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.

Initially, it was a monthly publication, but as the years passed, it transitioned to a fortnightly circulation, and finally, in 1987, it became a weekly magazine. Despite the challenges of censorship and the spacing of issues, the magazine persevered, providing profound news analysis that was a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and an inspiration to all who value freedom of information.

APSI magazine was not just a publication but a beacon of high-quality, in-depth information. Its subscribers, predominantly social sciences and humanities professionals, were hungry for international political analysis when such information was scarce due to Chile’s international isolation. Despite the editors’ expectations of international organizations and embassies subscribing, the magazine attracted many professionals seeking quality information about the world in a context where most Chilean media were censored or sympathetic to the regime.

Arturo Navarro Ceardi, a journalist and sociologist, was the first director of APSI. Navarro was linked to the leftist party Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria (MAPU). Navarro directed the magazine until 1982, when the dictatorship forced him to leave his post due to intense pressure from the dictatorship. Marcelo Contreras, a journalist linked to MAPU, was its second and last director. The political climate under the dictatorship was a challenge and a constant struggle for APSI’s leadership. They faced intense pressure, censorship, and even personal threats.

The magazine’s founding team, all left-leaning, included Hilda López, Eduardo Araya, Carlos Catalán, John Dinges, Rafael Otano, Marcelo Contreras, and Sergio Marras. Despite their political leanings, APSI’s hallmark was its independence from political parties.

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.