ABSTRACT
From January 4–11, 1968, nearly 500 delegates from 70 countries congregated at the Hotel Habana Libre for the unprecedented Cultural Congress of Havana (CCH). Advertised as a “meeting of intellectuals from all the world to discuss problems of Asia, Africa, and Latin America,” the congress drew broad participation from the arts and included presentations by literary giants like Mario Benedetti, Mario de Andrade, René Depestre, C.L.R. James, and Alex La Guma, among many others. This essay considers the 1968 CCH as a key site of Global South cold war cultural exchange. Although understudied, the impacts of the CCH were many. In Cuba, for example, the conference’s interrogation of intellectuals’ participation in revolutionary politics undergirded some of the island’s most important artistic works, such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias de subdesarrollo (1968), released a few months after the conference. The ideas expressed at the congress also played a significant role in the Cuban government’s subsequent crackdown on cultural and artistic freedoms during its quinquenio gris (five gray years, 1971–1976). Furthermore, the CCH was the site of controversy among prominent Black Cuban writers after state officials prevented these writers from speaking at the congress about ongoing racial inequalities on the island. This essay examines such tensions within the context of the CCH through an analysis of Havana Journal (1971), the memoir by Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey about his participation. Havana Journal sheds significant light on how the CCH revealed as many fissures as solidarities, and in this sense, it provides a window onto a more nuanced understanding of global solidarity movements within the cultural cold war.
