Disseminating the Tricontinental

Over 50 years ago, in January 1966, delegates from 82 non-Western countries, largely the leaders, often clandestine, of radical left oppositional groups, traveled to Cuba to attend the Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, held in Havana. This conference was foundational for a new moment in the orientation of global politics in the 1960s. The Bandung Conference of 1955 had been the first major conference of newly independent African and Asian states. The leaders at Bandung took a strategic decision of non-alignment with respect to the two major powers of the cold war; reading the debates of the conference, the main preoccupation of that first generation of leaders was that their countries should not become hot sites of the cold war. ¹ Although Bandung is often associated with the beginnings of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM), which determined a third way for those countries not forming part of the first and second worlds, the NAM was rather initiated by President Tito at a meeting in Belgrade in 1961 where leaders of non-Western states that were not part of a cold war military alliance (including Cuba) gathered to assert their own autonomy and political “third way.” NAM was therefore the first Tricontinental international political organization of leaders not just from Africa and Asia but from the entire non-Western world, the three continents of the South. ² The Tricontinental of 1966 amounted to a political realignment of Bandung, its organizing body, the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), ³ and NAM: in the first place because representation from Africa and Asia was extended to include the countries of South America, and in the second place because it constituted a dramatic political move away from non-alignment toward a radical anti-imperialism located firmly in the socialist camp. While Cuba was more formally oriented toward the Soviet Union, the conference itself took a more Maoist tone and was militantly opposed to the Soviet doctrine of peaceful co-existence.