Rendering Armed Struggle: OSPAAAL, Cuban Poster Art, and South-South Solidarity at the United Nations1

This article considers the role of the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) in championing a Latin American, tricontinentalist vision of Third World solidarity between these regions. It argues that Cuba used visual and media arts to frame and reframe historical evets, utilizing OSPAAAL as a conduit of pro-Cuba revolutionary ideas, as it circulated updates on national liberation struggles and calls to action for internationalist solidarity. OSPAAAL produced visual art in solidarity campaigns that allowed Cuba to promote a particular interpretation of the Cold War as ongoing colonialism to generate transnational support for national liberation struggles in the Middle East and Africa, as well as to promote the Cuban revolution itself. In particular, it examines the way that the visual approach used by the artists working with OSPAAAL intersected with other modes of transnational solidarity activism to promote revolutionary ideals and commonalities between distant participants and specifically in order to influence international cooperation at the United Nations and in advancing Castro’s profile within the Non-Aligned

Mundo. En el texto se argumenta que Cuba hizo uso de las artes visuales y de la comunicación gráfica para enmarcar y replantear determinados eventos históricos, utilizando a la OSPAAAL como un canal de ideas revolucionarias procubanas, tal como circularon entre las luchas de liberación nacional y en los llamados a la acción por la solidaridad internacionalista. El arte visual producido por la OSPAAAL permitió a Cuba promover una interpretación particular de la Guerra Fría como la continuación del colonialismo en la búsqueda de conseguir el respaldo transnacional para las luchas de liberación nacional en el Medio Oriente y África, así como para promover a la propia revolución cubana. En particular, se examina, por un lado, la forma en que se ha utilizado el enfoque visual del equipo gráfico de OSPAAAL en el momento de cruzarse con otras estrategias de activismo solidario transnacional cuyos objetivos eran la promoción entre miembros lejanos de ideales revolucionarios y de puntos en común y, por otro lado, como esta producción gráfica ha influido en los programas de cooperación internacional de las Naciones Unidas y, asimismo, en la representación del perfil Castro en el seno del Movimiento de Países No Alineados.
The Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) formally began when 82 nations came together in 1966 in Havana, Cuba, to champion a Latin American, tricontinentalist vision of Third World solidarity between these regions. OSPAAAL quickly became a conduit of revolutionary ideas, as it circulated updates on national liberation struggles and calls to action for solidarity, through a monthly newsletter, the Tricontinental Bulletin (1966-1988, 1995-), and a bi-monthly magazine, the Tricontinental (1967-1990, 1995-), which included interviews, news reporting and analysis, speeches and essays, alongside colorful posters, folded inside the magazine, which could easily be removed and displayed. This article explores the means by which the organization utilized visual art campaigns to promote a particular interpretation of the Cold War as ongoing colonialism, to generate transnational support for national liberation struggles in the Middle East and Africa, as well as to promote the Cuban revolution itself. In particular, it examines the way that the visual approach used by the artists working with OSPAAAL intersected with other modes of transnational solidarity activism to promote revolutionary ideals and commonalities between distant participants and specifically in order to influence international cooperation at the United Nations. Specifically, the work of images circulated via OSPAAAL facilitated the articulation of Cuba's intention to build an alliance with the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization at the United Nations as a means toward increased influence in the Non-Aligned Movement and garnering support for the ongoing revolution at home. In order to explain the reach and significance of OSPAAAL's solidarity work, this research considers a visual practice critical to South-South organizing, which I frame conceptually as the work of "rendering." I described this practice as that of mobilizing a kind of historical agency embedded in visual objects that are produced as an act of solidarity, a power that the visual has to shape discourse. I use this concept to expand upon the conceptual argument that transnational social movements "in the work of framing social discourses, present visual and performative pathway-spaces through which subjectivities can be crafted and realigned." 2 The term rendering has several meanings, which further makes valuable thinking through the implications of its use to explain this mode of solidarity action. "To render" can mean to provide or to give, such as to "render service," and can be used in this way to describe the means by which knowledge of some form is submitted for consideration, or otherwise delivered. The phrase "render judgement", for instance, is used to indicate a process of submitting a verdict or opinion, implying that deliberation or the application of some sort of ethical framework to an idea or an act has informed its conveyance. Rendering, furthermore, means to artistically represent, depict, or visually describe, and by such means to interpret or express. I use the notion of rendering to point to the many ways that the visual can communicate judgement, suggest ethical considerations, describe the particularity of events and to frame narratives in the service of political consciousness.
