Latin-Africa

The term "Latin-Africa" originates from twentieth-century Latin American Cold War rhetoric. Cuban leader Fidel Castro coined it in 1976, at Havana's First Congress, to celebrate Cuban military support of Angola's independence a year prior. It was an unprecedented moment in Latin American history: in defending the sovereignty of an African nation, Cuba joined Angola to resist both Portuguese imperialism and the allied powers of the US and apartheid South Africa. To justify such intervention to the Cuban people, Castro tapped into his island's prerevolutionary history of slavery, and in referring to Africans as "brothers" of the Cuban nation, he made African decolonization a statist obligation: "African blood flows freely through our veins. Many of our ancestors came as slaves from Africa to this land. . . . We're brothers and sisters of the people of Africa and we're ready to fight on their behalf!"1 Bound to Africa by colonial and postcolonial histories, when the Cuban mission in Angola triumphed after Cuba's defeat in various other African regions, Castro dubbed Cuba a "Latin-African" nation ("latino-africano").

The Angolan-Cuban victory was short-lived, however. This south-south alliance imploded during Ronald Reagan's administration, which funneled $250 million in military assistance to the rivals of the MPLA (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola — the Cuba-supported Angolan political party), and to the invading forces of apartheid South Africa. In 1981 the US, convinced that South Africa was threatened by the Marxist regimes of its African neighbors, vetoed four UN Security Council resolutions intended to impose sanctions and arms bans on Pretoria. This foreign military aid along with CIA espionage operations plunged Angola into a relentless civil war that continued until 2002. Cuba did not fare much better. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the strangulation of the US embargo, Cuban veterans returned to find their island sunken into the worst economic depression in modern history.

But a Latin-African historical era occasioned a literary one. In a post-independence Angola, intellectuals exhibited the failure of the Cuban-Angolan alliance in Ondjaki's endearing Bom dia camaradas (Good Morning Comrades: A Novel, 2001, 2008) or Pepetela's A geração da utopia (A Generation of Utopia, 1992). On the other side of the Atlantic, Cuban Wendy Guerra's Todos se van (Everyone Leaves 2006, 2012), Cuban Eliseo Alberto, Caracol Beach (1998), and Cuban-American Achy Obejas's Ruins (2009) all depicted veterans with post-traumatic stress and a general sense of alienation from Angola after they were forced to enlist. Such visions countered both state narratives and Colombian Gabriel García Márquez's version of the events in "Operation Carlota" (1976, 2013) and "Angola, un año después" (untranslated, "Angola, a year later," 1977). Castro had strategically enlisted the Nobel laureate to legitimize revolutionary fervor; García Márquez acquiesced and characterized the Angolan mission as voluntary and an expression of south-south love. The Latin-African literary scene that emerged ran the gamut between Third World devotion and alienation, but Angolan and Cuban literary examples primarily recover a Latin-African history through the specter of political failure.2

Reclaiming Latin-Africa

The possibilities for renewing a south-south model contemplated from this historical vantage point might seem bleak. Such a brief timeline seems to imply, as Fredric Jameson lamented, that "historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable."3 And yet, if a Latin-African framework does not suggest that revolutionary resistance remained triumphant, nor does it reinforce that disappointment precludes historical revival. Reclaiming Castro's term, I propose that "Latin-Africa" reveals a new literary history, where political discourses emerge at the interstices of Anglophone, Hispanophone or Lusophone regions.

While we tend to read postcolonial African or Latinx-American writers according to colonial conventions of language, a Latin-African literary history breaks free of these disciplinary delimitations. Instead, it unsettles what we think we know about major writers or the conventions they helped theorize. For example, how might a Latinx author's engagement with a Latin-African history complicate easy dichotomies or ethnic expectations that critics read into their work? Or if a Latin American canonical writer has shaped the ways we think about a literary movement or genre (e.g. magical realism), how might that writer's intersection with African Cold War politics broaden our convictions about this genre?

