We have often discussed the paradox that a thinker as seminal as Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), whose ideas resonated so deeply with radical nationalist and anti-imperialist leftism, in the manner of Che Guevara, showed, in his writings from 1959 to 1961, the year of his death, so little enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution.
Sartre, for example, who wrote the preface and, in a way, “translated” Les Damnés de la terre for the Francois Maspero edition in 1961, identified with the Cuban Revolution more than the Black, Martinican-Algerian thinker. Even in texts written after 1959, such as those collected in Toward the African Revolution (1964), a book that is unfortunately read less than his others, Fanon refers to Cuba without crediting the change the Revolution is producing on the island and in the region.
The explanation may lie in a couple of passages from The Wretched of the Earth, in which Fanon refers directly to Castro. At one point in his great essay, Fanon alludes to the fact that the delegations from Third World countries, meeting at the UN in September 1960, are not surprised that Castro appears in military uniform at the podium of the General Assembly. For Fanon, there is no great surprise at the Cuban leader’s attire because war has become, for underdeveloped countries, a constitutive part of reality. War is not the exception, but the rule, the way of life for colonized peoples, and the uniform symbolizes the origin and acceptance of a barbaric reality: “Likewise Castro attending the UN in military uniform does not scandalize the underdeveloped countries. What Castro is demonstrating is how aware he is of the continuing regime of violence. What is surprising is that he did not enter the UN with his submachine gun; but perhaps they wouldn’t have allowed that. The revolts, the acts of desperation, the factions armed with machetes or axes find their national identity in the unrelenting struggle that pits capitalism against socialism.”
But Fanon was not unaware that the polarization of the Cold War had created an antagonistic communist bloc, which held hegemony over its territory, a hegemony that also did not align with the interests of the colonized nations of the Third World, especially in Africa. Like the post-1962 Guevara, Fanon was critical of Moscow and the policy of the European communist parties, especially the French, regarding the Algerian question and African decolonization in general. It is there that Fanon’s greatest discord with the Cuban project appears: for the decolonial intellectual, the binary logic of the Cold War is part of the political and symbolic apparatus of the colonial order. That is why, at another point in The Wretched of the Earth, he refers critically to the Soviet nuclear protection of Cuba, which the Cuban leadership conceived from 1960, at the latest: “And there is no reason to believe that demagoguery alone explains the sudden interest by the major powers in the petty affairs of the underdeveloped regions. Every peasant revolt, every insurrection in the Third World fits into the framework of the cold war. Two men are beaten up in Salisbury and an entire bloc goes into action, focuses on these two men and uses this beating to raise the issue of Rhodesia—linking it to the rest of Africa and every colonized subject. But the full-scale campaign under way leads the other bloc to gauge the flaws in its sphere of influence. The colonized peoples realize that neither faction is interested in disengaging itself from regional conflicts. They no longer limit their horizons to one particular region since they are swept along in this atmosphere of universal convulsion. When every three months we learn that the sixth or seventh U.S. Fleet is heading toward some coast or other, when Khrushchev threatens to come to Castro’s aid with the help of missiles, when Kennedy envisages drastic solutions for Laos, the colonized or newly independent peoples get the impression they are being forced, whether they like it or not, into a frantic march.”
Fanon’s reservations regarding the Cuban Revolution stemmed from the duality he perceived in Fidel Castro. On one hand, Castro was the leader of a national liberation process, recovering lost or limited sovereignty. But, on the other hand, Castro was an ally of Moscow, in the midst of the Cold War, advancing the interests of the Soviet bloc in the Third World. The first Castro was a key actor in the decolonization process with which Fanon had been committed since the early fifties, when, freshly graduated in psychiatry from Lyon, he settled in a hospital for the mentally ill in Algeria. But the second was part of the same colonial system of the Cold War, which did not exclude the global politics of the Soviet bloc and the communist parties loyal to Moscow and “Marxism-Leninism.”[1]
The key to the distance in the Fanonian gaze on the Cuban Revolution lies, as with E. P. Thompson and other critical Marxists of the New Left, in the perception that the coupling with the Soviet bloc, while diminishing the originality of Cuban socialism, prevented it from exercising autonomous solidarity with African decolonization.
As is known, between 1964 and 1965, Che Guevara attempted to shorten these distances during his African travels. Along with a specific model for directing the national economy, different from the Soviet model and which generated multiple resistances within the government, Che Guevara bequeathed to the island’s leadership an entire strategy of intervention in the processes of African decolonization, which resorted to diplomacy as much as to guerrilla warfare. Unlike the economic management model, which would soon be discarded by the island’s government, the policy of support for African decolonization would extend into the eighties.
Between late 1964 and early 1965, Guevara traveled through Algeria, Mali, Congo, Guinea, Ghana, Dahomey, Tanzania and met with the Algerian Ben Bella, the Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah, the Tanzanian Julius Nyerere, the Congolese Massamba Débat, and even with the new leader of the Movement for the Liberation of Angola, Agostinho Neto. On one of these trips, Guevara also met with Josie Fanon, the widow of the Martinican Marxist, who had died a few years earlier in Washington, and reiterated in Révolution Africaine, the publication she directed, ideas very similar to those of Fanon in Les Damnés de la terre.
