Chapter 5 follows a small but diverse group of Cuban Spanish Civil War volunteers, paying particular attention to Rolando Masferrer and Eufemio Fernández. The post-Spain trajectories of these volunteers illustrate the volatile nature of politics in Cuba and the Circum-Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s, where coalitions were consistently made and unmade in transnational efforts to topple regional dictators. Later, several Spanish Civil War volunteers came to occupy influential roles as strategists and instructors within the military structures that the Castro regime developed to support revolutionary movements in the Americas after 1959. Thus, Cuban politics offered an unusually large and varied number of opportunities for Spanish Civil War veterans to remobilise after their service in Spain and to continue to engage with armed revolutionary projects of a transnational or internationalist nature.

Chapter 2 explores the impact of the global Cold War on decolonisation in these Caribbean territories. Three factors relating to the Cold War are explored: Americanisation in the Caribbean region; the significance of the Cuban Revolution; and anticolonial and Third World solidarity movements. As a newer colonial power in the Caribbean, the US played an important role as a cultural and ideological counterpoint to the metropolitan governments of Britain and France. The French State was greatly concerned about the popularity of the Communist Party in the French Antilles and took extensive measures to monitor and suppress members. The Cuban Revolution was a key moment for the region, inspiring activists across the Caribbean, including in the four territories in question. Fear of the spread of communism affected local politics and was used to discredit pro-autonomy politicians and activists. Chapter 2 argues that the Cold War in the Caribbean was, at times, a backdrop to political developments and, at other times, a crucial part of the political situation.

This chapter accounts for the twists and turns of Soviet–American and Sino-Soviet relations in 1960–61. Khrushchev's primary concern was resolving the Berlin issue, and he hoped that the new US president, John F. Kennedy, would be more amenable to finding a solution than Eisenhower had been. China continued to be a problem for Khrushchev. During the November 1960 Moscow conference of Communist parties, he faced Chinese resistance and criticism but ultimately prevailed in having the conference adopt a declaration that largely ignored Beijing's objections. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Soviet leader became increasingly concerned with the prospect of Cuba's survival. Berlin, Cuba, and other global issues were at the center of his discussions with Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961. The summit ended on a sour note, but despite Khrushchev's bluster and his optimistic evaluation that the chances of a war with the United States stood at merely 5 percent, he proved unwilling to push his luck over Berlin and ultimately authorized the building of the Berlin Wall to stem the flow of refugees and stabilize a highly volatile situation in East Germany.

This chapter addresses the limitations potentially placed on the success of revolutions by “human nature” - which in psychological terms are the hard-wired characteristics that limit change in behavior. It is argued that in the long term, even behaviors that we conceptualize as hardwired at present tend to change (particularly through changes in the environment). The avowed goals of the French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian revolutions are examined, and it is concluded that none of these revolutions achieved their goals. Despite failure, the regimes that survive in China, Cuba, and Iran continue to use the rhetoric of revolution. Four ways in which human nature seems to doom revolutions are considered: extremists come to power; an “ends justify the means” approach is adopted and corruption results; the style of leader–follower relations persist after revolutions, with the result that one dictatorship replaces another; and revolutionaries typically fail to set up the necessary conditions to achieve the behavioral changes necessary to reach their revolutionary goals (such as collectivization).

This chapter addresses the evolution of the crime fiction genre in Latin America by examining the relationship between three of the continent’s major cities and three historical moments. The following case studies chosen are: Buenos Aires in the stories of Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1942) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares; Havana in Armando Cristóbal Pérez’s novel La ronda de los rubies (The Ring of Rubies, 1973); and Mexico City in Días de combate (Days of Combat, 1976) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The chapter traces a textual trajectory from Borges and Bioy’s parodic games with the English models of mystery fiction to Taibo’s scathing national questioning of the Mexican neo-crime fiction, passing through Cristóbal’s politically committed and Cuban revolutionary crime fiction. That trajectory demonstrates the flexibility of the crime fiction genre, which has allowed it to branch out and adapt to the literary needs of different authors and contexts in the period between 1930 and 1980 in Latin American literature.

This chapter addresses the evolution of the crime fiction genre in Latin America by examining the relationship between three of the continent’s major cities and three historical moments. The following case studies chosen are: Buenos Aires in the stories of Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi (Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, 1942) by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares; Havana in Armando Cristóbal Pérez’s novel La ronda de los rubies (The Ring of Rubies, 1973); and Mexico City in Días de combate (Days of Combat, 1976) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The chapter traces a textual trajectory from Borges and Bioy’s parodic games with the English models of mystery fiction to Taibo’s scathing national questioning of the Mexican neo-crime fiction, passing through Cristóbal’s politically committed and Cuban revolutionary crime fiction. That trajectory demonstrates the flexibility of the crime fiction genre, which has allowed it to branch out and adapt to the literary needs of different authors and contexts in the period between 1930 and 1980 in Latin American literature.