The poetry of Puerto Rican Víctor Hernández Cruz (1949-) is a key example of this Latin-African literary history. Having moved to New York with his family in 1954, and to San Francisco in adulthood, Cruz relocated to Morocco in the 1990s, and the work he produced there imagines a North African civilization as part of a revised origin story for Latinos. This global shift is quite radical, both because Nuyorican poetry is often expected to contain itself to a delimited US territory but also because such a celebration of North Africa challenges Latinos' aspirations to whiteness. "Our mother country is Spain" he states, referring to coloniality in Latin America. "[B]ut we must include North Africa as one of our maternal abodes" which includes the "Berber tribespeople (Amaziri) of the Almohads and the Almorivides."4 Stretching back thirty centuries, Cruz glorifies Egyptian antiquity to refute the centrality of Western modernity. He links the "Egyptian Heliopolis / The books were the building of /Alexandria" to "Mexico City floating islands / Population in the millions/ Before the Spanish,"5 a move that is at once counterhegemonic and expresses a desire for historical south-south relations. 

Cruz's glorification of North Africa also raises considerations for postcolonial thought. If Ranajit Guha's Subaltern Studies group privileged the peasant working class, Cruz's subalternity centers a ruling class instead. Cruz celebrates the "Egyptian Heliopolis," or the Almoravid dynasty (1050-1147) that "conquered Ghana, Senegal/Mali."6 Cruz lionizes a Global South hegemony, but does so in order to discourage Latinos from assimilating into whiteness. Even if this move might seem like substituting one empire for another, how might a Spanish-speaking poet like Cruz and his engagement in a former British territory like Egypt widen dominant histories of a postcolonial region?

Lastly, a Latin-African framework also interrogates deep-seated notions of canonical figures as US-centric or regional. Cruz's poetry, often conceived as rooted in Nuyorican nationalism, is untethered from this ethnic expectation. His poetry can be read as global which, far from flattening particularity (in ways that neologisms like "Global anglophone" might do), brings Latinx writing into contact with specific regions like Egypt or Morocco. Something similar happens to Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), who is often read in a simplistic way as a "magical realist." But his stern critique of South African apartheid in an essay he contributed to the Art Against Apartheid collective (1983) is absent from literary critique of one of the most notable Latin American figures of the global sixties. Also absent is how Cortázar's work with the UNESCO in Nairobi, Kenya (1975) and his participation in the Russell Tribunal (1974-1976) on US war crimes in Vietnam, inform his anti-apartheid essay. Here, Cortázar's postcolonial entanglements prompt us to ask how an attention to his internationalist pursuits transform Latin American critical conceptions of genre. How might these postcolonial considerations contradict the notion that magical realism originated or developed exclusively in Latin America? Moreover, how might the involvement of such participants in this collective as Brazilian modernist Jorge Amado (1912-2001) or US Nuyorican poet Sandra María Esteves (1948-) similarly complicate the categories of Brazilian modernismo and Nuyorican poetry that these canonical authors represent respectively, if we center them as African internationalists? The joining of postcolonial and Latinx-American concerns unveils dimensions of writers or historical moments previously elided. But one of the most representative cases of this disjuncture is the Latin-African dimension of Mexican Nobel laureate poet Octavio Paz. Although one of Latin America's most famous poets, Paz's writings on Egypt fall into critical oblivion when disciplinary siloes continue to preclude south-south engagement.

Paz, NAM, & Nasser

A Latin American steeped in the anglophone postcolonial world, Paz bridges the Latin American-Postcolonial divide through African politics. During his ambassadorship in India (1962-1968), he befriended Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru — one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). This friendship, in turn, brought Paz into an awareness of one of NAM's co-conspirators, Egypt's first Prime Minister, Gamal Abdel Nasser. I single out Paz's Egyptian introspections to highlight how his admiration for Nasser might invite us to reconsider the commonplace assumption of Paz's conservative politics. While there are certainly other instances of Paz's writing on Nasser, the mentions discussed here widen both our perceptions of Mexican intellectual politics of the 1950s and 1960s while also evincing how Latin American concerns enter the thematic space of the postcolonial.  

