Introduction
In Santiago de Chile, in October 1961, a packed soccer match in the National Stadium was disrupted when a group of young protesters suddenly ran out onto the pitch. Onlookers might have been surprised to learn that these protesters were not Chileans; they were Cuban exiles. The youths unfurled a banner that read ‘Chilean: No more executions in Cuba. Let us defend liberty’, while other exiles in the stands tossed out pamphlets that warned, ‘Today it's Cuba, tomorrow it might be Chile.’Footnote 1 The episode encapsulates the public passions Cuba raised in the early 1960s, the way Cuba was read as a harbinger of the future of Latin America, and the way some Cuban exiles centred state violence in their attempts to influence regional public opinion. It also reminds us that not only pro-revolutionary, leftist youth mobilised and protested in this period. Anti-communist youth also took to the streets.
This article engages these themes – global youth politics, anti-communism and the transnational impact of the Cuban Revolution – by providing the first in-depth study of one of the most influential anti-Castro groups of the early 1960s, the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Revolutionary Student Directorate, DRE). Headquartered in Miami, and supported but never fully controlled by the CIA, the DRE established chapters throughout Latin America in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Over the next few years, as student bodies across Latin America split into ‘fidelista’ and ‘anti-fidelista’ camps, these DRE delegations went on a transnational offensive to influence the opinion of students in Latin America and beyond about the Cuban Revolution. Through an avalanche of publications, public events and protests, the DRE presented a counter-narrative of the Cuban Revolution that stressed the betrayal of the Revolution's early promises of social justice and its violation of human rights.
The DRE's activism coincided with sweeping global changes that challenged the bipolar logic of the post-war world. Decolonisation in Asia and Africa led to new visions of ‘Third World’ solidarity, first made tangible in the 1955 Bandung conference, which brought together Asian and African heads of state and contributed to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement. The emerging Sino-Soviet split challenged the Soviet emphasis on peaceful coexistence and stressed the urgency of national liberation. In Latin America, Cuba's alliance with the Soviet Union showed that US hegemony in the hemisphere was not inevitable. These momentous geopolitical changes were reflected in student politics. The 1955 Bandung conference was followed just one year later by the ‘Little Bandung’ student congress, at which thousands of African and Asian students denounced racism and imperialism.Footnote 2 Across Latin America, universities became key staging grounds for the rise of the New Left, characterised by its criticism of the rigidity and hierarchy of the ‘old’ Left and inspired by the Cuban example.
These global developments shaped the DRE's activism, pushing the group to articulate a denunciation of the Cuban Revolution that also acknowledged the aspirations and concerns of youth across the global South. Through its delegations in Latin America, and during the group's short but consequential trip to Africa in 1962, the DRE engaged with and partially endorsed central New Left demands, such as the quests for sovereignty, national liberation and social justice. As DRE secretary for international relations Eduardo Muñiz himself recognised, ‘These were ideas that for a young person had deep importance, deep appeal.’Footnote 3 Accordingly, rather than challenge the legitimacy of such aspirations, the DRE publicly questioned whether Cuba had in fact attained these goals, and at what cost. Its attempt to present criticisms of Cuba that would resonate widely is also reflected in its use of human rights discourse. The DRE decried state repression and bodily harm a decade before the strong human rights movements that would emerge in the Southern Cone. The history of the DRE thus reminds us of anti-communism's wide and varied character, including its more progressive or youth-oriented expressions and its alternative interpretations of New Left ideals.
Methodologically, this article moves beyond common approaches to anti-Castro activism that focus on exile relations with US foreign policy actors.Footnote 4 Instead, I draw on new sources such as internal correspondence to illuminate the DRE's internationalist vision and how this manifested in its transnational campaign to influence global youth. As such, this article broadens the historiography on students in Latin America, which often focuses on leftist politics or the rise of counterculture.Footnote 5 This article builds on recent scholarship that sees the 1960s as a period of anti-communist, as well as leftist, youth ascendancy.Footnote 6 It challenges the prevalent idea that Latin American youths uniformly supported the Cuban Revolution, stressing instead that student organisations and youth culture were key sites of plurality and debate during the Cold War.Footnote 7 In addition, the history of the DRE reminds us that Cuba's pre-1959 revolutionary movement and its post-1959 ripple effects were often rooted in students and youths. This was widely recognised by contemporaries, who often saw ‘youth’ as the privileged protagonists of the ‘youngest revolution’, as one journalist dubbed the Cuban Revolution.Footnote 8 But the important role of youths as actors was often lost in the attention paid subsequently to the Cuban Rebel Army led by Fidel Castro.
This article also builds on recent scholarship that has emphasised the transnational nature of anti-communist symbols and networks in the Latin American Cold War,Footnote 9 while acknowledging that anti-communist imaginaries were not dictated by the US government nor necessarily framed within the great power contest between the United States and the Soviets.Footnote 10 While scholarship on transnational anti-communism often focuses on the productive encounter of likeminded far-right groups, the DRE presents a perhaps unusual example of an anti-communist group that sought allies or at least audiences across the political spectrum, attending events that ranged from the commemorative ceremonies of Mexico's far-right Catholic nationalists to the Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students.Footnote 11 The DRE's self-conscious attempts to present its own politics as reformist rather than right-wing expands our understanding of anti-communism by illuminating its internal tensions. As the DRE would learn, passionately embracing anti-communism without fuelling the rise of the Right at the height of the Cold War would prove to be a delicate balancing act.
Finally, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on the global reverberations of the Cuban Revolution. Recent studies of the Cuban Revolution's outward impact have argued that 1959 inaugurated a broader hemispheric conflict, expressed most clearly in the Left's embrace of the armed path to revolution and the Right's pre-emptive strikes in a surge of military dictatorships.Footnote 12 Moving beyond Latin America, a growing historiography examines how Cuban revolutionary leaders sought influence in the global South by providing military support to allies in Africa and by constructing a ‘third worldist’ or ‘Tricontinentalist’ political imaginary.Footnote 13 Paying closer attention to the actions and ideas of anti-communist Cuban exiles adds to this literature by showing that an internationalist agenda was never exclusive to Cuba's revolutionary Left. Anti-communist exiles too helped make Cuba's cause a continental, even global, one.
