Across 104 issues, Mediodía published a dazzling constellation of authors, including Cubans such as the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, the lawyer and feminist activist Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, the novelist Alejo Carpentier, and the Afro-Cuban poet Regino Pedroso. They also included Latin American, US, and European writers of radical sympathies, from Langston Hughes to César Vallejo, and from André Malraux to Isaak Babel. It was initially a literary monthly before becoming a weekly magazine with a strong political and current affairs focus. Within months it had a circulation of 10,000 copies, its readership spread across the island. Mediodía was centrally concerned with Cuban domestic politics, and with the struggles for democratic representation and for racial and gender equality. But amid the ferment of the 1930s, these battles could not be disconnected from the broader turbulence afflicting the world. The magazine’s coverage reflected this sense of global interconnection: reportage on the Spanish Civil War nestled alongside essays on racial discrimination in Cuba; accounts of Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation featured next to warnings of the looming threat Nazi Germany posed to Czechoslovakia.

Mediodía provides a compelling window onto Cuban politics in the 1930s, where a populist revolution had been thwarted in 1933–34, yet the democratizing impulses the revolution had unleashed had not yet been contained. Urgent questions about imperialism, Cuba’s national sovereignty, racial inequality, and social injustice were in the air, prompting fervent and wide-ranging debates, and these were all reflected in Mediodía’s pages. At the same time, for the magazine’s editors, the boundary between internal questions and global issues was entirely permeable: the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti racist struggles were bound together into a single battle with many interconnected fronts.

The publications produced from exile during the period of the military dictatorships in Latin America show an advanced awareness of the ideological and political barriers produced by the distortion or invisibilization of certain facts by the media, co-opted by the dictatorial and neo-imperial powers. The FBI (Front brésilien d’Information) was a newspaper founded in 1969 in Alger (Algeria) by Brazilian refugees, which circulated through several countries in Europe and Latin America until 1973. The publication had different collaborators and delegations in Chile, Uruguay, France, Holland, Italy, Germany, where it was published at irregular intervals. It was conceived as a counter-hegemonic political tool of (un)information, aiming to unmask the crimes of the military dictatorship and the state of oppression in Brazil.​

The fact that the FBI was based in Alger, which was at the time one of the most important centers for revolutionary movements in Africa, marks the particularity of its perspective, aware of the extensive effects of imperialism and attentive to the problems and challenges common to the countries of the Global South. I am going to place a special focus on certain images, themes and recurrent terms of the FBI, which functioned as shared codes to understand and name different experiences of repression and resistance in the Southern Cone.

The literary magazine, however fragile and limited as infrastructure, offered Caribbean writers a way to publish at home and to be circulated both at home and abroad. They made the careers of writers such as George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and many others. They made these careers by alternating between aesthetically launching the Caribbean into literary and geopolitical visibility and facilitating circulation to larger scale infrastructures in literary centers in Paris, London, Madrid, New York, and Mexico City.

Although my research is broader, I draw specifically on the following literary periodicals:

1. Tropiques (Fort de France, Martinique, 1941-1945)

Language: French (and some Kreyol)

Type: quarterly, no advertisements, subject to Vichy censorship for half-run, mostly literary publication including French literary works alongside local work and scattered work in translation from Spanish, includes literary and social theory fomenting black consciousness and increasingly evincing a Marxist political perspective, especially in second half  of run

Circulation: French Antilles, Haiti, Cuba, Curaçao, Mexico, New York, Alexandria, Chile, Venezuela

Editorial Collective: Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil

2. BIM (Bridgetown, Barbados, 1942-1972)

Language: English (and various local dialects)

Type: semi-annual exclusively literary and programmatically apolitical periodical, financed by advertisements, demonstrating colonial self-censorship, dedicated to local literary production and becoming increasingly regional in scope in the late 1940s

Circulation: British West Indies and England

Editorial Collective: Frank Collymore & W. Therold Barnes with scouting work by George Lamming

3. Gaceta del Caribe (Habana, Cuba 1944)

Language: Spanish

Type: monthly, popular front literary critical and political periodical secretly financed by Cuban CP

Circulation: Haiti, Curaçao, Mexico, U.S., Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay

Editorial Collective: Nicolás Guillén, Mirta Aguirre, Jose Antonio Portuondo, Angel Augier