In terms of solidarity activism, the work of translating a conflict from one national context, with its particularities of culture and language, its inherent multiplicity and complexity, to another, far removed, where it can be usefully understood, is not an easy task. The work of rendering a known struggle in such a way as to mobilize political resources to the task of solidarity requires both a commitment to some version of accuracy, a meaningful representativeness, and some ability to abstract, to translate through forms that have the ability to speak to universally identifiable notions. 3  3 This notion of solidarity is well articulated by Julie-Françoise Tolliver in describing the work of poet Aimé Césaire in recuperating the image of Patrice Lumumba as an agent of anti-colonial solidarity in Julie-Françoise Tolliver, "Césaire/Lumumba. A Season of Solidarity": Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50: 4 (2014), pp. 398-409. See also the work translation in the case of OSPAAAL went far beyond ideology, foreign policy, or political programs. It attempted to convey a clear message regarding the relationship between local struggles and the wider fight against imperialism. OSPAAAL's poster art presented a vision of resistance both simple and compelling to non-Cubans, emphasizing the central role of Cuba in organizing and leading cooperation. This essay argues that the poster art of OSPAAAL, circulated via publications that reached a broad audience of activists and advocates that directly helped to shape the agenda of the non-aligned countries, provided a rendering of anti-colonial conflict that facilitated the larger designs of Cuba's internationalist agenda. 4

Cuban Internationalism and the Non-Aligned Movement
When in 1955, Indonesian president Achmed Sukarno hosted the first Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, this event symbolized the beginning of a concerted effort by formerly colonized nations to carve out a space for economic and political independence 5 and to recognize the ongoing efforts of these countries to maintain neutral relations in the escalating violence of the ambitions of powerful states, such as Russia, China, and the United States. This conference echoed and called attention to the aspirations of earlier antiracism and anti-colonialism conferences, such as the League of Colored Peoples, founded in Britain in 1931 by Jamaican civil rights leader Harold Moody, and the Comintern-led League Against Imperialism founded in 1927 in Brussels specifically on the grounds of containing the expansion of China, reducing the intervention of the U.S. in Latin America, and promoting nationalist self-determination in Africa. 6 As a result of this meeting, the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization was formed, and subsequently organized conferences in Cairo 1957 and in Conakry in 1960 to articulate a collective position against racism and imperialism faced in these regions. 7 Between these two conferences, in 1959, Cuba's armed revolution brought a radical, socialist government into power, and, subsequently, the United States mobilized resources, including work through the Organization of American States, to isolate Cuba within the hemisphere. 8 The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) provided a unique space for transregional dialogue that from 1955 in Bandung would challenge the international hierarchy of power that privileged European and North American interests in international institutions such as the United Nations. As Cuba's revolutionary cause began to be considered a threat to hemispheric stability, Castro looked to parties outside the region to help establish his government's legitimacy. It had not gone without notice that African and Asian delegations had formed a bloc at the United Nations that had limited the ability of France, a powerful colonialist European state, to bring resolutions to the table that might undermine Algeria's independence movement. That the United Nations admitted Algeria and recognized its claim to sovereign statehood confirmed "the UN's role as an arbiter of the new international order." 9 The Non-Aligned Movement represented formerly colonized nations that sought to resist both the pressures of global capitalism and that of expansive communism to promote political independence as a third bloc. While the NAM had as a primary goal peaceful coexistence, Cuba's ideological commitments prioritized continued support for armed struggle, and despite the rhetorical position it most often took in support of peace at the United Nations, its strong positions on armed intervention would continue to influence conversation and debate among delegations.