Social Catholicism, Revolution and the Origins of the DRE
The founding members of the DRE were deeply influenced by the Social Catholic doctrines that were prevalent in post-war Cuba. Although the formal practice of Catholicism had historically been relatively weak in Cuba, by the 1940s a vibrant lay Catholic movement helped revitalise Catholicism among Cuba's urban middle and upper classes.Footnote 14 The formation of lay groups such as Agrupación Católica Universitaria (Catholic University Group, ACU) and various youth branches of Acción Católica (Catholic Action) inspired many young Cubans with Catholic ideas of social justice and the duty to ‘see, judge and act’.Footnote 15 Their social thinking was shaped by the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931), which criticised free-market capitalism's exploitation as well as communism's atheism and materialism. The island's church hierarchy and large Spanish immigrant community (many of whom had come to Spain in the early twentieth century seeking economic opportunities) could be conservative, influenced by the falangista thinking of Franco's Spain, which was reinterpreted and popularised locally by the Spanish-trained Cuban Jesuit Manuel Foyaca. But the island's Catholic laity leaned towards the more progressive thinking of Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher who criticised the growing authoritarianism of interwar Europe, defended social justice, political pluralism and religious freedom, and helped break down the pre-war Catholic suspicion of mass politics.Footnote 16 By the 1940s many Cuban Catholics had embraced the need for structural solutions, rather than charity, to address chronic poverty and inequality. Lay activists mounted initiatives to establish education and health programmes in poor neighbourhoods. They published journals, and hosted radio and television programmes, that debated Christian solutions to contemporary problems. (DRE founder Juan Manuel Salvat, for example, recalled that as a teenager he had participated in a radio programme in Sagua la Grande called ‘Justicia Social’.)Footnote 17 Catholics also became increasingly active in politics, a process curtailed by Fulgencio Batista's 1952 coup, after which political organising was restricted.Footnote 18
The anti-Batista struggle that unfolded throughout the rest of the decade eventually drew many lay Catholics and even some members of the clergy into opposition, including armed opposition.Footnote 19 Many youths from lay Catholic groups such as JOC and Juventud Universitaria Católica (Catholic University Youth, JUC) joined Fidel Castro's Movimiento 26 de Julio (26 July Movement), which had not yet openly embraced socialism.Footnote 20 Indeed, as John Kirk notes, ‘one can claim with some certainty that more Catholics participated in the struggle against the Batista dictatorship than did militants of the communist party’.Footnote 21 Although the future DRE leaders were only tangentially involved in the insurrection, they, like most other Social Catholic activists, welcomed Cuba's 1959 Revolution as an opportunity for national sacrifice and redemption and supported the first wave of revolutionary reforms.Footnote 22
Throughout 1959 and 1960, some urban middle-class Catholic Cubans were becoming disaffected by the Revolution's rapid radicalisation, exemplified by the growing influence of the Communist Party within key state institutions such as the military and the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Agrarian Reform Institute), and the corresponding loss of influence of Social Democratic figures in the new administration.Footnote 23 Perceptions of growing Soviet influence within Cuba were also a source of tension. Soviet diplomat Anastas Mikoyan's February 1960 visit to Havana was a turning point. Ostensibly in Cuba to open the Soviet exhibition that was then touring several countries, Mikoyan enjoyed a lavish reception. His high-profile visit touched off the first public anti-communist protests in post-1959 Cuba.Footnote 24 The DRE's founding nucleus took a leading role in these protests. It blamed Mikoyan for the violent repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising and viewed him as the embodiment of the most repressive aspects of Soviet communism. Yet ‘at that point we still believed in the Revolution as the path to liberty and justice’, Salvat recounted, recalling that protesters bore signs that read ‘Long live the revolution, down with communism.’Footnote 25
For the DRE's founding members, turbulence within the University of Havana would prove to be the final straw. Although the university community almost universally supported the Revolution in 1959, conflict between students grew in 1959 and 1960 over a series of issues including university autonomy and alignment with the Soviet Union.Footnote 26 The 1959 elections of the student federation were a first stumbling block, as Fidel and Raúl Castro intervened to favour their preferred candidate.Footnote 27 Political conflicts on campus soon escalated. The newly formed Brigadas Universitarias (University Brigades) physically confronted students deemed insufficiently loyal to the Revolution, including the future DRE founders, and in spring of 1960 demanded their expulsion.Footnote 28 Barred from the university and fearful of imprisonment, Juan Manuel Salvat, Alberto Muller Quintana, Miguel García Armengol and Ernesto Fernández Travieso sought refuge underground and in exile. They announced the formation of the DRE in the autumn of 1960.Footnote 29
By that time, a number of militant anti-Castro groups had begun to emerge. On the virulently anti-communist far Right, the La Rosa Blanca organisation drew on former members of Batista's military, and the Legión Anticomunista del Caribe (Caribbean Anti-Communist Legion), supported by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, combined exiled Cubans with anti-communist soldiers of fortune from eastern Europe and elsewhere.Footnote 30 On the other side of the political spectrum were groups representing organised labour and the non-communist Left, such as the Movimiento 30 de Noviembre (30 November Movement) led by labour leader David Salvador and the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (People's Revolutionary Movement) founded by former 26 de Julio leader Manuel Ray. In between were groups that offered a variety of visions we might define as nationalist or reformist, including the Liberal-Democratic umbrella group Frente Democrático Revolucionario (Democratic Revolutionary Front), the Catholic nationalist group Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Recuperation Movement) and the DRE.Footnote 31
The DRE, like many other anti-Castro groups at that time, sought to defend or reclaim the Revolution's pre-1959 nationalist, democratic or ‘humanist’ character against the Cuban Revolution's increasing radicalisation.Footnote 32 In a way, DRE members combined reformist policies with a revolutionary sensibility. Like the revolutionaries who had overthrown Batista, the DRE embraced an ethos of direct action and personal sacrifice, a transcendent sense of political calling and a belief in the vanguard role of youth. Its use of the term ‘directorio’ symbolically linked the DRE to the anti-Batista struggle by identifying with the largely anti-communist revolutionary group Directorio Revolucionario (Revolutionary Directory, DR), led by the immensely popular Catholic university student José Antonio Echeverría, killed by police in 1957.Footnote 33
Yet the DRE departed from Cuba's revolutionary leadership in multiple ways. The group openly embraced Catholicism at a time when the revolutionary leadership was becoming increasingly suspicious of the church. The DRE's manifestos stated repeatedly, ‘We are democrats … We are Christians.’Footnote 34 Its vision of social justice drew on concepts derived from social Christian doctrine, such as dignity and defence of human liberty, and it tended to view Cuba's underlying problems in terms of moral decay that reflected a lack of Christian virtue.Footnote 35 While the DRE supported structural reforms, it counselled gradual change, in contrast to the revolutionary leadership. ‘A country can't be changed with one stroke nor in one day’, read one DRE editorial. ‘We believe that it is necessary to change political, economic and social structures, but through progressive evolution.’Footnote 36 For example, the DRE's moderate vision of agrarian reform prioritised the distribution of state lands and tierras baldías (unclaimed, frequently marginal plots) before breaking up private holdings ‘that do not fulfil their social function’ and it viewed peasant cooperatives, rather than state institutions, as central to rural development.Footnote 37 This stance was consistent with Catholic visions of corporatism since Rerum novarum but markedly different from the state-centred approach gradually being implemented by the revolutionary leadership. Finally, although the DRE hoped Catholicism would provide a ‘third way’ in a Cold War world divided between ‘rapacious’ free-market capitalism and ‘atheistic’ communism, the group's denunciations of ‘Soviet imperialism’ and monetary support from the US government effectively put the DRE and the revolutionary leadership in enemy camps.