Following the Cuban Revolution, the Cold War heated up in Latin America. To some, the Revolution was a sign of the spread of Soviet-directed Communist movements and the pressing need to stop this by any means possible. To others, Castro’s success was a symbol of hope: the United States was not all-powerful, and so radical reform was within the realm of possibility. The United States sought to undermine the Cuban Revolution and to prevent similar developments from happening elsewhere. It supported a number of initiatives to prevent the spread of Communism in the hemisphere, including the Alliance for Progress, strengthening ties with the region’s militaries, and overt and covert programs to support “friendly” governments and destabilize “unfriendly” ones. The resulting clashes led to one of the darkest periods of U.S.–Latin American relations.

Writers in Latin America’s Black press frequently publicized and denounced particularly egregious examples of discrimination or racism, including many that involved painful accusations having to do with pernicious stereotypes about Black sexuality. In so doing, they responded to claims by Latin American politicians and intellectuals that racism was mild or non-existent in their countries, and that to speak about racism was itself racist, and would have the effect of dividing the national community. The rhetorical strategies writers in the Black press adopted included barely contained expressions of outrage, skillful deployment of irony, careful efforts at debunking, and, quite frequently, with expressions of agreement with the premise that racism was inconsistent with the local political culture.Authors who wrote about racism consistently presented the United States as a yardstick against which the existence or severity of racism could be measured, or as a source for the importation and imposition of racism that was at odds with local values and tradition.Finally, writers discussed and debated the mechanisms that should be employed to combat racism.

Caribbean literature from the mid twentieth century is often centrally concerned with nationalism and independence. But literature from this period, both within the anglophone Caribbean and across the pan-Caribbean region, also responded to a series of other – sometimes complementary, sometimes competing – political projects. This chapter looks at how literature represented and addressed institutional changes such as the rise of trade unions, the development of political parties and constitutional changes in the anglophone Caribbean; the advent of DOM status in the French Caribbean; Puerto Rico’s anomalous status as an Associated Free State of the USA; Cuba’s annexation into the US economy; and the Cuban Revolution. Writers sought to document these changes, to mobilize social movements, and to imagine new political possibilities. In the process, they negotiated the push and pull between literary commitment and artistic freedom. For a variety of reasons, anglophone literary figures were often drawn to West Indian federation. Even after federation failed, writers still frequently couched their nationalism in regional terms and looked to various pan-Caribbean inspirations for a larger vision of citizenship and community. This chapter will examine how writers from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s sought to support, critique, and navigate the political transformations of the era.

During the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Anglo-Caribbean workers migrated to Spanish-speaking countries, but intellectual exchanges between the region’s anglophone and hispanophone writers remained few and far between. This situation changed above all as a result of the Cuban Revolution, which captured the imagination of a generation of writers and catalysed new networks through institutions like Casa de las Américas. These exchanges would be dominated by concerns with race and sovereignty, while sidestepping questions about Cuban communism and literary censorship. When Andrew Salkey attended the 1968 Cultural Congress in Havana with C. L. R. James and John La Rose, he portrayed Cuba as a symbol of regional anti-imperialism and interrogated the condition of Afro-Cubans, overlooking contemporary censorship scandals. The cross-Caribbean itineraries of Nicolás Guillén and Edward Kamau Brathwaite in the 1970s are emblematic of the cultural diplomacy of the time period. While Guillén’s reception foregrounded his writing on people of African descent and downplayed his commitment to communism, Brathwaite’s poetry was celebrated in Cuba but also subject to suspicion for its black radical content.

Instead of seeing Boom authors as the beneficiaries of international economic developments and marketing campaigns or as passive victims of US political propaganda during the Cold War, it would be wiser to acknowledge their ideological and literary agency. Magical realism, as well as other Boom aesthetic choices, including modernist experimentalism, responded to two separate developments. First, independently from a potential influence of CIA-backed political propaganda in Latin America, they were an inevitable outcome of the direct literary influence of US and European masters. Second, magical realism and other modernist formal experimentation used by the Boom authors, rather than being a nod to anti-communist US propaganda during the Cold War era, were a direct and personal reaction precisely against the strict internationalist political dictums coming first from the Soviet Union and then from Cuba. They responded to a self-affirmation of the authors' autonomy and individual/national approach against Soviet and Cuban revolutionary impositions.

Borges declared that a writer’s political views were circumstantial and should not interfere with his or her literary creation and reputation. However, the cases of Argentina and Cuba from the mid-1940s on illustrate the influence of context on the reception of his work. The chapter focuses on three periods: the mid-1940s, the mid-1950s, and the first decade of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. In Argentina, the failure of the jury to award Borges the National Literary Award in 1942 was politically motivated. In Cuba, the first critical text on Borges appeared in 1944 and was influenced by the attitude to culture of the Origenes group, led by J Lezama Lima. In the following decade, and after the overthrowing of Perón, Borges’s work was criticized for being out of touch with Argentine realities, whereas in Cuba, a new literary magazine, Ciclón, expressed support for his work. After the Cuban Revolution, Borges’s name continued to be mentioned; however, after 1968, he would be censored in the island for two decades. The chapter concludes that writers and c ritics tend to read other writers in relation with their own cultural credos or projects.