When Fidel Castro decided to attend his first UN General Assembly meeting in 1960, he was not as warmly received as he had expected to be. 10 Complaining of poor treatment at the upscale accommodation arranged for him in Manhattan, Castro eventually decided to relocate the Cuban delegation to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, a move that stirred up coverage in the press, resulting in the visit of several high-profile leaders within the African-American community to the hotel and, in part, inspiring a longer connection between Cuba and the African-American civil rights Castro was clearly an outsider at the UN. However, it was during this same year that he chose to make Cuba the first Latin American nation to join the Non-Aligned Movement. In joining the NAM, Cuba signaled the beginning of a more formal alliance of Latin American anti-imperialism and noninterventionism with Asian and African decolonization, despite the fact that Cuba's strong connections with Moscow raised notable suspicion. In 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement, led by heads of states that attended the Cairo and Conakry meetings, convened in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Castro was not yet an insider in Belgrade, but from roughly 1962 to 1965, he and his advisors persistently sought an entry point for influence within the Afro-Asian bloc at the United Nations through the NAM, looking for support for the Cuban revolutionary government and its calls to resist U.S. imperialism. Part of Castro's strategy to increase influence in these two organizational settings was to ally himself with Algerian leaders that would be able to help articulate the relationship the Americas could have to national liberation struggles on the continent of Africa and eventually also in the Middle East.
During these years, the Algerian Revolution stood as a clear example of national liberation from colonial forces, and also in the early 1960s had become something of an informal headquarters and site of exchange for many groups involved in dimensions of transnational revolutionary activity. When Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella visited Cuba in 1962 in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, he vowed to assist the small island nation in defending itself against a North American invasion, and Castro determined that Algeria and Cuba could form a partnership in fostering revolution. 11 Algeria and Cuba became allies in assisting armed groups in Africa and Latin America, and Algiers became a key point through which both arms and humanitarian aid could be transported and organized. During these years, Castro formed a strong alliance with Ben Bella and benefited from his close connections to highranking Algerian revolutionary leaders, whose socialist reputation Castro admired and hoped to emulate. At this same time, in 1960, Argentine Jorge Masetti, who was in charge of overseeing arms transfers to Algeria, was put in charge of founding a Cuban news agency, Prensa Latina, which would serve to disseminate news from Latin America to counterparts abroad. 12 In 1965, however, Ben Bella's government was toppled by a military coup, and Cuba was forced to look for another way to maintain its position of influence within the Afro-Asian bloc.13 In 1964, the Non-Aligned Movement met in Cairo, Egypt, where Abdel Gamal Nasser nudged the movement ever so slightly away from its earlier commitments to national liberation and socialism and toward more nationalist and alliance-based aims. In Belgrade in 1964, Nasser had pushed the movement away from support for military aid and military alliance, despite the fact that weapons and military personnel continued to be successfully moved through Egypt, including from Cuba to Zanzibar and the Republic of the Congo. It became clear to Castro that Nasser, as the most prominent and powerful figurehead of the Non-Aligned Movement, hoped to redirect the bloc away from support of national liberation and armed conflict, and toward a Pan-Arab nationalism that belied the strategic positioning of Egypt as the primary regional power in North Africa. Algeria had been set to host the next Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference, but after the fall of Ben Bella, the conference was cancelled, opening the door for Havana to host it. In this moment, Cuba saw an opening to persuade leaders to push beyond the limits of Nasser's vision of anti-imperialist struggle, which Castro also criticized as circumscribed by limitations to women's rights and to labor reform. Castro pushed for a far more reaching revolutionary stance, which saw anti-colonialism as deeply intertwined with other social reforms, such as education and health care, and an ongoing commitment to liberation by revolutionary force.
In  16 This commitment would extend well beyond the 1970s, and by the 1980s, Cuba would play a decisive role in preventing South Africa's colonization of Namibia and in support of independence movements in Angola and Mozambique. Cuba's direct intervention in Africa, later billed as "selfless internationalism" by leaders such as Nelson Mandela 17 and as a matter of revolutionary idealism bordering on the fanatical by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 18 it should be noted, also served to exert influence on the Soviet Union and the U.S. in other areas of Cuban interest and to mobilize public support at home, particularly among Afro-Cubans and other racialized groups. 19 However, sending direct military and humanitarian assistance were not the only means by which Cuba signaled its willingness to advance internationalist revolutionary objectives.

