The Rise and Decline of an Alliance: Cuba and African American Leaders in the 1960s

In the 1960s, a critical fracture developed in the American Civil Rights movement creating, in the process, a new group of Black nationalists. This new militant wing of the movement believed it had found a natural ally in Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolutionary regime and forged a close relationship with its leaders. Reitan argues that the parameters that governed the relationship between the Cuban government and increasingly radicalized African-American activists in the 1960s were largely determined by the ideological conflicts between the revolutionary views of Che Guevara and more conservative pro-Moscow views.