This chapter discusses some of the mechanisms that the ideologues of the Cuban planter class, grouped at the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País in the early nineteenth century, used to transform art into a white domain. These ideologues characterized the works of popular Afrodescendant artists as crude and unsophisticated, and institutionalized art education through the Academia de San Alejandro (1818). The Academia excluded applicants of African descent (as well as women) and trained future artists in European styles, sensibilities, and techniques. As a result, we know of only one artist with identified works in nineteenth-century Cuba, Vicente Escobar (1762–1834), who was socially identified as pardo. Escobar came from a privileged sector of Havana’s population of African descent. Members of his family occupied prominent positions in the Pardo Battalions of the Militias and were successful craftsmen who accumulated some wealth, including slaves. It was probably thanks to these family connections that Escobar learned his trade as painter. This may also explain how he managed to acquire formal training at the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, which he attended in 1784.

This chapter traces the transformation of Christian Democratic attitudes toward the Chilean military regime. Whereas the two Christian Democratic parties in the FRG defended the military coup in 1973, by 1975 the CDU had turned against the Pinochet because of three interrelated reasons. First, CDU politicians feared that left-wing solidarity activists were using Chile to monopolize the topic of human rights in the FRG. Second, the international movement against the Pinochet regime and the latter’s international isolation forced the CDU to take a more critical stance. Finally, the Pinochet regime repressed Chile’s Christian Democratic Party (PDC), a close collaborator of the CDU and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation since the 1960s. The CSU, however, welcomed the Pinochet regime’s neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy and rejected the Keynesian PDC. Despite these differences, there was also convergence. The CDU consistently criticized the asylum program for refugees from Chile, largely accepted Pinochet’s neoliberal experiment, ignored abuses elsewhere in Latin America, and moved towards normalizing relations with the Pinochet regime by the late 1970s.

This section is an incomplete biographical directory of Afrodescendant artists in Cuba, from the colonial period to the present.

This chapter places the Cuban experience in a broader, Afro-Latin American context. It highlights some similarities and differences with other Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on Brazil, where scholarship about artists of African descent is considerably more advanced. As we begin the difficult task of reconstructing the lives and contributions of artists of African descent across the region, new cartographies in the art history of Latin America emerge. For example, the historiographic project linked to San Alejandro appears to have been uniquely successful, as it is possible to identify larger numbers of artists of African descent in other countries during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the presence of Afro-Cuban artists in early twentieth-century Europe was not unique, although the Cubans were there in larger numbers. Many of these artists, like their Cuban peers, were excluded from the new “modern art” that emerged under European influences in the interwar period and were relegated to the corners of academic, “pre-modern,” art. The chapter highlights intriguing parallelisms between Cuba and Brazil, which persist even after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

Nearly thirty years after the end of the civil war, campesina women continue to remember their revolutionary past. The Survivors’ Historical Memory Committee of Arcatao, Chalatenango, has worked on four major projects: the exhumation of victims killed in military-led massacres, the construction of a sanctuary to house the remains of loved ones, commemorative events, and a community museum led by survivors themselves. These popular historians facilitate intergenerational continuity across decades of struggle. The committee’s work to mourn, exhume, bury, and remember the dead charts a path toward healing, a tenuous process given the ongoing violence in postwar El Salvador. Additionally, I draw insights from two workshops I facilitated in 2015 to trace how committee women understand their revolutionary past. They have a specifically feminist understanding of their insurgent past and highlight the central role of civilian organizing within the guerrilla territories. Campesina women insisted on remembering how their revolutionary organizing created more equitable gender relations and resisted state violence against women, and they critiqued male leftists who ignored their contributions.