OSPAAAL and Cuban Political Poster Art
OSPAAAL since 1967 has printed a magazine, still in circulation, called The Tricontinental, which at its peak distributed over 30,000 issues in four languages, mailed to 87 countries, and most of these issues included a poster, stapled as an insert between the center fold. Distribution was most often by diplomatic pouch directly to organizations and leaders allied with tricontinentalist ideals. OSPAAAL also published books and reprinted texts of important speeches, but its widest reach was most certainly its magazine and its political poster art. While it is always difficult to speak directly to the question of reception, it is notable that archives of leftist political parties and organizations around the world still contain sizeable collections of issues and that references to its articles and reprints of its photographs and images feature prominently in the circulation of news stories of many leftist organs, particularly among Castroist and Guevarist parties' political journalism. In terms of poster art, Lincoln Cushing has argued that OSPAAAL's was the most enduring and effective "international poster distribution system in the world." 20 Part of the success of this endeavor can be traced to state support for the printing of political posters through OSPAAAL, ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute), and Editora Politica, which was the publishing department of the Cuban Communist Party. Poster art was a critical feature of the Cuban Revolution itself, flowing naturally as a form of ideological persuasion from other revolutionary artistic traditions like the avant-garde art of the Russian Revolution. Eladio Rivadulla Martínez was commissioned by Castro to make the first poster art of the revolution, to celebrate the victory of the revolution in 1959 through "afiches" to be plastered across the island, announcing the new order of the day, designed in a style that paid tribute to the poster art of the Taller Grafica that had served as a vital organ of solidarity in Mexico. 21 Many of the primary artists that would be employed in designing the poster art of OSPAAAL, such as Martínez, Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, Alfredo J. González Rostgaard, and René Mederos Pazos, made a primary living making film posters for Cuba's film industry. The prolific publishing by the ICAIC, the film institute, which printed poster art for each and every film produced by the institute and also for other international films that were distributed in Cuba from elsewhere that lacked marketable poster art, supported artists and provided a space where poster art could refine its own new visual languages. Within this space, artists were called on to create poster art that would speak to revolutionary themes in the same language of bold, captivating, vibrant, and universal images. Two central characteristics of the artistic production conditions made the production and distribution of OSPAAAL posters unique in this period. The first was their visual uniqueness in public spaces. The noncommercial nature of the images, in striking contrast to the preponderance of "marketing" images in poster advertising across most of the recipient countries, suggested that these posters, "had nothing to sell." 22 This absence of commercialism visually highlighted the relationship these posters had to the presentation of revolutionary ideas, particularly as they competed for space on public walls next to advertisements for consumer products or political campaign posters. Second, art historians have noted that the posters aesthetically embodied the spirit of the Cuban Revolution and its slogan: "within the revolution, everything, outside, nothing." This meant that over time, artists could work untethered to any particular style, allowing for a tremendous amount of creative experimentation, 23  party posters, that were often tied to specific colors, text, images, banners, representational art, and sometimes even to very specific artistic movements or styles. In fact, the posters of the early 1960s were at home equally in the world of psychedelic colors of the 1960s folk and "take it to the streets" protest music culture as in the world of silkscreened, wearable "Pop Art." Posters might mirror the abstract minimalism of Pablo Neruda's poetry or the loud expressionist painting of urban São Paulo. They had tremendous stylistic range, which is remarkable considering the frequent destabilizations of and limitations to Cuba's print economy of paint, paper, and equipment.
The impact of the graphic in political messaging in the work of Cuban political posters has been described by Susan Sontag as early as 1970 as providing a seductive source of ideological motivation to revolutionary causes and ongoing resistance. 24 But to focus on the work of rendering, Cuban posters brought a particular visual form of solidarity work into the context of institutional organizing efforts. Prior to OSPAAAL, Cuba from 1959 to the mid-1960s was engaged in what Dirk Kruijt describes as a "fervor" of training revolutionary guerrilla soldiers and encouraging socialist revolution in places like Panama, Paraguay, Colombia, Argentina, and elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, during the same period that it was politically isolated and under significant threat by the U.S. 25 However, by the mid-1960s, it was clear that this strategy was not working, and in the wake of increasing criticism of Cuba's alignment with the Soviet Union, Castro decided to pursue a more pragmatic path, allying himself more vigorously with tercermundismo and the Non-Aligned Movement, inspired by the Bandung meetings to "bring Bandung" to Havana. 26 As Castro travelled across the region, speaking with trade unionists, students, rural peasants, and the urban poor, he and his advisors had not found as much sympathy for militarism or guerrilla violence as they had supposed, and Castro was somewhat surprised to find that the primary concerns of many of these groups were in increasing the basic standard of living above overturning regimes. 27 As a consequence, he shifted his energies to reframing the experience of revolution through national liberation struggles, and from 1966 to 1968 utilized the poster art of OSPAAAL to promote a radical-socialist, anti-imperialist, version of Tricontinental solidarity that would appeal to leaders of the emerging Non-Aligned Movement. Increasingly, poster art of the Tricontinental would also be directed toward making visible the specific campaigns that were being advanced by Cuba in the institutional setting of the UN, but through an appeal to shared revolutionary objectives. The twin goals of cultural production according to the revolution were to promote armed struggle and the guerra popular. In this way, artists and intellectuals were discouraged from creating vanguardist art that might not be interpretable across great distances or divides of culture and were prompted to make accessible art, art that could easily communicate with and convince the masses. Posters and articles were printed with text printed in a variety of languages of the organization, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Italian, and by 1968 in Arabic, offering an entry point for not only the organizations that received copies, with their activist and professional staff, but also to constituents of these groups, with whom print literature could easily be shared.
