The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family, Michelle Chase and Isabella Cosse (eds), 2026, University of Florida Press
The most celebrated weapon in Latin American revolutionary history was probably the AK-47 that Fidel Castro handed over to Salvador Allende in 1971.
The rifle was a personal gift from the Cuban leader to his Chilean counterpart during a high-profile state visit and was said to have borne a golden plate engraved “To my friend and comrade-in-arms”.
Legnd has it that Allende used this firearm to take his own life on 11 September 1973 just before the capture of La Moneda palace by soldiers loyal to General Augusto Pinochet, although it has never been recovered.
Nonetheless, it is the story that matters, suffused as it is with mythological power that paints a steely image of revolutionary solidarity, courageous self-sacrifice, and socialist defiance on the barricades—in classic, male terms.
It is rarely remembered, however, that in 1966 Vilma Espín, president of the Federation of Cuban Women, made a personal gift of the pistol she had used in the Sierra Maestra to Nguyen Thi Dinh, vice commander of the armed forces of South Vietnam’s National Liberation Front and president of the Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam.
Espín had been so impressed by the Vietnamese women delegates she had met during the Tricontinental Conference held in Havana, that a few years later she would lead a Cuban delegation to a country violated in every sense by US imperialism.
Espín was important for her fulsome praise of Vietnamese women as a model “not just for us but for all peoples” and promised that Cuban women would follow their heroic example.
As Michelle Chase points out in The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family, this praise came at the apex of Cuban expressions of solidarity for Vietnam in the wake of the Tricontinental.
Espín’s was one of many references to the “heroic Vietnamese woman” in Cuba in this period, but also across the world, and Chase examines the way this figure was held up as a model for Cuba’s own “New Woman” and in some ways even for its “New Man”.
This example and other chapters in this collection edited by Chase and Isabella Cosseseek to explore Cuba’s global impact on leftwing movements, progressivism and revolutionary groups, but also the impact of the latter on Cuba.
More importantly, they seek to do so by studying the period from the Revolution in 1959 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s—during which Cuba exerted an unrivalled, magnetic attraction on the left everywhere, especially in the Global South—through actors hitherto not recognised as key players: women, rank-and-file militants, youths and children.
Of course, attention to Cuba’s transnational influences and alliances is not new and also underpins the contemporary acts of solidarity that we are now witnessing as the island, once again, is forced to confront US aggression.
Scholarship of the revolution’s transnational relationships has traditionally examined this in heavier terms of Cuba’s relations with the US and the USSR, and in recent years with the Global South, within broad historical frameworks of geopolitics and diplomacy.
Cuban internationalism has been studied primarily through its political impact on the New Left and support for guerrilla movements that placed Havana at the heart of the Tricontinental resistance to imperialism.
However, there has been far less attention to the sociocultural dimensions of solidarity based on gender, sexuality, family and daily life—which, while often being downplayed as categories for political strategy and praxis, can nevertheless be decisive.
More recent studies of revolutionary Cuba have picked up on this, such as those by Anita Casavantes Bradford and Rachel Hynson that point to the political importance to the revolution of themes such as gender, childhood and family, and how more ethereal qualities such as emotion and affection are valid themes of scholarship.
It was Che Guevara, remember, who once alluded to this, saying, “The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”
These are important subjects because not only are they fundamental to the human condition but also, as with all social relations, they are constantly reconstructed in accordance with class dynamics.
As the editors of this collection note, Cuba’s impact was never limited solely to questions of strategy or models of socialism, and the utopia it offered the left resided also in progressive ways of approaching gender, sexuality and love, all of which found their reflections in the activities of global solidarity movements.
Alongside Chase’s contribution, for example, Sarah Seidman and Siwei Wang explore the way transnational solidarity campaigns were shaped by ideas of gender and, conversely, how ideas about women’s liberation and the gendered character of revolution were developed in a transnational exchange of ideas across the Global South.
The transnational sociocultural historical approach sketched out in this book also provides insights into one of the most important ideological developments to come out the Revolution, the notion of Cuba’s “New Man”.
Essays by Felipe Caro Romero and Robert Franco, for example, uncover how this and other notions were debated—and indeed contested—in Latin America.
Several chapters offer insights into how revolutionary politics shaped familiy intimacy, drawing attention to the connections between emotions and ideology and politics.
Alexis Baldacci, for example, explores how Cuban youths and the state negotiated questions of fashion and consumption amid competing models in the Socialist Bloc and US, which, far from being an inconsequential topic, became central to definitions of revolutionary values.
Emily Snyder’s essay on the gendered dimensions of Cuban internationalism in revolutionary Nicaragua tackles the theme of love directly.
She argues that by the late 1970s, revolutionary ideals dictated that the “New Family” would labour to construct an international “revolutionary family” by privileging revolutionary love over romantic, individual love.
Gender, suggests Ailynn Torres Santana in her Afterword, is not a form of identity politics that can simply be sidelined while historians get to grips with more momentous political projects and strategies of power—it is an arena of power in itself that straddles the realms of the political and the revolutionary.
She notes: “Feminist historiography has shown the weight of political power in the construction of genders and sexualities that inhabit the national imagined community. In this way, political power has intervened directly in women’s bodies and has constructed regimes of representation in which they fit.”
She argues, therefore, that uncovering imaginaries of gender and sexuality—as represented, narrated and practised—is fundamental to understanding post-1959 Cuba.
“… the Cuban Revolution built, from very early on, a political programme toward gender relations and sexuality. This programme was central to the deployment of the revolution inwardly and to its representation outwardly. It was also the framework through which different international links were established and through which conflicts were dealt with domestically.”
That is not to say there were not contradictions and tensions—the Cuban revolutionary state’s attitudes towards homosexuality were a clear arena of both discord and repression, and there is much evidence of “confused realities”.
But that is above all a reflection of the differing expectations generated by a utopian project, the Cold War cage in which Cuba became imprisoned, and the erosion of the original dreams as a result of a sixty-year embargo. It is not an indictment of revolution itself.
Indeed, such contradictions and tensions confirm the vitality of such debates today, especially those that are being revived outside Cuba about the fate of its experiment with socialism under a renewed US assault.
They force the Left everywhere to ask, once again, pressing questions about socialism itself, in which Cuba represents promise and potential, and their renewed solidarity with it.
As Torres writes: “Does what happens now in Cuba matter at all to the Lefts in Latin America, the Global South, and elsewhere? Is the Cuban Revolution the past? Is Cuba still a utopia?”
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