The Venceremos Brigade: North Americans in Cuba Since 1969

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.7.2.0236
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Pages: 236-264
• Author: Kavitha Iyengar
• Subject Matter: Venceremos Brigade,Cuba,US-Cuban relations,US Left,New Left,Cuban Revolution,socialism

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 7.2 SeaSonS 2015

STUDENT ARTICLE

THE VENCEREMOS BRIGADE: NORTH

AMERICANS IN CUBA SINCE 1969

Kavitha Iyengar

University of California, Berkeley, USA

Abstract

The Venceremos Brigade is an ‘anti-imperialist Education Project’ that began its travel

to Cuba in 1969 to support and learn about the Cuban Revolution. On Venceremos

trips, North American volunteers offer aid to Cuban government projects while

touring the island nation and learning about both Cuba and revolutionary ideals.

Participants in the projects are involved for both personal and political reasons,

offering a model for productive political relations born of hostilities. Although its story

remains undocumented within histories of both the US Left and US-Cuban relations,

by 2015, the group had sent more than 9,000 North American activists to the island.

Through reading newspapers from Cuba, Venceremos Press Publications in the US,

and by listening to personal narratives, this article documents this important political

education project that continues to model productive relations today.

Keywords: Venceremos Brigade, Cuba, US-Cuban relations, US Left, New Left, Cuban

Revolution, socialism

As Cuba and the US approach normalised relations, the moment manifests with

a presence that most US citizens have not experienced for decades. For most

North Americans, the current shift is a complete turn from relations begun at the

inception of the Cuban Revolution. In truth, this shift mirrors the work that the

Venceremos Brigade has been realising for decades. I found the Venceremos

Brigade among the weeds of the American Left, modelling a distinct and positive

form of US-Cuban relations amidst a political context hostile to Cuba. Born

from fraught relations, the Brigade has persisted throughout the period defined

THE VENCEREMOS BRIGADE: NORTH AMERICANS IN CUBA SINCE 1969 237

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by negative relations and demonstrates how a productive politics can emerge

from a politics of hostility: when mutual interests are involved. The current rela-

tional shift offers a new vantage point from which to reconsider US-Cuban rela-

tions – offering a space to explore the Venceremos Brigade.

The Venceremos Brigade was a political education project founded in 1969 by

members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) along with officials of

the Republic of Cuba. The Brigade continues to travel to Cuba today, and to date

has sent more than 9,000 activists to the island (Sale 1973). Those who have

participated in the Brigade have done so to demonstrate support for the Cuban

Revolution/Government, foster socio-economic growth in the country, develop

political and social consciousness, and learn about Cuba. ‘Brigadistas’ have tradi-

tionally demonstrated support and helped to foster growth on the island by par-

ticipating in national sugar harvests or housing projects, all the while learning

from the Cuban Revolution. Today, brigadistas continue to travel to Cuba and

work on the island while learning of its politics and culture.

Having begun ten years after the 1959 culmination of the Cuban Revolution,

this long-standing North American project of support for Cuba should be known.

The group’s participants embody a recurring trend from the course of US history:

North Americans negotiate the contradictions of the US’s proffered patriotism

that simultaneously allows for institutionally marginalising certain subgroups of

citizens. The Brigade’s participants demonstrate this historical tendency through

their collective, demograph diversity – they represent a broad scope of the US

along the dimensions of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. There is

little written on the Venceremos Brigade within the pertinent historiographies –

neither in the history of US-Cuban relations nor in the history of the New Left.

The story’s importance and relevance become increasingly apparent as our pre-

sent moment asks us to rethink our orientation towards Cuba.

The age into which the Brigade was born was one dominated by a fundamen-

tally anti-Cuban narrative. The narrative was historically constructed, having

begun long before 1959, and the story has only marginally changed since the

culmination of Cuba’s communist revolution. Looking to Cuban-American pol-

icy today, we are entering a new policy arena, one governed by a decrease in

hostility, a spirit of reconciliation, and fundamentally speaking, a future of pro-

ductive relations between the US and Cuba. This is the US in which I read the

Venceremos Brigade, not a US that was ruled by ‘an impulsive force calling for

the invasion of Cuba and the overthrow of its government’ or a US ruled by

‘expansionism and industrialism – the territorial urge accompanied by a search

for markets’ (Langley 1968, 185–186). Rather, I locate the Venceremos Brigade

today, in an evolving political situation wherein the US president has begun to

ease travel restrictions to Cuba, and diplomatic talks are transpiring between the