Cuban poster art circulated by the Tricontinental took on a set of explicit themes that dovetailed with Castro's vision of revolutionary Cuba and that reinforced the role that he imagined for Cuba in providing leadership to Non-Aligned countries in the struggle against imperialism. Artist René Mederos Pazos, best known for his images celebrating the history of the revolution through the lens of Castro's and Guevara's role in leading armed struggle in the trenches, for example, was sent to Vietnam to document the Viet Cong struggle. The images he produced first circulated juxtaposed in the magazine against speeches given by Hô Chi Mihn and Che Guevara, interpreting the Vietnamese struggle through the framework of internationalism. Mederos Pazos developed a style that combined the same iconographic characteristics of his earlier well-known depictions of Cuban combat with shapes and forms that reflected the Vietnamese landscape and folk art, such as the inclusion of local tropical foliage and sweeping paintbrush strokes to mimic Vietnamese lettering. Depictions of the conflict emphasized not only a similar and common enemy in representations of militarized empire, but also rendered shared heroes of national liberation in the figure of Minh. They also illustrated a naturalness of the inclusion of local political projects within the scope of Tricontinental internationalism. Eventually Mederos Pazos' most iconic images were adapted to postage stamps, travelling visual reminders of Cuba's solidarity with the Viet Cong in its struggle against colonialism and the United States.
A second major theme of the poster art of this period showcased the antiracism Castro wished to emphasize as part of the shared fight against colonialism. Despite a poor record on race relations and racial inequality within Cuba, Castro built his platform on longstanding Cuban solidarity with African American suffering in the United States 28 and against the institutionalized racism of colonialism in Africa. 29 In 1968, the Tricontinental published a poster in collaboration with a designer affiliated with the Black Panthers, to commemorate the Watts Riots, a violent civil rebellion that followed police violence in the city of Los Angeles in 1965. 30 Castro's interest in highlighting the connections between forms of racism "in the belly of the beast" as well as in ongoing colonialism also led him in 1972 to invite San Francisco-based artist Jane Norling to come to Cuba, on exchange from the People's Press, to be tasked with bringing into focus the connections between racial struggles in the US and the Caribbean. Norling's work demonstrates the influence of national liberation poster art on interpreting U.S. race relations, particularly in drawing attention to the exploitation of the bodies of people of African descent, such as women of color working in poorly paid industries such as health care and domestic service. Reminding viewers of the place of subaltern subjects in the capitalist imperial project, these images suggested that to challenge the hegemonic narrative of global capital meant firstly rejecting the exploitative racist and sexist ideologies upon which it was based. Castro embraced the struggle of black solidarity and black power movements in the United States in a way that he did not at home, but these images spoke to his critique of Nasserism and to the centrality of labor and women's rights to internationalist revolutionary struggle. As a point of contrast, in January 1968, when Cuba hosted the Congreso Cultural de Havana, bringing artists together from over 70 different countries in order to reinforce the role of cultural production in anti-imperialist struggle, the Cuban government expressly forbid Afro-Cubans from speaking out publicly about race relations on the island. imprisoned, under the accusation that they had conspired to publish a "manifesto negro." 31 Cuba's revolutionary internationalist poster art was aimed at an audience abroad, at community leaders, intellectuals, and political groups in the growing membership of Non-Aligned movement countries. It was here that Castro wished to declare the ideals of Cuba's revolutionary government and to suggest that Cuba's interest in the affairs of Africa, Asia and the Middle East were aligned with longstanding Cuban ideals of anti-colonialism, antiapartheid, and anti-racism. However, these posters circulated for another purpose, as well, in that they drew attention to the ongoing imperialist violence of the United States and gave weight to Castro's objective of reinforcing the necessity of maintaining armed struggle and that of the permanence of Cuba's revolutionary regime. The poster art of OSPAAAL visually illustrated the connections between these goals, with particular focus on the visual imagery of armed struggle and graphic representations of the intellectual underpinnings of anti-colonialism.

