Cuba in Arabic and the Limits of Third World Solidarity

This article examines the reasons for the lag in the formation of cultural networks between Cuba and the Arab world in spite of strong political and economic ties in the mid-twentieth century by outlining their practices of solidarity and analyzing various literary and artistic representations of Cuba in Arabic. The article briefly surveys three representative bilateral relationships in the long 1960s—Cuba and Algeria, Cuba and the Palestinians, and Cuba and Egypt—to show how the need to maintain political sovereignty and bridge the economic gap with the North in the new post-1945 world order, along with the linguistic barriers and top-down centralized control of cultural exchanges, made it very difficult, if not impossible, for any lateral grass-roots interactions to take place. The article also analyzes a number of Arab literary and artistic representations of Cuba and its political icons, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. My analysis shows that even though such representations of the island-nation were inspired by Third World solidarity, their Arabic “afterlives” expose the mediated nature of such icons and lay bare a process of assimilation into the Arab canon that emptied them of their Cuban specificity. The Cuba that appeared in Arabic was a vaguely defined and symbolic space for Third World political and economic struggle. Examining the limitations of cultural solidarity in the age of National Liberation can help scholars of the Third World and post-colonial studies re-evaluate mid-twentieth century international solidarity and network building strategies which continue to be either romanticized or overlooked.