Many decades after Paz's two assignments in India, he reflects nostalgically on his time there in a memoir titled Vislumbres de la India (In Light of India, 1995, 1997). When Paz discusses his first assignment in 1952 as an agent of the Mexican diplomatic corps before becoming ambassador, Egyptian decolonization is mentioned in passing:

At first sight, we might characterize Paz's 1952 desires as essentializations not unlike those of Cruz. After all, this quasi-orientalist reaction to Cairo — excitement for the pyramids, museums and the Red Sea — is informed by the British fascination of the "orient" in figures he avidly read like Levi Strauss. These comments in Vislumbres are also exemplary of a "Hispanic Orientalism," in the lineage of Argentine Domingo Sarmiento's Bedouins in Facundo (1845) or modernista Ruben Darío (1867-1916). And yet, Paz's commentary on Egyptian surroundings incorporates and connects the country's politics and a celebration of Third World might. Paz mentions the ousting of King Farouk that then-Colonel Nasser and the Free Officers engineered. Paz's allusion to "the last days" of monarchical rule also suggest that "riots" and blockades clear the way for a new dawn. The burning of the "Shepherd's Hotel" — a textual memorial to the oligarchy — similarly creates a clean slate. While he declares that conditions seem "unsafe" as Paz transitions from Cairo to Bombay, Paz's nonchalant reporting of the scenes of Egyptian decolonization reflect no signs of concern, as if hopeful for Egyptian progress. 

The Egyptian revolution would materialize more concretely in Paz's writing during his ambassadorship.  In Corriente alterna (Alternating Current, 1967, 1973), a collection of essays that Paz wrote roughly during this time, between 1959 and 1967, Paz maintains hope for the project of non-alignment. When contesting Jean-Paul Sartre's universalist concept of revolution in the Third World, Paz evokes Nasser:

This passing comment on Nasser is one of many moments of Paz's political intervention on both Nasserism and NAM. For one, it is a remarkable instance of support for Nasserist politics in a writer who has long been criticized for his turn from leftism. But this comment also identifies how Paz's support for Egypt's decolonization comes from what he considers to be Nasser's original approach.

Different from the universalist nationalisms that were the norm at the time, Paz states that "their rebellion is an affirmation of their uniqueness." For indeed, in an era in which left-wing intellectuals attempted to reconcile humane socialist revolution with individual freedom, Nasser offered a unique model: he adapted a socially-progressive system to national state capitalism. Internationalists characterized this model as "Nasserism" or a "synthesis of religious, civil, and socialist values" that while anti-capitalist, offered economically-sound programs for social mobility as a solution to petty-bourgeois Arab socialism in the first few years of his government.9 Paz's commentary also emerges during an era of strong diplomatic relations between Mexico and Egypt: Mexico established its first embassy in Cairo in 1960, and in 1964, Mexico became a NAM observer when the convention was hosted in Cairo. Mexico also supported Nasser's establishment of the Arab League and, and in 1965, ratifiedits nonalignment and simultaneous support for African sovereignty, especially that of Algeria. Although Mexico envisioned itself as "an integral part of that developing world,"10 politically it maintained neutrality to avoid angering its neighbor and top trading partner to the north. Paz, for his part, was more forthright in his support of Nasserism before he became the subject of CIA surveillance.

Perhaps this espionage program — which also targeted fellow Mexicans Frida Kahlo, Elena Poniatowska, and Carlos Fuentes — made Paz's praise of Nasserism and NAM more guarded in later writing. While honoring Nehru's legacy in New Delhi in 1984, Paz reflected on the architects of NAM as leading the way for "a new dawn of humanism" and that "this unusual alliance" was "founded in a plurality of visions for mankind."11 And in his memoir he stated that during the late 1950s, "[p]erhaps Marx had not been wrong: the revolution would explode in an advanced country, with an established proletariat educated in democratic traditions."12 Paz perhaps hoped that Nasserism in particular and NAM in general might usher in an alternative to both leftist populism and socialist regimes that he personally excoriated.