As the DRE founders broke with the Revolution in the autumn of 1960, their efforts to organise an underground opposition movement came to the attention of the CIA. The Agency's enormous new Miami station, known as JMWAVE, was cultivating extensive contacts in the Cuban underground and Miami exile community as it sought partners in its plans for the military overthrow of Fidel Castro. The CIA initially wanted the group to focus on psychological operations, but DRE members were passionate about contributing to armed opposition. As a result, some DRE leaders received cursory weapons training from CIA handlers and were then infiltrated mostly into Cuba's urban centres in advance of the Bay of Pigs invasion.Footnote 38 As plans for it leaked, Cuban security forces pre-emptively imprisoned tens of thousands of people and conducted a dragnet that virtually eliminated the urban underground and rural focal points of armed opposition.Footnote 39 The DRE underground was at the forefront of this process: a botched weapons drop just prior to the April 1961 Bay of Pigs operation led to the capture of DRE leader Alberto Muller, execution of several of the group's leading members and the imprisonment of dozens of others. After the spectacular failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, many DRE members fled into exile and its underground apparatus was gradually repressed. Now primarily an exile organisation, the future of the DRE lay overseas.
The DRE's Transnational Anti-Communism and the Role of US Support
Like other Cuban exile organisations of the early 1960s, the DRE conceptualised its struggle as a global fight against international communism. As the DRE's bulletin put it, ‘Our struggle has no borders, because [communism] does not recognise them.’Footnote 40 Most historiography on Cuban exiles focuses on their relationship with the US government or their gradual accommodation to US society and politics.Footnote 41 Yet many activist exiles in the early 1960s saw their struggle in broader terms, framed by both the East–West superpower conflicts of the Cold War and the North–South questions of post-colonial development. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion boosted expressions of popular support for Cuba around the region, making the battle for Latin American opinion seem even more important.Footnote 42 The DRE now hoped to use its own experience as a clarion call to rally anti-communist forces in what it viewed as an epic conflict between democracy and totalitarianism throughout the Americas and beyond.Footnote 43
The US presidential administration had a similar agenda. The Alliance for Progress programme, announced by John F. Kennedy to great fanfare in 1961, sought to channel demands for social justice catalysed by the Cuban example through more moderate political leaders, encouraging development and progressive reform while simultaneously taking a hardline stance against communism. The DRE's vision for the region dovetailed with those stated goals. For example, DRE members saw reformist Venezuelan president and star Alliance for Progress partner Rómulo Betancourt as proof that structural transformation could be achieved without communism.Footnote 44
Beyond public diplomacy and economic stimuli, the Kennedy administration also used the CIA to covertly support reformist sectors in Latin America to rival the revolutionary or Marxist Left and contain the power of Cuba's example.Footnote 45 After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA repurposed its Cuban operations, now financing a number of Cuban exile groups which would be tasked with swaying targeted sectors of Latin American publics. These included teachers, organised labour and even professional athletes.Footnote 46 Yet the group the CIA was most concerned with was youth. Since the late 1950s, the CIA had become increasingly concerned with global youth and student politics. It had clandestinely promoted moderate student groups to rival radical ones, especially in the emergent post-colonial world.Footnote 47 In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA now hoped the DRE would influence ‘the large, restive, and politically important student groups of Latin America in their resistance to Castroist and communist propaganda offensives’.Footnote 48 Although the DRE formed a paramilitary branch dedicated to launching maritime raids on the Cuban coast, the CIA never supported these activities. It believed the DRE's true potential lay in the battle for hearts and minds.
The CIA's decision to fund the DRE was crucial, for it turned what would otherwise have been a small group of exiled anti-communist students into an influential organisation with offices throughout the hemisphere. From 1961 to 1966, CIA support for the DRE ranged from about $6,000 to $16,000 per month for travel, subsistence, publications, radio production and other operational expenses.Footnote 49 With this support the DRE was able to open ‘delegations’ – small offices, usually staffed by a maximum of eight Cuban exiles, in most Latin American countries.Footnote 50 By mid-1962 the DRE boasted delegations in 17 countries including Spain.Footnote 51 The delegations’ main activities could be grouped into two related categories: first and foremost, they disseminated information to students and other groups. The delegations developed a formidable publicity apparatus for this purpose, distributing roughly 20,000 copies per month of the DRE bulletin Trinchera (‘Trench’), printing hundreds of thousands of leaflets and flyers and broadcasting short daily radio programmes.Footnote 52 Second, the DRE sought to influence local university elections by helping to unify different non-communist factions in their struggle against Marxist candidates or parties. Its efforts arguably tipped the balance of university elections towards non-communist candidates in Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama and Honduras in 1962.Footnote 53
While the CIA provided the resources that made these projects possible, we should be cautious not to overemphasise CIA control, nor assume that the relationship between the DRE and the US government was naturally harmonious. While recent historiography has questioned earlier assumptions that the US government served as the mastermind behind all transnational anti-communist networks,Footnote 54 Cuban exiles who collaborated with the CIA are still often imaged as imperialist puppets, empty vessels filled by Agency directives. Yet the DRE was primarily motivated and shaped by its own experiences, particularly the rise of Social Catholicism in Cuba, intense conflict within Cuba between 1959 and 1961, and the group's subsequent transnational interactions. And although the CIA provided general strategic guidance and met regularly with DRE leaders, the Agency did not exercise direct control over the group's daily activities or publications.
