29.01. Tanya Harmer (Exile at the Centre of the Solar System: Chileans in Cuba and Global Revolutionary Circuits at the End of the Cold War)

Global History Colloquium, 29 January 2024, 18h15-19h45 (in person)

FU Berlin, FMI, Room A336, Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin

Abstract:

Exile at the Centre of the Solar System: Chileans in Cuba and Global Revolutionary Circuits at the End of the Cold War

Abstract: During the Cold War, revolutionaries, dissidents, liberation movements and refugees from all over the world travelled to Cuba in search of solidarity, support and safety. In many respects, Cuba was the logical place to seek support and to connect with networks across the Americas and beyond. Following the coup that brought a right-wing dictatorship to power in 1973 in Chile, Chilean exiles became the largest group of refugees to date to arrive. For more than a decade, they worked, studied, raised families and, in many cases, prepared for internationalist revolutionary missions and anti-dictatorial resistance. This paper examines what it meant to seek exile in Cuba or to spend time on the island as an exile en route to internationalist missions and resistance. In doing so, it explores the centrality and consequences Cuba had for global revolutionary circuits in the 1970s and 1980s. It also asks how these connections and circulations shaped the late Cold War and the way the conflict ended.

Tanya Harmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of International History at the LSE. She is the author of Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (UNC, 2011), which won LASA’s Luciano Tomassini award, and Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (UNC, 2020).