La Ruche, ‘Organe de la jeune génération,’ Journal Hebdomadaire Littéraire et Social, began in late 1945 as a cultural, literary and political revue produced by left-militant youth would go on to become some of Haiti’s most important intellectual and political actors. Members of La Ruche, such as poet, René Depestre, future novelist, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and photographer, Gérald Bloncourt, published forty-two French-language issues between December 7th 1945 and December 9th 1946. Amidst the length of the journal’s run, Haiti would experience a popular uprising led by members of the La Ruche editorial board in January 1946 (also known as Les Cinq Glorieuses), coinciding with the incendiary lecture series of the surrealist poet, André Breton, in Port-au-Prince. The pages of La Ruche bear witness to the political conjuncture of a Black Jacobinist anti-imperialism and a Popular Front antifascism imported into the literary scene by intellectuals with connections to Spanish republicanism and the French Resistance. The amalgam of these two different traditions appears perfectly blended in the political imaginaries of the ’46 generation. My paper will consider the events of the 1946 revolution in relation to La Ruche, and the mobilization of a Haitian surrealist antifascism legible in its pages. Their signature imbrication of Atlantic World anti-colonialism and Third World anti-fascism, with its robust vision of liberation through both poetic and practical means, is an important precedent for analyzing opposition against ascendant far-right authoritarian regimes in the Global South.

This paper reconstructs the connections between Du Bois and Cuban intellectuals within global south struggles for anti-racist democracies. The first section shows how Du Bois connections with Cuba occurred both at the level of intellectual collectives and through interpersonal relationships. Besides the prominent anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, Du Bois maintained contact with Gustavo Urrutia, who was an intellectual and journalist, author of an opinion column in the influential Cuban newspaper “Diario de la Marina.” Urrutia’s column Ideals of a Race focused on racism and colonialism in Cuba from 1928 to 1931.​

Urrutia and Du Bois connection was initially given through the publication of some writings by Urrutia in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine, The Crisis, in 1931 and 1932. Urrutia’s ideas were anchored in a community around the Cuban periodical “Adelante” which functioned as an expression of the anti-racist struggle and denunciation of the wounds in Cuban democracy after Machado anti-popular government (1925-1933). “Adelante” not only debated the problem of blacks in the Cuban nation but also demanded economic reparation as a response to the legacies of slavery.

My argument regards the work of black intellectuals that, during the 1930s, addressed issues that were close to a Dubosian perspective (Itzigshon and Brown 2019). I analyze how these organic intellectuals worked in a Marxist-Dubosian way of analysis regarding racism, culture, and nationalism in Cuba.

In March of 1936, “Adelante” wrote a piece on W.E.B. Du Bois, in which he appears as an analyst of the historical injustices to blacks in the United States, highlighting the publications of the University of Atlanta. Although “Adelante” stands out bibliographical work of Du Bois, his work on “structural racism” was raised. This gives an account of intellectuals and activists’ nationalist and anti-imperialist perspective. In this vein, I refer not only to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) but also to Gustavo Urrutia’s writings in “Adelante” under the title El nuevo Negro (1937) and Alberto Arredondo’s El Negro en Cuba (1939) as part of the same political-intellectual anti-racist struggle.

Focusing on Cuba is not neutral since this country played a crucial role in the intellectual production in Latin America not only because of the multiple connections with socialism in Europe and the United States but also because of an anti-racist political movement linked to the reconstruction of republicanism in the Caribbean.

During the 1920s the primary medium for activities of the cultural, artistic and political left were journals and periodicals. They served as platforms for the vanguard(-isms) in general, directing attention to other groups, initiatives, and publications. They were a gathering point; a place for sharing artistic programs and discussions, political propaganda, public debates and confrontations with readers, as well as sites for collective efforts. In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2013) Peter Brooker underlined the avant-garde practice as “networked exchange” across borders thanks to the role of periodicals, which shaped the global modernism.​

In my paper prepared for the workshop I intend to apply recent studies on 1920s avant-garde journals and periodicals to develop a discourse on transcontinental networks of the political, cultural and artistic Magazines that operated in the early 1970s in Latin America, Africa and Europe. I intend to discuss Casa de Las Americas from the years of 1970-1972. It was a period, when editors of this Cuban periodical devoted one of the numbers to Pan-African Festival in Algiers (1970, No. 58) and begun to advertise Souffles and AfricAsia directing attention to revolutionary circles in Rabat and Paris. I intend to discuss their contacts and situate them on the global and historical spectrum of revolutionary, left-wing, artistic, literary and avant-garde publications. I aim to explore the “networked exchange” of these three Magazines, which entered into transnational circulation and aimed to create a platform of transcontinental propaganda of solidarity for revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America.