Indeed, the CIA and the DRE clashed frequently due to the DRE's divergences from the US government's Cuba policy. While the White House urged caution in the wake of major events such as the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis and Kennedy's assassination, the DRE's paramilitary branch continued to launch commando attacks on Cuban shores, fearing that delays would only allow the Soviets to consolidate control of the island. The CIA refused to fund the group's armed activities and sometimes actively thwarted them, particularly as the Kennedy administration expressed increasing disapproval of exile commando raids in 1962 and 1963.Footnote 55 But the DRE ignored these admonitions and shifted some of the Agency's funding for propaganda towards its paramilitary activities.Footnote 56
As a result, the CIA expressed blunt frustration with the DRE as ‘uncontrollable’,Footnote 57 a loose cannon that might well ‘sink a Soviet vessel and force [us] to the brink of war’, the Miami station chief fumed in August 1962.Footnote 58 For its part, the DRE viewed the CIA and the White House as vacillating, misguided and weak at best; trending towards coexistence and acceptance of a communist Cuba at worst. The group's disdain for US Cuba policy was captured in its summer 1962 slogan, emblazoned on the front page of its bulletin Trinchera: ‘Peaceful coexistence, No! War, Yes!’Footnote 59 That autumn the CIA summarised the DRE's attitude towards the Agency succinctly as ‘Contempt repeat contempt’.Footnote 60 Symbolising the nadir in relations, one DRE leader casually gifted his CIA handler a copy of The Ugly American, the 1958 novel that offered a scathing critique of America's failure to counteract the spread of communism in south-east Asia.Footnote 61 If DRE leaders accepted CIA funding matter-of-factly and shared the Kennedy administration's broad goals for Latin America, the relationship between the DRE, the White House and the CIA was a continuously strained marriage of convenience, not a simple story of co-optation or control.
With the ‘Free Students’ of Latin America: The University as Cold War Battleground
As the DRE established offices across Latin America in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, it faced a daunting landscape. Universities had become key battlegrounds in the early 1960s as students debated the Cuban Revolution and its implications for their own countries.Footnote 62 The US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion inflamed youth politics further, prompting a surge in anti-imperialist protests and declarations of solidarity with the besieged island. In this highly charged atmosphere, the DRE aimed to challenge the Cuban Revolution's prestige in the student milieu by exposing repression and authoritarianism within Cuba and by convincing students that only by supporting the anti-Castro ‘liberation forces’ could Cuba become the ‘salvation’ of the Americas.Footnote 63 It would not be an easy task. As Muñiz recalled, ‘Everyone had placed their greatest hopes in the Cuban Revolution.’ Its promises to eradicate inequality, poverty and corruption resonated overwhelmingly with Latin American youths. ‘We were working in an ambience of a lot of hostility. The student federations were totally sympathetic towards the Cuban Revolution and we were unwelcome “gusanos” (worms).’Footnote 64
The DRE saw its battle as one for the allegiance of Latin America's reformist centre, assuming that conservative sectors and the emerging New Left already had clearly defined stances on the Cuban Revolution.Footnote 65 The DRE especially prioritised collaboration with Christian Democratic youth, whose politics most closely reflected its own. In the Christian Democratic strongholds of Venezuela and Chile, this was a primary focus of the DRE delegations. Venezuela was a particularly successful example of this strategy. The Venezuelan DRE was one of the largest, drawing from Caracas's growing Cuban exile community, and one of the most active. In 1962 elections at the Central University, the DRE helped form an alliance between the Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (Committee for the Organisation of Independent Electoral Politics, COPEI, a Social Democratic party), Acción Democrática (Democratic Action) and Movimiento Universitario Católico (Catholic University Movement) students that successfully won over three schools (facultades) from Marxist leadership.Footnote 66 And at the first World Congress of Juventud Demócrata Cristiana de América (Christian Democratic Youth of America, JUDCA) in Caracas in 1962, a partnership with the Venezuelan delegation allowed the DRE to present its case to delegates from all over the world.Footnote 67
At the same time, the DRE recognised the fragility and fluidity of ‘centrist’ politics. Chile exemplified its concerns. As Chile's 1964 elections approached, the DRE feared that the Partido Demócrata Cristiano (Christian Democratic Party, PDC) might be forced to form detrimental alliances with either the Left or the Right in order to gain votes. ‘Chile finds itself in a great dilemma’, the DRE mused in its bulletin. ‘Latin America should be attentive to that dilemma, because in that country a clear and definitive struggle is developing between the forces trying to resolve the serious problems of the continent.’Footnote 68 The DRE also recognised that Christian Democracy could itself be internally conflicted, as a left wing of Chile's PDC youth argued for supporting the Cuban Revolution. As one internal 1961 letter urged, ‘we must win over Chile's Christian Democracy. That should be our primary objective in Chile.’Footnote 69 Thus the political centre, as the DRE saw it, was a moving target, subject to the polarising pressures of the Cold War.
Those pressures presented the DRE with challenges. The group's goal of combatting the ‘extreme’ Left without encouraging the far Right would prove to be a delicate balancing act. Although the DRE ideally sought to collaborate with Christian Democratic or other reformist students, groups farther to the Right were often eager for cooperation. And in countries without strong Christian Democratic parties, and where student federations were under leftist leadership, DRE delegates might find themselves mostly leaning on Catholic lay organisations such as Acción Católica or on more insurgent anti-communist groups that flirted or openly aligned with the far Right.
