'Black is a Country': The Impact of the Cuban Revolution on American Black Radical Solidaritie

This Master's thesis looks at the solidarities of black radicals in the mid-20th century and traces how they evolved in contact with the Cuban Revolution. I argue that the Cuban Revolution refracted and altered existing threads of black radical solidarity by acting as a discursive site for theorizing and debating the tactics and ideology of black freedom. This resulted in the strengthening of black American Third World identity, the proliferation of a colonial understanding of the black condition, and the development of competing forms of black nationalism. This thesis positions the Cuban Revolution as a definitive moment in black radical intellectual history which did not necessarily originate any of the major threads of black radical solidarity, but which had a profound impact on the ways that the animating ideas of mid-20th century black radicalism were theorized and expressed from the 1960s through the 1970s and beyond.