Revisiting key arguments of the individual chapters, the afterward identifies lingering questions and possible agendas for future research.

The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China saw decolonization as a long-awaited opportunity to overturn the imperialist-dominated world order. Both countries saw themselves as bearing no guilt for the crimes of imperialism and the underdeveloped state of newly independent countries. Rather, they saw themselves to varying degrees as victims of imperialism and natural allies for Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, the advent of attempts to give political structure to the developing world raised the specter of a “Third World” not necessarily aligned with Moscow or Beijing. For the Soviets, the very notion of a “Third World” was a non-starter, a political and ideological dead-end that would deflect the revolutionary energies of the people. For the Chinese, the unwillingness of many in the developing countries to accept Chinese leadership kept this constituency beyond China’s reach. Consequently, the rhetoric of support for anti-imperialism and alliance between the “international communist movement” and the “national liberation movement” masked a much more complex, manipulative, and often antagonistic relationship between the “Second World” and the “Third.”

The 1960s and 1970s are often remembered as the age of the Third World guerrilla. But by the mid-1970s, the seemingly unstoppable force of secular Third World liberation, embodied by the Tricontinental Conference, had lost momentum. A new generation of liberation fighters mobilizing sectarian and ethnic identities in local struggles gradually overtook secular left-wing revolutionaries.

Nowhere were these changes more pronounced than the Middle East. During the heyday of the Third World guerrilla, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) captured attention by casting itself as an Arab Viet Cong. Despite spectacular operations against Israel and its Western supporters, the PLO could not achieve lasting gains. By the mid-1970s, Palestinian fighters were pulled into the bloody Lebanese Civil War, which devolved into a conflict between rival sectarian groups. Soon after, the 1979 Revolution in Iran demonstrated that theocratic radicalism had become a significant player on the world stage. By the late 1980s, secular liberation fighters such as the PLO were replaced by the likes of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Mujahideen as the vanguard of revolutionary forces in the Middle East.

In the 1960s, Algeria and Cuba became global archetypes of revolution. Opposed to the international system, militant, and loosely allied with the Soviet Union, the two countries challenged Western security in both the Caribbean and North Africa. This similarity created an important if superficial solidarity that emphasized regional support for armed revolutionary movements as a way of safeguarding their states from US intervention. Nevertheless, the Cuban and Algerian positions in Third World affairs started to diverge in the late-1960s as the two countries politico-economic positions changed and they adopted distinct strategies for advancing a radical Third World agenda. Algeria became increasingly invested in using established structures and norms to adjust the international order. In contrast, Cuba championed a global armed militancy, sometimes targeting Third World governments associated with such groups as the G-77 but viewed as insufficiently dedicated to Tricontinental goals. This divergence in international perspectives and tactics reveals the complexity of the Tricontinental ideology, as well as the evolution of radical diplomacy as revolutionary states matured.

Cuba is well-known for its mix of radical positions and skills at brokering agreements. Cuban internationalism began as a way to build alliances to counterbalance its geopolitical asymmetry with the United States and gain allies to ensure its survival. These skills are exemplified in the Tricontinental Conference. This investigation sketches the central role that Havana played in the development and hosting of the conference, then focuses on the negotiations undertaken by Cubans to keep the talks going in a thorny political climate in which many political positions were represented. More specifically, we focus on the role of Cuba before and after the Tricontinental in negotiating the tensions and infighting between stakeholders from anti-colonial and socialist liberation movements and parties in the Third World, as well as the emerging rift between the Soviets and Chinese. Finally, honing in on the example of West Germany, we consider how Western leftist participants at the conference saw Cuba’s role in this multidimensional, avant-garde camp that included not only guerrilla movements, communist parties, and other radical organizations, but social democrats as well.

The chapter positions the revolutionary African theorist Amílcar Cabral as part of a Tricontinental generation that believed coordinated, parallel liberation struggles would erase inequalities between Global North and South. A dedicated nationalist, he viewed socialism as a toolkit for evaluating and challenging the international system. His party, the African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), combined armed revolt and social reconstruction in an attempt to erase the economic inequalities and racism central to Euro-American imperialism. As the PAIGC became enmeshed in diverse solidarity networks that sustained its war, Cabral refined his ideology to better explain his party’s position at the intersection of Third World anti-imperial traditions, international socialism, and Pan-Africanism. Identarian and ideological frictions hampered the movement, but PAIGC philosophy legitimized the creation of an inclusive revolutionary coalition and proved effective at building solidarity in North and South. As a result, Cabral became a leading political theorist of revolution and anti-imperialism, placing him in the foundational canon of the Tricontinental movement.

The Cold War and process of decolonization divided the world, with Vietnam emerging after 1954 as a center of global competition. Leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi believed that success in their revolution could tip the worldwide balance of power in favor of the socialist bloc and national liberation movements. This conviction, combined with the need to conduct diplomacy from a position of military weakness, made those leaders accomplished practitioners of international politics as they balanced commitments to Marxism-Leninism, anti-imperialism, and anti-Americanism.

This chapter addresses how Hanoi navigated its membership and commitment to overlapping international movements at the height of the Cold War. It demonstrates that despite confronting the United States in Indochina, DRV leaders never thought strictly in terms of their own interests. Over the years they iterated and acted upon commitments to socialist internationalism, “world revolution,” and “Third Worldism” (tiermondisme). The Cold War and Sino-Soviet dispute created challenges for Hanoi, but the contemporaneous process of decolonization in the Third World also created opportunities.

The chapter traces the development of Guevara’s revolutionary consciousness and the concurrent creation of a militant program of armed struggle on three continents (Asia, Africa, and Latin America). It places Guevara’s intellectual and revolutionary project in the context of the emerging and evolving alliance between the Cuban revolution and the Soviet Union, the simultaneous confrontation with the realities and legacies of US imperialism, and the quixotic quest for Third World solidarity. An exploration of Che’s beliefs, ideas, and actions relating to revolutionary warfare reveals a man ahead of his time. Guevara synthesized and built upon the foundation of guerrilla strategies and tactics promulgated most famously by Mao Zedong but also exhibited by Augusto Sandino, hero of the struggle to liberate Nicaragua from the US occupation. In doing so, he championed an agenda of political and militant solidarity that would continue to attract adherents long after his death at the hands of Bolivian security forces in 1967.

The chapter examines US officials’ views of and responses to the Tricontinental Conference and the OSPAAAL organization from 1965 through 1968. Using declassified US government archival documents, it argues that the US government saw the Tricontinental as both a revolutionary threat and a counterrevolutionary opportunity. The Johnson administration and the State Department responded to the conference and the OSPAAAL organization through a vigorous but largely behind-the-scenes diplomatic effort to meet the challenge and exploit the opportunities it presented. The core of this strategy was to exacerbate and exploit, largely indirectly and by proxy, the political and ideological divisions among the organizations represented at Havana, in order to undermine the tricontinental solidarity project and divide, isolate, and harass Washington’s enemies, especially the Cuban government. Through its diplomatic, economic, and intelligence and security counteroffensive, the US government largely validated the Tricontinental critique of the US role in the Third World.