.Footnote ⁵⁸ Perhaps no country boasted greater influence over the Global South’s economic diplomacy over the next decade. Additionally, hydrocarbons bestowed Algeria with significant revenues to plow into its modernization drive, giving the country the appearance of genuine postcolonial socialist prosperity in the 1970s. It was on this basis that the peripatetic Polish appraiser of post-coloniality, Ryszard Kapuściński, described it as “the pivotal Third World State … a model, bright and entrancing.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Together, the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana and the 1967 G-77 meeting in Algiers set the course for international affairs in the Third World over the remainder of the Cold War. On the one hand, the Algiers Charter facilitated the construction of what became known in due time as the Global South: an assemblage of practically all developing countries, defined by inegalitarian global economic structures and the disparity in material prosperity between North and South. Conventional wisdom holds that the NIEO and UNCTAD projects ultimately failed, being blown apart by debt, structural adjustment, and neoliberal capitalist globalization in the 1980s and 1990s.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet the G-77’s agenda still exerts influence, helping to stymie the most recent round of World Trade negotiations and informing the design of the Paris climate change treaty. In comparison, the Tricontinental’s communist-led call for global insurgency was becoming more of a radical niche within the Third World movement, even in the late 1960s. Certain lingering anti-colonial struggles continued to command the sympathy of most of the Southern Hemisphere – South Africa, Palestine, and so on – but national political elites were also increasingly concerned that the controversy that inevitably accompanied armed struggle would jeopardize the greater cause of reforming global economic structures. Perhaps no event better encapsulates this divergence within the Third World than the terrorist attack on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna in December 1975: a small group of international terrorists, led by the notorious Venezuelan Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (“Carlos the Jackal”), took representatives of OPEC hostage in order to call attention to the Palestinian cause. The event demonstrated revolutionary anti-colonialists’ frustration with the new postcolonial establishment.Footnote ⁶¹

The Tricontinental agenda did leave a deep and lasting legacy, though perhaps one felt mostly in specific localities. Because of the Tricontinental’s influence and the reduced participation of other postcolonial countries in violent causes, many of the major national liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, such as those in Portugal’s African colonies and Palestine, took on a more communist character than their predecessors elsewhere in Africa and Asia.Footnote ⁶² But the Tricontinental’s undisguised purpose of confronting the United States also helped ensure that events in places such as Angola, Mozambique, and Palestine took a tragic and bloody turn, entailing decades of civil war and unresolved political impasses. For a time, Guevara’s uncompromising vision of many Vietnams came to pass. But by the 1990s, the end of the socialist road was also accompanied by a decisive turn away from violent anti-colonialism. In Northern Ireland, Palestine, and South Africa, among other places, nationalist revolutionaries renounced both armed resistance and socialism. In that sense, Tricontinentalism and the Third World’s vision of global economic transformation both shared the same fate.Footnote ⁶³