The DRE's Mexican delegation found itself courted by such groups. The DRE's political imaginary resonated deeply in Mexico, where conservative Catholics had felt beleaguered since the 1910–20 revolution's anti-clericalism and the repression of the largely Catholic uprising of the late 1920s known as the Cristero War. Here the DRE found enthusiastic partners in the Unión Nacional Sinarquista (National Synarchist Union, UNS), a largely rural right-wing Catholic group formed in 1937 as a kind of sequel to the Cristero insurgents, and the anti-communist Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación (University Movement of Renovating Orientation, MURO), formed by conservative students in 1962.Footnote 70 As historian Luis Herrán Ávila has argued, ‘the struggle against Castro's regime evoked ideas of anti-communist resistance and national liberation that resonated with other memories and histories of right-wing mobilisation’ in Mexico and throughout the Americas.Footnote 71 Mexican Catholics, in particular, felt a ‘special connection’ to Cuban exiles, Herrán Ávila argues, showing the impact that anti-Castro propaganda, including radio broadcasts and printed propaganda, had on them.
Mexican delegate Ángel Delgado received many warm and enthusiastic letters from right-wing Mexican Catholics who recounted that the DRE's publications were virtually devoured at their meetings. One Sinarquista member in Ciudad Mante, Tamaulipas, recounted that in 1963 DRE materials were ‘immediately ripped from my hands [at meetings] … people are constantly coming to see if I have received any [new] publications’.Footnote 72 Almost two years later another Sinarquista member from the same city requested more publications, noting that in their activities ‘we have seen how distributing [DRE] bulletins (propaganda) gives us good results, since it serves to open the people's eyes’.Footnote 73 And Delgado participated in a large memorial ceremony for those who ‘died fighting communism’ in Tamaulipas with the PAN, Acción Católica and the Sinarquistas. Through such public acts, right-wing Mexican Catholics linked the DRE's anti-Castro struggle to the history of anti-communist martyrdom in the Cristero War. Their vivid and recent experiences had great impact, Delgado recounted, ‘since our presence and our stories about Cuba's suffering act as an incentive to stop the systematic propaganda of communism’.Footnote 74
Elsewhere local alliances could be determined less by ideological compatibility and more by which groups were most militant, most effectively mobilised and most willing to engage in public demonstrations and street combat. Perhaps this made sense given the DRE's stated intentions to disrupt ‘enemy protests’Footnote 75 and mount counter-protests against pro-Cuban demonstrations. For example, in Ecuador local DRE members had developed relationships with a number of groups and movements, but it was Acción Anticomunista Ecuatoriana (Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Action, AAE) that was most consistently willing to physically confront the Left. The DRE partnered with AAE to hold various acts of protest in Cuenca, Ibarra and elsewhere that often ended in skirmishes with leftist youth.Footnote 76 Similarly, in Colombia the DRE considered the merits of collaborating with the group Joven Colombia (Young Colombia), stating flatly that the group was ‘anti-communist and anti-Semitic’. Open expressions of anti-Semitism were rare in Cuba and were historically associated with the pro-fascist right-wing fringe. Perhaps for this reason the DRE went on to suggest that, more than an intellectual partner, Joven Colombia might be useful as ‘effective shock troops (una eficaz maquinaria de choque)’ that had shown ‘courage in the street battle[s] against communism’.Footnote 77 In Bolivia the DRE established strong contacts among the student members of the Falange Socialista Boliviana (Bolivian Socialist Falange) and reached out to students who had recently engaged in a brawl with their leftist counterparts, proposing the joint formation of a Comité Estudiantil Pro Cuba Libre (Pro Free Cuba Student Committee), ‘which [would] be an organism of struggle and combat’.Footnote 78 Such examples suggest that, on the ground, some delegates favoured partnerships with the most combative anti-communist students who shared their ideals of sacrifice and militant action.
Yet the DRE leadership was uneasy about partnerships with neo-fascist or far-right groups. In internal correspondence, the Miami headquarters warned delegates to carefully navigate political ‘extremes’ in local politics.Footnote 79 For example, in a 1961 letter to the delegate in Ecuador, headquarters warned that the DRE ‘should not ally itself with the country's reactionary sectors … nor with the rich class, nor with fascist or falangista figures’. The DRE should stick to its own ideology favouring Social Democracy and Catholic social doctrine, without falling into ‘extremisms of the Right (very common and detrimental) nor … the Left’.Footnote 80 Similarly, in 1963 the DRE's head of international relations Enrique Mesa warned the newly appointed DRE delegate in Montevideo that proto-fascist student groups would be interested in collaborating with him. He might consider using them for ‘specific acts, like protests, rallies, etc.’, Mesa wrote, but should take ‘great care not to appear publicly identified with them at all (this is very important)’.Footnote 81
Sensitive to being publicly identified with the far Right, the DRE also internally debated the need to project a positive rather than reactionary political identity. DRE members understood this was a strategic imperative in order to appeal to Latin American youth. As the Venezuelan delegate noted, after giving some 70 talks to groups of local students, he sought to keep his tone positive. ‘We do not want to base our struggle in anti-communism, but rather in pro-democracy [and] pro-justice.’Footnote 82 Similarly, when the DRE delegate in Mexico, Ángel Delgado, received a letter from a Colombian woman who proposed they work together to create an ‘anti-communist front’, he penned a long, complex response, arguing that the label ‘anti-communist’ was not sufficiently forward-looking and included too many groups with reactionary ideas (ideas cavernícolas) that did not appeal to Latin American youths.Footnote 83 Other DRE delegates and their political allies too warned that ‘empty propaganda’ simply stating that communism was ‘bad’ would not persuade those who suffered from hunger, poverty and illness.Footnote 84 And, privately, DRE members admitted that their leftist counterparts were often more analytically rigorous and theoretically informed, ‘easily taking us prisoner’ in debates. ‘We shouldn't just [say] that communism is materialist and atheistic’, one DRE member admonished his fellow members: ‘We should develop an in-depth understanding of their theories and practices.’Footnote 85
Thus, while the DRE sometimes indulged in sensationalist anti-communist tropes in its publications, it also recognised and internally debated the limits of that discourse for its counterparts. Engagement in innumerable face-to-face confrontations and debates taught it that it needed to move beyond simplistic anti-communist slogans. Battling leftist students in the streets was one thing; winning over students in Latin America or elsewhere in the global South was another.
