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The Venceremos Brigade: North Americans in Cuba Since 1969
Abstract
The Venceremos Brigade is an ‘anti-imperialist Education Project’ that began its travel to Cuba in 1969 to support and learn about the Cuban Revolution. On Venceremos trips, North American volunteers offer aid to Cuban government projects while touring the island nation and learning about both Cuba and revolutionary ideals. Participants in the projects are involved for both personal and political reasons, offering a model for productive political relations born of hostilities. Although its story remains undocumented within histories of both the US Left and US-Cuban relations, by 2015, the group had sent more than 9,000 North American activists to the island. Through reading newspapers from Cuba, Venceremos Press Publications in the US, and by listening to personal narratives, this article documents this important political education project that continues to model productive relations today.
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Notes
This language of the ‘Third World’ is dated given our modern rhetoric of developing/developed countries. I use ‘Third World’ here and elsewhere, conscious of the Cold-War implications, because the Venceremos Brigade must be contextualised within the Cold-War world.
The New Left is a term employed by some scholars after the decades examined to describe a variety of social movements that dealt with identity, anti-imperialism and various other political issues of the 1960s and 1970s that included educators, agitators and others seeking reforms in gay rights, abortion, gender roles, drugs, race and other US social ills.
Some of the committee's notable founders include Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Satre, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsburg and Carleton Beals.
This Fair Play pamphlet and those that follow are preserved in the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan.
I collected these Cuban Press publications from January to May 2014 at La Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba de José Martí in Havana, Cuba. These publications represent a certain national consensus.
These Venceremos Press sources come from the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library in Ann Arbor, MI.
Interestingly, the newspapers in the José Martí Library's collection included only those eleven Brigades. The rest were either (a) excluded from the library's archives, (b) the articles were literally cut out from the archived paper or (c) the articles were never written. On a logistical level, writing the story of the Venceremos Brigade could have been challenging with distant locations of work camps compromising Granma‘s reporting capabilities. A nation facing international isolation and economic sanctions may have lacked the number of disposable individuals required to document the story of the Venceremos Brigade.
The omission of the Venceremos Brigade from Granma and Bohemia from 1973 to 1981 is difficult to understand without more information. The Venceremos Press's pamphlets, which I explore below, also document these years that the Cuban press omits, with pieces published in both 1974 and 1976.
Karlson was a participant on the third Venceremos Brigade and the 30th–42nd Brigades, which she shared with a conversation by phone on 21 February 2015.
I credit this terminology to Bob Guild, National Education Director of the Venceremos Brigade in the 1980s, from an interview on 12 February 2015.
The Venceremos Brigade Press's documents that I refer to are pamphlets that the Venceremos Brigade published in the 1970s.
I often link Granma and Bohemia for their similar intention, styles and content.
‘La Mas Importante Enseñanza de la Revolución Cubana es que nos Demuestra y nos Refuerza la idea de la Posibilidad del Cambio, de la Posibilidad de la Revolución.’ Granma . 10 December 1969. Print.
One of the aims of the Venceremos Brigade was to liberate and elevate humanity to Che's ‘Hombre Nuevo’. Upon returning from one of the early Brigade trips, the Venceremos Press published a pamphlet teaching about Che and his philosophy on the new socialist man. Americans claimed that they would go back and teach fellow Americans about the real Cuban Revolution, and we see that with a Brigade pamphlet about the new socialist man and the new form of humanity that Cuba and the Revolution is purporting to develop.
We read a different story in 1985 as well. Whereas in 1983 we were still offered broad trip details, in 1985 we only read of the construction of a historic site. Reporting on the 14th Brigade, in honour of Sandy Pollack, we learn of a trip that is constructing a patrimony, and little else. This helps us see how the story of the Brigade is changing for Cubans at the least.
We read a very similar article on 26 April 1988 when the 19th Brigade is reported with unemotional details. It still seems to be a solidarity narrative, but one filled with facts rather than argumentation and politics.
Sloman (2000).
This content comes from an unpublished oral history/interview with Kathe Karlson that I conducted on 12 March 2015 via Skype.
#BlackLivesMatter is an activist movement that was created in 2012 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, accused of killing a young black man, Trayvon Martin. Martin's death sparked national outrage as many in the African American community claimed that Zimmerman was a murderer who was acquitted because of the colour of his skin and the colour of his victim's skin. The movement is a call to action in response to anti-black racism in the US that seeks to broaden the conversation around state violence enacted on black bodies in the US.