Guevara’s involvement in these processes had, besides the ideological affinity, an intellectual origin that often escapes his scholars: the Argentinian was perhaps the only one among the top leaders of the Revolution who spoke and read French. In the Archive of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, in Mexico City, in the files corresponding to the Argentinian Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, director of that institution in the early sixties, there is ample evidence of Guevara’s interest in the Spanish translation of The Wretched of the Earth, with the famous preface by Jean-Paul Sartre.
The translation, as we know, was commissioned by Enrique González Pedrero, a collaborator of Orfila Reynal, to his wife, the Cuban writer Julieta Campos, and the book had two editions, one in 1963 and another in 1965. In Orfila’s papers in the FCE archive, there are communications from Carlos Fuentes and Enrique González Pedrero that report on the interest of Raúl Roa Kourí, son of the foreign minister, then posted at the Cuban embassy in Mexico, in sending copies of the Spanish edition of The Wretched of the Earth to Havana. In the end, as observed by the Cuban philosopher Félix Valdés García, the Venceremos publishing house reproduced Campos’ translation in 1965, and Ediciones Revolucionarias reprinted the essays from Toward the African Revolution in 1966.
The connection between Latin American guerrillas and African and Asian decolonization, fostered by the Cuban Revolution, was, to a large extent, the starting point for the creation of organizations like the OSPAAAL (Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America), which held its first meeting in Havana in January 1966. Guevara, who was then secluded in a residence in Dar es Salaam after the failure of the Congo guerrilla campaign and awaiting a transfer to Prague, understood the creation of this body as a confirmation of his ideas.
Guevara’s message to the Tricontinental, made public in April 1967 while he was fighting in Bolivia, though written months earlier, did not cite Fanon, but in its review of the African situation, it alluded to a “virginity” in the African colonial process, which recalls certain moments in The Wretched of the Earth. Guevara distinguished the situation of the decolonization of Portuguese enclaves like Guinea, Mozambique, and Angola, where he saw progress, from that of Congo, Rhodesia, and South Africa, under apartheid, where he observed setbacks. But he intuited, like Fanon, that decolonization was not enough to leave the colonial period behind: “We have seen therefore that the Manichaeanism that first governed colonial society is maintained intact during the period of decolonization.”
Thus, the limited reception of Fanon in Cuba occurred during the most clearly Guevarist moment of the Cuban Revolution, between 1966 and 1968. After the overcoming of that Guevarist period and the adoption of a policy of integration into the Soviet bloc, Fanon’s ideas, critical of the “two imperialisms of the Cold War,” in the same vein as Guevara’s speech in Algiers, became an obstacle to the Sovietization of Cuban socialism.
In Leer a Fanon 50 años después (Reading Fanon 50 Years Later, 2016), the Cuban scholar Félix Valdés García states that since the seventies, the decolonial thinker “ceased to be part of the readings for the Philosophy program at the University of Havana.”[2] The Mexican Jaime Ortega Reyna maintains, for his part, that “in Cuba there was a tendency to forget Fanon’s thought, above all, his decolonial spirit.”[3]
As Ortega suggests, the belated gesture by Fernández Retamar and others to assimilate Fanon into the revolutionary tradition of José Martí produced a whitening of Fanon’s radical decolonization through Martían republicanism. In any approach to Fanon from the 19th-century Hispanic American intellectual tradition of decolonization, republicanism appears as a core element that is difficult to assimilate. Any other approach from the Latin American Marxism of the Cold War faces the difficulty of generally rejecting the thesis of the two imperialisms shared by Fanon and Guevara.[4]
The key point of that disagreement is conveniently forgotten: on September 20, 1973, at a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Algiers, Fidel Castro proposed a refutation of Guevara’s famous speech in that same city a decade earlier. The USSR was not an imperialist power but a nation in solidarity, and its support for the Third World was resolute and profound. Criticisms of this support by leaders of the New Left, like Fanon and Guevara, handed weapons to leftist revisionism, an accomplice to imperialist war.
In The Rebel’s Clinic (2024), the brilliant biography of Frantz Fanon written by Adam Shatz,[5] the rejection that the Martinican and Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary felt for that Cold War logic—which implied an alliance with the Soviet bloc as the only path toward decolonization—is confirmed. His connection with the Angolan anti-communist Holden Roberto falls within that same heterodoxy. Fanon’s disagreement with Cuba was an extension of his own disagreement with the French Communist Party and the pro-Soviet left of Europe, which, in his view, could not understand decolonization outside of a binary rationality.
Notes:
[1] Cf. Rafael Rojas, Fighting over Fidel. The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, Princeton University Press, 2017.
[2] Félix Valdés García (ed): Leer a Fanon medio siglo después, Clacso/ Ruth Editorial, Buenos Aires, 2017.
[3] Jaime Ortega Reyna, “La revolución imaginada. Itinerarios de la recepción de Frantz Fanon en América Latina y el Caribe,” en Mario Rufer, La colonialidad y sus nombres: conceptos clave, Clacso Buenos Aires, 2023.
[4] Cf. Claudia Zapata, Lucía Stecher y Elena Oliva, Frantz Fanon desde América Latina: lecturas contemporáneas de un pensador del siglo XX, Corregidor, Buenos Aires, 2013.
[5] Adam Shatz: The Rebel’s Clinic. The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2024.