‘Christian’ Human Rights after the Bay of Pigs
As the DRE delegations in Latin America sought to disseminate a resonant critique of the Cuban Revolution, they often centred on state repression and human rights abuse. Scholarship on the history of human rights in Latin America has focused on the state terrorism of the Southern Cone in the 1970s as a catalyst in the rise of the global human rights movement.Footnote 86 But examination of the human rights discourse used by Cuban exile activists in the early 1960s reminds us of the plasticity and political variation inherent in such claims. The DRE's version of human rights discourse was shaped by its formation in Social Catholicism and by a legalistic tendency to appeal to international treaties and charters. In this way it was distinct from the more progressive and social movement-oriented human rights discourse that would radiate outward from the Southern Cone in the 1970s and ’80s. Similar to the ‘Christian human rights’ Samuel Moyn has discussed in the European context,Footnote 87 the DRE's critique of the Cuban Revolution often drew on language and imagery characteristic of Christian Democracy, stressing violations of human dignity and the human person, with a particular focus on prison conditions and the use of the death penalty. It also resembled the strategies used by eastern European exile groups in the 1950s, which sought to expose the ‘crimes’ of the Soviets in the ‘captive nations’ of the eastern bloc.Footnote 88
The DRE's denunciation of human rights abuses within Cuba first emerged in response to the internal state of emergency provoked by the Bay of Pigs invasion and its aftermath, when the Cuban government pre-emptively detained thousands of suspected dissidents. The mass security sweep around the invasion resulted in the imprisonment and in some cases the executions of DRE leaders and other anti-Castro activists. Although the Cuban government believed the death penalty and long imprisonments were justified punishments for armed opposition, the DRE decried the Revolution's zealous persecution of idealistic youths and university students. And as dissidents flooded into foreign embassies in Havana to seek safe passage in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, the DRE also protested against violations of the right to asylum. This period of turbulence around the Bay of Pigs invasion gave the DRE a deep and lasting sense of vulnerability and persecution. It also contributed to its sense of urgency in condemning executions and documenting conditions for political prisoners.
The DRE's denunciation of prison conditions and executions sometimes drew on an affective religious discourse of ‘martyrs’ and ‘the fallen’. But the group also embraced more liberal and legalistic language and tactics. For example, the DRE appealed multiple times to the recently formed Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States. In August 1961, the group submitted a long report in which it argued that recent revolutionary executive decrees violated provisions of the UN Declaration of Human Rights as well as the Cuban Constitution of 1940.Footnote 89 DRE member Fernando García Chacón addressed the IACHR again in October 1961 and August 1962, denouncing the treatment of political prisoners and the use of the death penalty.Footnote 90 The DRE also founded an ephemeral group called Comisión Cubana por los Derechos Humanos (Cuban Commission for Human Rights), signalling its commitment to human rights as a framework for anti-Castro activism.Footnote 91
While the DRE's emphasis on human rights was shaped by its members’ lived experiences within Cuba as targets of state retaliation, it proved to be an effective platform for publicising its cause and garnering support in Latin America. DRE members campaigned in their respective countries against the use of the death penalty for political prisoners and for better prison conditions. They convinced many heads of state and student groups to send telegrams or petitions to the Cuban government requesting clemency for detainees.Footnote 92 DRE pamphlets also referred to human rights abuses, often contrasting the Revolution's early promises with examples of post-1959 repression or asserting that the language of liberation was used to mask the violation of human rights within Cuba. For example, a leaflet documented the killing of several youths who sought asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in Havana in December 1961.Footnote 93 It contrasted a stark photo of dead bodies being unceremoniously loaded onto a flatbed truck with the phrases, ‘Is this self-determination? Are these human rights? Is this democracy?’Footnote 94
In the months after the Bay of Pigs, DRE delegations throughout Latin America also engaged in public protests or other direct actions to publicise human rights violations in Cuba. In Brazil, members led a brief hunger strike outside the Brazilian Foreign Ministry to demand safe passage for the Cubans who had sought asylum within Cuba's Brazilian embassy.Footnote 95 DRE delegations helped organise street protests with local students to denounce the use of the death penalty to staunch dissent within Cuba. For example, some student protests in October 1961 explicitly referenced the use of the death penalty after the DRE successfully passed a motion to declare 17 October a ‘day of mourning’ for executed students at a Latin American student congress.Footnote 96 Two student protests in Mexico that adopted the DRE's slogans ‘Down with the firing squad of infamy’ and ‘1961: Year of the Firing Squad’ were dissolved by police.Footnote 97 In Costa Rica, the DRE partnered with the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria de Costa Rica (University Student Federation of Costa Rica, FEUCR) and other student groups to lead enormous marches on the presidential palace and Central Park in which protesters pleaded for the life of imprisoned DRE leader Alberto Muller.Footnote 98 In Ecuador the group Juventudes Ecuatorianas Anticomunistas (Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Youth) called for a rally and religious service under the DRE slogans ‘Stop the Firing Squads in Cuba! To Save Cuba is to Save America!’Footnote 99 Although often dwarfed in size by pro-revolutionary protests, the DRE's demonstrations nevertheless managed to interject the issue of executions in Cuba into public consciousness in Latin America. Centring state repression and human rights abuse helped the DRE balance its more ideologically rigid anti-communist pronouncements with demands to hold the Cuban Revolution accountable for violating its own avowed principles.