This chapter focuses on the role of women teachers and campesinas in the class struggle. Two mass organizations played a critical role in building a combative labor movement: the National Association of Salvadoran Educators and Union of Rural Workers. Women comprised 80 percent of members in the teachers’ association, while significant numbers of campesinas participated in the rural union. By 1975, teachers and peasants joined forces in a revolutionary coalition to overthrow the political and economic system that exploited the entire working class. Many teachers and rural workers joined guerrilla organizations, such as the Popular Liberation Forces, whose cadre helped build mass organizations. Participation in the class struggle led to changes on two fronts. First, it deepened women’s class consciousness and revealed the state’s brutality in crushing the most minimal reforms. Second, the struggle transformed how women saw themselves and their role in changing society. Women confronted sexist expectations that shamed them for working alongside men and prioritizing political participation over domestic work. Fifteen years prior to the outbreak of the revolutionary war in 1980, a multigenerational movement of women had broken with patriarchal tradition. That rupture was fundamental. It facilitated women’s political participation and their increasing militant action that elevated class struggle to unprecedented levels. This gendered history allows us to appreciate what it took to build and sustain the revolutionary mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

The epilogue explains West German engagement with Latin American politics from 1988 to 1992, restates the historiographical contributions of the book, and briefly examines the trajectory of market-friendly and market-critical human rights from the 1990s into the 2000s. Christian Democratic officials encouraged market-friendly democratization in Latin America by supporting the electoral ouster of the Sandinistas in 1990, and providing development aid packages to El Salvador despite continued abuses and rampant corruption. Alongside the collapse of state socialism in East Central Europe, democratization in Latin America helped enthrone market-friendly human rights into German reason of state. But the market-friendly conditionality principle instituted in 1991 has selectively targeted some states, such as Cuba, while ignoring abuses in countries important to German economic development. Market-critical human rights activism endured by establishing links with left-wing parties in Germany and with the transnational anti-globalization movement. But the propensity of some of its adherents to support authoritarian states makes it an easy target for market-friendly advocates. However, market-critical human rights can be a helpful corrective to an international human rights system that has largely eschewed criticism of inequality since the 1990s.

In late eighteenth-century Havana, residents frequently referred to the existence of large communities of negros and pardos as “officers in the trade of painter” and the authors of “exquisite works.” But who are these artists, and where can we find their works? What sort of works did they produce? Where were they trained, and how did they master their crafts with such perfection? By centering the artistic production and social worlds of artists of African descent in Cuba since the colonial period, this revisionist history of Cuban art provides compelling answers to these questions. Carefully researched and cogently argued, the book explores the gendered racial biases that have informed the constitution of the Cuban art canon; exposes how the ideologues of the slave-owning planter class institutionalized the association between “fine arts” and key attributes of whiteness; and examines how this association continues to shape art historical narratives in Cuba.

This chapter examines West German efforts to admit refugees from Chile. It argues that the rhetoric of antifascism mobilized by the Chile solidarity movement was influential during the government of Willy Brandt (1973–1974), because the key pillars of the Social Democratic Party (youth organizations, trade unions, and regional party structures) endorsed the admittance of refugees as antifascist fighters, and members of the Free Democratic Party also sanctioned the admittance of refugees from Chile. However, following Helmut Schmidt’ accession to the chancellorship in 1974, securing political asylum for refugees from Chile became far more challenging and nearly impossible for political refugees from Argentina. This is because Schmidt and fellow government officials opposed left-wing solidarity during a time in which the focus shifted towards stabilizing the economy and combating left-wing terrorism. The government’s stance forced the solidarity movement to emphasize their humanitarian motivations. As the case of Helmut Frenz’s engagement demonstrates, the politics of emergency coexisted with a market-critical understanding of the violence perpetrated by the Chilean military regime.

The introduction explains the book’s innovative contribution to the historiographies of human rights and German history. Whereas human rights scholarship largely sees post-1970s rights advocacy as a form of conservative humanitarianism, the book demonstrates that the triumph of market-friendly human rights in Cold War Germany was the product of contingency. Bitter political fights within the left, conservative left baiting, and the decline of revolutionary projects in the Global South enabled the market-friendly vision promoted by Christian Democrats to sideline the market-critical human rights vision of the left. The introduction also demonstrates that any account seeking to understand the development of the German left after 1968 must pay close attention to its internationalism.