Third World Solidarity at the United Nations
At the United Nations, the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) had organized a platform formalized in 1960 from which to advance the goals of national liberation in Africa and Asia, and by 1973, with the independence of Guinea-Bissau, the Permanent Secretariat of AAPSO joined by the Soviet Solidarity Committee, decided to convene their 12 th session in Moscow in 1975. 32 AAPSO was founded on the principles of anti-colonialism and much of its energy was directed to not only garnering international support for revolutionary struggle, but also very specifically to the fight against apartheid. Its regular conferences were aimed at deepening understandings of apartheid and to recruiting representative delegates from key international organizations that would help widen the reach of their campaign. 33  Charter, which included non-intervention, self-determination, and upholding national sovereignty by means of national control of resources and unfettered economic and social development. 34 AAPSO's voice at the UN was the strongest source of support for these priorities and its members determined whether and how related resolutions would succeed in the General Assembly. By the late 1960s, Cuba's international priorities had aligned with that of AAPSO, and Castro's growing intervention in Africa, particularly in Angola, necessitated seeking support for these efforts. During this period, Cuba also struggled with shifts within the Soviet position toward not only Latin America, but also its expansionist designs in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. At the United Nations General Assembly, many countries outside of the AAPSO-bloc questioned the logic of coupling political and economic independence and challenged the position of national liberation as a viable approach to international security.
For all parties concerned at the United Nations, the Middle East presented a particular challenge. Only recently independent from British and French colonialism, the League of Nations mandate system, and occupations predicated on strategic military interests during the Second World War, modern states in the Middle East continued to experience high levels of conflict throughout the 1960s and early 1970s around borders established by the UN and the fate of displaced populations, such as "stateless" Kurdish and Palestinian refugees. In addition, external intervention in pursuit of access to natural resources and strategic military locations continued to add pressure on independent national governments. The Arab-Israeli War (1948), followed by the Six-Day War (1967), the War of Attrition (1970), and the Yom Kippur War (1973), gave evidence of an ongoing commitment on behalf of Israel's allies, notably the United Kingdom and the United States, to promote Israel's interest in the region and not to support demands of people of Arabic descent within Israel's borders, much less to prepare the return of those who had fled to nearby countries.
From the perspective of OSPAAAL, the policies of the Israeli state to utilize legal, military, economic, and other tactics to expel Palestinians and deprive them of territory was recognized as a renewed commitment by internationally empowered capitalist governments to colonialism, simply under a new guise. 35 With Egyptian leadership, countries within the Non-Aligned Movement mobilized by concern around Arab-Israeli conflict, and turned their interest toward Israeli land occupation, resulting in a decline in interest in the national independence of Palestine. This shift created an opportunity for Castro to speak to the question of Palestine in a nuanced way within these spaces, and to turn his attention to the means by which advocating for the armed struggle of Palestinian nationalists in the Middle East was akin to the ongoing need for armed struggle elsewhere. At the United Nations, the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organization from the late 1960s through to the early 1970s had as its primary focus the liberation of African peoples, with Angola's independence movement, finally achieved in 1975, as a central rallying point. This perspectival shift increased Castro's influence among the AAPSO-bloc at the United Nations, particularly with representatives less interested in directly taking on the powerful interests that had a stake in the creation and maintenance of the Israeli state.
