This chapter examines the emergence of the Chile solidarity movement, a broad umbrella of Latin American exiles, West German New Leftists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and orthodox Communists united by the idea that the Pinochet regime was fascist that required their opposition given Germany’s fascist past. The chapter explains why these leftists employed a human rights rhetoric that leftists had largely shunned in the 1960s. It argues that from 1973 to 1976 there was a widespread consensus among solidarity activists that the demand for human rights and expressing solidarity with Chile’s socialist experiment under Allende were compatible claims. Human rights became part of a common strategy to secure the international isolation of the Chilean military regime. These “politics of emergency” enabled the close collaboration between leftists and Amnesty International. These “politics of emergency” were controversial, but the Chile solidarity movement was forced to adopt them to help the Chilean left survive. The chapter concludes by showing how this consensus weakened after 1976 because Maoists rejected the endless continuation of the politics of emergency.

By the early twentieth century, a handful of students of African descent were attending the Academia de San Alejandro. Some of them managed to continue their studies in Europe, frequently with fellowships from national and local institutions. The so-called sociedades de color – clubs and mutual aid societies organized by people of African descent – played key roles in procuring state support for these artists and their careers. By the late 1930s, a small but consolidated group of artists of African descent, including a few women, exhibited regularly in Havana. Several participated in international exhibitions as well. Yet many, indeed most, of these artists are barely remembered today. The rise of the artistic vanguardia (avant-garde) of the 1920s and 1930s depicted their works, which were executed in the academic language, as obsolete and mediocre. As in the early nineteenth century, what the vanguardia described as true – and certainly as new – art was produced mostly by white artists. This is ironic, for much avant-garde art constructed visions of national identity that were centered on Afro-Cuban cultural expressions, to the point that the movement is known as Afrocubanismo in Cuban arts and letters.

The introduction begins with the story of Domitila, a young campesina who escaped to the mountains at night to train for the coming insurrection. Guarding her secret, she endured beatings from her father, who accused her of promiscuity. After her father discovered the revolver hidden underneath her pillow, he affords her a form of respect that he had previously reserved for men. Through Domitila’s personal story, I explain the conditions that drove rural workers to organize, the dramatic rise of state repression against unarmed movements, the left’s radicalization, the subsequent formation of the insurgency, the outbreak of the civil war (1980–1992), women’s organizing in the guerrilla territories and in multiple countries abroad, and the postwar battles to remember an insurgent past. I also contextualize El Salvador within a regional and global Cold War history. After the major actors and temporal scope are identified, I explain how dominant narratives, many rooted in Cold War paradigms, have contributed to the erasure of revolutionary women within feminist histories. I offer an alternative framework and methodology – rooted in dialectical approaches, oral history, and movement archives – that takes seriously the political contributions of revolutionary women.

Mapping the statements of Afro-Cuban artists on the Afrodescendant social condition and their cultural heritage during the revolutionary period, this chapter delves into the Afro-centric art of Manuel Mendive, Rafael Queneditt, Rogelio Rodríguez Cobas, and others who, during the 1960s–1980s, pointed their emphasis to the Yoruba and Bantú worlds that shaped Antillean societies despite the regime’s religious intolerance. Along with Adelaida Herrera Valdés, Julia Valdés Borrero, and others, they formed the Group Antillano, the first visual art collective grounded on notions of Afrodescendant consciousness that Cuba had ever experienced. The chapter moves chronologically, noting how what could constitute the groundbreaking “New Cuban Art” of the post-1959 period is not Volumen I, but the art of the Queloides collective. While their works were not the first to be concerned with issues of structural racism, they were an unprecedented endeavor that moved beyond previous reformist visions and instead aimed to dismantle the fundamental tenets of Cuban national narratives. The chapter concludes with the internationalization of Afro-Cuban art and how migration and diaspora shape the work of contemporary Afro-Cuban artists.

This chapter traces the rise of a market-critical vision of human rights in the solidarity movement with Central America. From 1977 onward, solidarity activists (including New Leftists, liberationist Christians, advocates connected to Social Democracy, and radical humanitarians) supported the revolutionary struggles in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Before 1979, solidarity activists and emissaries from the Sandinista guerrilla employed the politics of emergency to vilify the regimes of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and Carlos Humberto Romero in El Salvador. After their overthrow in 1979, solidarity activists traded the politics of emergency for a politics of revolution. Activists came to believe that building social justice in Central America necessitated revolutionary state building. Market-critical human rights served solidarity activists to defend the Salvadoran guerrilla and the Sandinistas, even as they were accused of violating the rights of ethnic and political minorities. Market-critical activists refused to see the politics of revolution as a choice between morality and social justice; rather, they saw revolutionary social justice as the precondition for a moral society.