Debating the New Left in the Global South
For the DRE to truly influence its counterparts in Latin America and Africa, the group had to recognise, grapple with and try to influence students’ legitimate demands for social justice and national liberation. This led it to engage with concepts we more often associate with New Left youth, while simultaneously attempting to challenge the more radical definitions of democracy, revolution, solidarity and self-determination that were emerging in Cuba. We find this tendency in the DRE's propaganda, which sometimes directly debated concepts such as self-determination or social justice. The pamphlet El diccionario del comunismo: cómo comprender mejor su vocabulario (Dictionary of Communism: How to Better Understand its Vocabulary), while partly sarcastic, also provided serious analysis of competing definitions of terms such as ‘national liberation’ or ‘popular democracy’. The pamphlet Mire Usted cómo nos autodeterminamos (Look How We Have Self-Determined) began with a question for the reader: ‘If you are among those who believe in the so-called self-determination of the Cuban people, please answer this question: Have you researched the system the Cuban people have to exercise their self-determination, and to decide which leaders and what type of government they want?’Footnote 100
Face-to-face interactions also forced the DRE to stretch its ideological horizons and sometimes resulted in conceptual compromises. One such example can be found in the resolutions of the fourth Congreso Latinoamericano de Estudiantes (Latin American Students’ Congress, IV CLAE) held in Natal, Brazil in October 1961, and which a DRE contingent attended. The first CLAE had been held in Montevideo in 1955 as a space of exchange for national student federations; subsequent congresses reflected the rising polarisation of the Cold War and pressure on student federations to join either the pro-Soviet International Union of Students (IUS) or the pro-Western Coordinating Secretariat of the National Unions of Students (COSEC).Footnote 101 These conflicts culminated in the explosive IV CLAE in Natal where, after extensive clashes between leftist and anti-communist students including the DRE, the former withdrew angrily from the congress. The DRE thereafter enjoyed a sympathetic audience among the students who remained; the remaining delegates approved resolutions on Cuba that the DRE henceforth celebrated as a vindication of its cause.Footnote 102
But rather than a simple vilification of the Cuban regime, the resulting resolutions of IV CLAE were nuanced, reflecting contemporary debates within Latin America about what Cuba represented, especially for students and youths. They praised the Revolution's original principles as reflecting genuine regional aspirations for freedom, national independence, peace, social justice, structural change and the expulsion of foreign monopolies. They also lauded certain positive developments in revolutionary Cuba, such as the destruction of archaic social and economic structures, the birth of a new ‘spirit of collective participation in the construction of a national future’ and the marking of the ‘first possibility for the great Latin American masses’ to find collective solutions to systemic problems. However, the CLAE resolutions endorsed the DRE's understanding that the Revolution had distorted those original ideals. They decried the emergence of a totalitarian regime that repressed individual liberty, freedom of religion and freedom of expression; used the death penalty to neutralise political opponents; controlled labour unions; repeatedly violated human rights; and attempted to undermine governments throughout Latin America. They also specifically denounced the suppression of university autonomy and freedom of teaching, and affirmed a resolution specifically condemning the use of the death penalty against university students. Still, the resolutions blamed ‘North American imperialistic monopolies’ as well as ‘reactionary elements’ in Cuba for the Revolution's derailing. The CLAE resolutions reflected a dialogue between DRE delegates and other student delegates from around the region, advancing the common exile thesis about the ‘revolution betrayed’ while also reiterating the necessity for true liberation in Cuba and Latin America.Footnote 103
The DRE's 1962 trip to Africa provides another example of the way DRE delegates negotiated with youth from the global South. In late May and early June 1962, a DRE delegation took a whirlwind trip to visit student groups in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. Its purpose was to counteract the growing interest in and admiration for Cuba's model of development in newly independent African countries, partly fostered by the growing relations between Cuba and Africa.Footnote 104 More pragmatically, it was an opportunity to develop allies for international student congresses held elsewhere. Indeed, the strategy seemed to pay off: later that summer, when leftist students tried to expel the DRE from a congress in Quebec, student leaders from Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria stood up to defend it.Footnote 105
Like the student congress in Natal, the Africa trip shows how the DRE could advance its own agenda while also acknowledging local concerns. The trip gave the DRE the opportunity to disseminate its critique of Cuban prison conditions and the plight of student dissidents. In fact, the African trip seemed to confirm the power and plasticity of the DRE's human rights-oriented criticisms of the early 1960s: DRE delegates found that African students were overwhelmingly predisposed to sympathise with the Cuban Revolution, which they saw as a small and impoverished country's attempt to become fully independent and more equitable. But many African students were nonetheless shocked by the DRE documentation of imprisoned students and executions by firing squad.Footnote 106 When presented with evidence of injustices within Cuba, one DRE member reported, ‘the students react’.Footnote 107
The DRE also worked hard to anticipate African students’ concerns. The DRE's introductory letter deemphasised the group's overt anti-communist mission, eliminated any mention of the United States or the Soviet Union, and downplayed its Catholic orientation. Instead, the initial contact letter stressed the common ties of ‘underdevelopment’ and anti-imperialist struggle that united ‘revolutionary’ African and Latin American students. ‘Our peoples belong to the underdeveloped world that suffered – and is still suffering – from the evils of colonialist political and economic oppression’, read the DRE's introductory letter. ‘The great battle of our century is that of the total liberation of the Afro-Asian and Latin American countries.’ Noting Latin American students’ respect for their African and Asian counterparts who had long engaged in the ‘struggle for democracy’ and had forged post-colonial alliances in Bandung, the DRE humbly claimed it had ‘much to learn from the African students who have carried … the flag of the [twentieth-century] anti-colonialist struggle’.Footnote 108
While in some venues the DRE had insisted that pre-1959 Cuba had not been ‘underdeveloped’, DRE members on this trip stressed parallels between Cuba and Africa and expressed their solidarity and commonality of purpose with national liberation movements around the world. These two seemingly contradictory currents of analysis coexisted uneasily within the DRE, just as they would within the broader Cuban exile community for decades to come.Footnote 109 While it is possible that the DRE's embrace of self-determination reflected a strategic bid for African student votes, it is also fair to surmise that this reflected the different tendencies found within the DRE.
The DRE's trip to Africa might have passed into historical oblivion had it not been for the lasting impression it made on one delegate: Lourdes Casal. Admittedly, Casal was something of an outlier in the DRE. A mixed-race woman in a predominantly white male group, Casal later wrote that it took her years to fully understand the repercussions of that trip for her own identification as a Cuban woman of African descent. Memories of that trip and her subsequent involvement in the US civil rights movements gradually transformed Casal's understanding of identity, nationalism and socialism, culminating in her pioneering theoretical contributions to intersectional feminism and her political contributions to the exile community's reengagement with Cuba in the 1970s.Footnote 110 Casal would go on to fully embrace the Cuban revolutionary government by the late 1970s and she ultimately died in Havana. Her personal trajectory captures the differential impact that contact with the global South might have on Cuban exile activists depending on their gendered and racialised positions.