Paz's antipathy towards socialist regimes and leftist populism is, however, one of the reasons why he is perceived as more conservative than the anti-Stalinist left in Mexico at the time (whether these be Trotskyites, or disillusioned communists). After all, the two journals he edited after his ambassadorship, Plural and Vuelta, published democratic values of European liberal thinkers. Although Paz's editorial focus was on transmitting "left-wing liberalism based on the exaltation of individual freedoms," as Ignacio Sánchez Prado explains, this positionality was "constructed in opposition both to right-wing nationalism and to Soviet-style communism."13 Paz's political context, after all, draws from CIA-financed and anti-communist journals like Cuadernos that propagated ideas of liberalism and individual freedoms coming from the US. But Paz's positionality here is not too distanced from Nasserism either. Nasser's 1952 movement intended to extend national property to government, while its sustainers were liberal democrats. In the early days, Nasser's development strategy, while shifted away from profit-making to a welfare-oriented economy, still allowed the private enterprise to function under a "guided capitalism."14 Nasserism was, in Paz's terms above, a novelty, and as such entered Latin American politics with force. Countries like Panama, Brazil, and Uruguay sough to implement Egypt's 1950s economic policies in congress to stave off US economic monopolies. In 1956, the Eisenhower administration all but invaded Panama, so fierce was Panama's Nasserist rhetoric when defending their sovereignty over the Panama Canal zone. Mexico, for its part, sent scholars to Panama to discuss legal possibilities of adapting Nasserist politics in 1960.15 In other words, a 1950s and early 1960s Nasserism becomes a desirable avenue for Latin American politics to stand up to Western hegemony. Nasserism can even be envisioned as viable at best or admirable at worst for the characterized as socially-liberal and fiscally-conservative like Paz.

If merging postcolonial African and Latin American histories helps us reconsider the expectations we have about canonical authors, a Latin-African history invites us to recategorize Paz's political alliances — which African politics certainly shaped. Given that some strains of his Eurocentric liberal thought are traceable to Nasserism, we might also revisit — on the postcolonial side of things — our expectations of Nasserist economic and social revolution, while also including Nasser's effect on domains like Mexican or Latin American diplomacy, well beyond the borders of the former British empire. But this Latin-African moment reverberates in the present as well. When Paz brought Nasserism into Mexican politics, he opened up avenues for others to follow in contemporary Mexican literature.16 Additionally, in the twenty-first century, prominent African voices have begun centering a Cold War Latin America in their novels, as if reciprocating Paz's gaze upon North Africa.17

A twenty-first century Latin-African literary corpus continues to grow, rooted in a twentieth-century history of south-south solidarity. And yet, disciplinary practices in the US might render this dimension of Cold war studies completely invisible. Whether or not this is due to strict linguistic divisions governing our disciplines or a dearth of south-south literary distributors and translations, it has never been more urgent to burst free of these siloes. As displacement and necropolitical violence in the Global South soars, I am reminded of a Fanonian plea: to renew an intellectual curiosity for fields beyond our expertise. Fanon beseeched the Third World to learn about "case histories" around the globe (such as campaigns for "fighting illiteracy" in geographically distanced areas like Burma and Argentina) to inspire real south-south solidarity.18 Such a move is heeded in what is arguably some of the most revolutionary writing of Latinx-American writers. But without this intellectual curiosity, and in the presence of disciplinary division, the postcolonial entanglements of the Latinx-American writers will remain out of reach.

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Sarah M. Quesada (Twitter: @SarahmQuesada) is an Associate Professor of Romance Studies and by courtesy, of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge UP, December 2022), which received an Honorable Mention for First Book in 2023 from the Modern Languages Association (MLA). Her second book project investigates different internationalist attachments among Chicana, Mexican, and African writers, and unburies the influences of lesser-known feminists in this south-south engagement. Her work has been supported by the National Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies, among other places, and she currently serves on the Executive Committee for the MLA's Anthropology and Literature Forum, the advisory board of the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism (Duke UP), and is the Book Review editor for Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.

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