Castro hoped to advance a pro-revolutionary platform at the United Nations by crafting a majority position around which Non-Aligned countries would organize themselves. Associating his own national and regional goals with the cause of national liberation in the Middle East and Africa, particularly by rallying support around the common ills of racism and apartheid, Castro was able to increase the visibility of Cuba's leadership and to advocate for its interests in these spaces. By 1968, the United Nations organized a special commission to investigate Israel's treatment of Palestinians, following several resolutions made by the General Assembly, the Security Council and the UN Commission on Human Rights designed to facilitate return for Palestinian refugees and to prevent the destruction of homes in occupied territories. 36 From 1968 to 1974, the United Nations passed numerous resolutions to deal with the fate of the Palestinian peoples, largely aimed at mobilizing humanitarian assistance through United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and establishing some form of recognition of a right to return. This advance at the UN could be largely attributed to the organizing work of the Afro-Asian solidarity bloc, which garnered support among European and Arab states similarly concerned with neo-colonialism or interested more generally in the need to seek support for stateless peoples and refugees, and which with Castro's involvement was able to include support for resolutions from other Latin American nations. On October 14, 1974, the United Nations heard and passed a resolution (No. 3210) that finally gave the Palestinian people a voice, by inviting the Palestinian Liberation Organization to represent the Palestinian people in deliberations on Palestine in the General Assembly, which provided a superficial end point of sorts to Castro's influence in that the entry of the PLO's voice shifted significantly the dynamics of debate. Prior to 1974, solidarity with the Palestinian cause provided an anchor for establishing the credibility of Castro's claims to support non-aligned, anti-imperialist struggle, allowing him to move beyond challenges of his position with respect to the Soviet Union. The increasing visibility of Cuba's Tricontinental magazine coverage of the Middle East over these years also contributed to the shaping of perspectives on the Arab world, particularly among leftist parties in Latin America, welcoming the Latin American left to envision its commitment to revolution to include positions on the Middle East, Zionism, and Palestinian nationalism. 37

Rendering Cuban Solidarity in Africa and the Middle East
What OSPAAAL artists contributed to the circulation of ideas of what armed struggle meant, however, between 1968 and 1974, as a mode of solidarity within transnational political spaces, suggests that the rendering work of visual culture facilitated connections and underlined principles of solidarity that allowed a particular hierarchy of struggle to take precedence over others in these international contexts. Artists depicted African and Middle Eastern liberation struggles with strong visual references to Cuban and Latin American revolutionary iconography. Using bold colors, particularly yellows, oranges, and reds, against thick black lines, artists abstracted images of struggle and portraits of revolutionary heroes, both intellectual and military. These posters created a symbolic visual language that was immediately accessible to audiences receiving the Tricontinental publications. Poster art was accompanied by essays written by figures such as Minh and Guevara, interviews with Yasser Arafat, pronouncements by Luis Cabral, and calls for specific acts and days of solidarity with various causes. Art historians have suggested that the use of minimalism and an aesthetic that mirrored highly reproduceable, cinematic poster art, visually suggested that the struggle for liberation had found its way into the idiom of the times. 38 OSPAAAL's poster art iconographically connected the ideological struggles of Latin American revolution with those of Vietnam, Palestine, the Congo, Yemen, and elsewhere, suggested the ability of individual causes to be considered from within a comparative frame and as interconnected on a trans-regional level. These posters also visually framed Castro's desire for solidarity action to move away from Nasserism, which limited as a "gatekeeper" Latin American internationalist approaches to solidarity action in international institutions. Appealing to the Afro-Asian bloc, the poster art used mirroring language, using symbolic and visual connections not only to identify, but also to demonstrate a more thorough rendering of these struggles.