If it took Casal years to fully comprehend the impact the trip made on her understanding of identity and Cuban nationalism, the geopolitical implications of that experience were more immediately clear. Upon her return from Africa in the summer of 1962, Casal wrote a prescient essay entitled ‘África ante el problema cubano’ (‘Africa and the Problem of Cuba’). Her article chastised Cuban exile organisations for focusing almost exclusively on Latin American politics. She argued instead for seeing parallels between Cuba and other countries of the ‘Third’ or developing world, ‘because it is to that world that we belong, whether we like it or not’. She described Africa as the ‘continent of the future’, saw the Afro-Asian bloc as playing a growing role in international politics, and argued that if Cuban exiles could capture the ‘moral support of the African peoples in our struggle, we will have taken a transcendental step towards the liberation of our country’.Footnote 111
Few Cuban exiles followed Casal's appeal to conceptualise Cuba's history and future in relation to Africa's. While some continued to see parallels between Cuba and other developing nations of the post-colonial world, and to understand their struggle as one that transcended the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, many more embraced a narrative of Cuban exceptionalism and Cold War Manicheism as the 1960s wore on. Indeed, revolutionary Cuba would soon more firmly take up the mantle of post-colonial solidarity with its vision of the ‘Tricontinental’, a precursor to what we would now call the global South.Footnote 112 But Casal's ideas capture the fluidity of the exile political imaginary in this period and the sometimes unexpected consequences of interacting with youth of the global South in the early 1960s.
Conclusions
The political trends of the mid-1960s proved inauspicious for the DRE. The reaction to one of the group's final tours of Latin American universities, held in spring of 1965, was a sign of the times. During speeches given before hundreds of university and high-school students in Argentina, Chile and Paraguay, DRE representative Juan A. Rodríguez Jomolca tried to focus on communist infiltration in Latin America. But he found himself dogged by persistent questions from the audiences about the US invasion of the Dominican Republic.Footnote 113 After the US-supported coup in Brazil, with US marines in the Caribbean, and with US involvement fuelling conflict in Vietnam, it was becoming harder to frame ‘Castro-communist subversion’ or ‘Russian imperialism’ as the greatest threats to the hemisphere.
At the same time, the Johnson administration, weary of Cuban exile paramilitary machinations and increasingly overcommitted in South Asia, began defunding anti-Castro exile groups in 1965. The DRE was one of them.Footnote 114 In early 1965, the CIA's Miami station undertook a review of its psychological operations and decided that the DRE's budget ‘should be cut drastically and eventually terminated’.Footnote 115 By 1966, most of the DRE delegations in Latin America had closed. The last CIA payment to the DRE was made in September of that year.Footnote 116 By that time, fatigue and depression had set in, causing many DRE delegates to resign, seek more permanent forms of work, or return to their studies.Footnote 117 To the extent that the DRE is remembered now, it is for its spectacular but largely futile paramilitary attacks on Cuban coasts in 1962 and ’63. Yet the history of the DRE contains several important lessons about Cuban exile activism, the Cuban Revolution's global reverberations in the 1960s, and student and youth politics in the Cold War.
The history of the DRE expands our understanding of the different strands of Cuban exile anti-communism during the Cold War. Anti-Castro exiles are often assumed to be monolithically and trans-historically right-wing, focused on elite property claims and characterised by a quasi-annexationist mentality that Cubans call ‘Plattismo’.Footnote 118 Yet the groups at the forefront of anti-Castro militancy in the early 1960s were primarily nationalist, Christian Democratic or Social Democratic.Footnote 119 While many Cuban exiles did eventually turn further to the Right,Footnote 120 we must understand that development as the result of a series of conjunctures in the global Cold War that gradually shattered the Social Democratic consensus of Republican Cuba. These included the Cuban Revolution's embrace of socialism and the Soviet Union; the rise of ‘hardline’ exile politics that tolerated neither compromise nor dissent; and the Reagan revolution, which revived exiles’ counterinsurgent passions and drafted them into a global anti-communist crusade. But this was never the whole story and overlooks the various strands and possibilities of exile politics in the early 1960s.
The history of the DRE also adds to our understanding of global student and youth politics in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. While most historiography focuses on the passions that Cuba inspired among leftist youths throughout the region, the DRE's history illuminates the challenges of those youths who self-consciously positioned themselves as centrist or reformist and continued to defend a moderate political imaginary against the ‘extremism’ evoked by Cuba. The fate of such reformist student politics at the height of the Cold War proved complex. On the one hand the DRE delegates struggled to avoid the political extremes of Left and Right. They attempted to ally primarily with Christian Democratic student groups, but their cause often fanned the flames of the far Right and DRE members sometimes covertly partnered with right-wing youth groups. In some ways, their story reinforces scholarship on the Latin American Cold War that argues that Social Democracy was a casualty of the polarisation of the period, and that liberal, Social Democratic, or Christian Democratic visions of anti-communism were all too easily co-opted by the Right.Footnote 121
On the other hand, despite fearing the radicalising trends of the period, the DRE could not ignore the rise of the New Left. The group's attempt to reach and influence students across the global South pushed it to grapple with and partially endorse concepts we now more frequently associate with the New Left, especially the quest for national liberation and social justice, lending its anti-communism a more progressive cast. This strategy bore fruit across the global South, as the DRE articulated a critique of the Cuban Revolution that acknowledged the legitimacy of its goals of sovereignty and liberation, yet also exposed human rights abuses, which raised genuine concern among Latin American and African students and among active Catholics. The multiplicity of the DRE's messaging reminds us of the elasticity and broad range of both anti-communism and student politics, and the roles they played in the cultural and political struggles across the global South during the Cold War.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the colleagues who offered their insights on this manuscript, including Jennifer Adair, Alison Bruey, Michael Bustamante, Marcelo Casals, Luis Herrán Ávila, Billy Kelly, Aaron Coy Moulton and Marian Schlotterbeck, as well as three anonymous JLAS reviewers. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the financial support that made the research for this manuscript possible, including a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer stipend and a Pace University Scholarly Research award.
