"Hands Off Korea!": Women's Internationalist Solidarity and Peace Activism in Early Cold War Cuba

Recent scholarship on transnational left-feminist activism during the Cold War often focuses on north-south or east-west connections, more rarely exploring transpacific, south-south forms of engagement. This article unearths a revealing episode in internationalism and south-south solidarity by studying the Cuban left's Hands Off Korea campaign (1950–1951), a protest movement against the Korean War in which women played crucial roles as both intellectual authors and foot soldiers. In particular, the article explores the important role played by two members of the Cuban affiliate of the pro-Soviet Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), Edith García Buchaca and Candelaria Rodríguez. Their experiences traveling to China and North Korea (respectively) and their insertion into global left-feminist networks, facilitated by the WIDF, helped them cast war, revolution, and decolonization as "women's issues." These conceptual links inspired the Hands Off Korea campaign and help to explain its surprising success.