Images circulated by OSPAAAL also highlighted the central relationship between racism and colonialism. Featured images were frequently meant to highlight the role of formerly excluded peoples within armed struggle, such as women, peasants, and black intellectual leaders. Although Cuba's commitment to resolving issues of social inequality on the island was unclear, the magazine reproduced numerous images of Amílcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba, as revolutionary leaders depicted visually in a similar fashion to images that circulated of U.S. civil rights activist Malcolm X, Cuban poet and independence hero José Marti, and the Nicaraguan revolutionary figure Augusto Sandino. When applied to the Palestinian cause in the Middle East, respect for cultural practices to avoid figurative representation, OSPAAAL posters utilized the same basic shapes, bold colors, use of contrast, and minimalist presentation to identify a direct comparison. This poster art circulated in such a manner as to define these causes as all a part of a larger project of resistance to colonialism. It rendered specific struggles legible through a common visual framework, making visible the work of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Organization at the United Nations in privileging national liberation struggle as a common one against colonialism, racism, apartheid, and intervention to their memberships and external publics alike. By 1979, Cuba eventually became a rising force within the Non-Aligned Movement, hosting its annual conference in Havana. OSPAAAL's poster art by this period had been able to help establish a dialogue useful to advancing not only Castro's but also the movement's broader goals. By creating a visual pathway space for rendering understandings of internationalist solidarity in forums such as the United Nations, this form of transnational communication would continue to be used long into the 1980s and 1990s as these same parties confronted the apartheid regime in South Africa and U.S. interventionism in Central American and the Caribbean. Wresting the tremendous force of both the movement and what was the Afro-Asian solidarity bloc at the UN from the orienting frameworks of Nasserism was no casual feat. Posters that reframed Middle Eastern, Asian, and African conflict through a Latin American and internationalist framework visually displayed Cuba's advocacy for Afro-Asian national liberation and for the notion of permanent revolution. OSPAAAL, as a tool of solidarity, visually articulated Cuba's intention to partner for a time with the aims of the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization at the United Nations, and the result of this ongoing campaign, with its various complementary strategies, enabled Cuba to raise its profile and expand its influence. It allowed the bloc to move forward resolutions on the national liberation of African nations and to eventually insert Latin American, and specifically Cuban, interests into the center of these spaces. By the late 1970s, Castro's interventions provided an intellectual resource to solidarity campaigns that refused to conceptualize regional hegemons as a useful alternative to European or U.S. neo-colonialism. Framing the struggles of the Palestinians, Angolans, Vietnamese, African-Americans, and others through a Latin American internationalist frame helped Cuba to defend the particular nature of the ongoing Cuban revolutionary position and its foreign policy. It also partially allowed Castro to deflect some external criticism for the revolution's failings at home.

Conclusions
On September 14, 1976, in Mexico City, a meeting of the Conference on Economic Co-Operation among Developing Countries, at which UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim announced in his opening remarks that "the movement toward economic integration and cooperation among States based on equality, one might say based on collective self-reliance, has deep roots in Latin America, going as far back as 150 years to the visionary ideas of the liberator Simón Bolivar." He continued, "the movement for third world solidarity may be entering today a new and decisive phase," one to which he attributed the significant influence of the United Nations framework and its commitment to the values and goals of trans-regional cooperation. 39 The rest of the statement continued to laud Latin America's, and of course Mexico's, revolutionary path to independence. It is notable that the Secretary General framed these goals so squarely within the language of Third-Worldist solidarity as a movement, a force of global change, and pointedly, as a primary source of restructuring and resource mobilization. This articulation by 1976 of Third World solidarity rhetorically mirrored the vision of tercermundismo advanced by Cuba beginning in the late 1960s, although it contradicted in some ways the essentially pragmatic approach advanced at the Conference. This reshaped narrative of what Latin American countries might contribute from within institutional frameworks to south-south solidarity movements of the early 1970s is the product of a long history of international organizing that was finally able to thread together distant struggles.
As a case study, OSPAAAL's experience and efforts to promote national liberation at the United Nations underline the increasing relevance of transnational visual culture and media in creating a distinct sense of political community possessing the ability to advance solidarity campaigns outside of the sphere of the state. Anne Garland Mahler argues that OSPAAAL was "the primary engine of radical cultural production throughout the world," and that it formed the "ideological backbone of current conceptualizations of global subalternity." 40 Although within the realm of institutional forms of international cooperation OSPAAAL was not always considered a resounding success, its continuing importance in Latin American and Third Worldist narratives of 1970s solidarity efforts presents a strong point of contradiction to the dismissal of these efforts as predominantly rooted in developmentalist ambitions or "fundamentally ambivalent in nature.  41 This perspective has been common among scholars writing about Latin American involvement in Third Worldist institutions, conferences, and organizations in the 1970s, and their collective pessimism is articulated well by Hugo Celso Felipe Mansilla, "Latin America within the Third World. The Search for a New Identity, the Acceptance of Old Contents": Ibero-amerikanisches Archiv, 11: 2 (1985), pp. 171-191.