North Korea, Tricontinentalism, and the Latin American Revolution, 1959–1970
Moe Taylor, Cambridge University Press, £85

A GENERATION on from the Cold War, it is easy to forget how every aspect of our lives was shaped for half a century by the existential confrontation between the capitalist and socialist worlds.

Given that, it is imperative we do not allow the latest showdown between the “free” world and its adversaries today to obscure the real driving force of anti-communism after 1945: US imperialism.

That motive becomes emphatically clear when we consider alongside the usual suspects of Russia and China the “rogue” states that Washington and its satellites today continue to isolate, demonise or threaten: Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and so on. 

All were participants in a short-lived but influential experiment in internationalism in the mid-1960s known as Tricontinentalism that saw established capitalist America’s near invincible empire as the main enemy of historical progress and origin of global instability.

Spearheaded by communist North Korea and Cuba, this project was based on an analysis of the post-war order that argued that Washington’s strategy was to concentrate military resources wherever revolutionary change loomed in the global South.

The catalogue of victims of US imperialism is far too long to recount, but Vietnam was its signature campaign. This was a country targeted by the largest blitz in history that, if victorious on paper was, as a result, crippled for generations.

It was therefore no surprise that Vietnam was the centrepiece of the analysis emerging from revolutionary movements such as that in Cuba, where Che’s Guevara’s most celebrated maxim was a call to arms by creating “two, three, many Vietnams.”

A new consensus forged at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, which brought together 500 delegates from 82 countries, agreed that the central task of the international left was the defeat of US imperialism through armed insurgency.

As author Moe Taylor argues, this analysis was not just an indictment of US foreign policy, but a conscious rejection by socialist movements in the global South of naive Soviet faith in “peaceful coexistence” and China’s dogmatic sectarianism.

It was a challenge to the status quo within the socialist camp by an emerging Third Worldist tendency associated with the North Korean, Cuban, and Vietnamese communist parties.

Taylor writes: “Tricontinentalism broke with Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy while attempting to recentre the communist principle of proletarian internationalism, placing national liberation struggle before class struggle, and action over ideology.”

As North Korea’s most important historical engagement with Latin America, Kim Il Sung and the Workers’ Party of Korea gave Tricontinentalism concrete form by arming, financing and training guerillas from throughout the region. 

It is a hidden, but fascinating story: Mexico’s Movimiento de Accion Revolucionaria (MAR) was just one of many groups that travelled to Pyongyang (known locally as the “Capital of the Revolution”) to learn low-intensity warfare. 

Tricontinentalism has largely escaped left-wing analysis and is mostly invisible in existing Cold War scholarship, not least because North Korea and Cuba abandoned it in the early 1970s, but also because of an over-emphatic narrative of superpower rivalry that suits US triumphalism. 

Yet that does not diminish its stamp on subsequent perspectives, shaping the outline of cross-border solidarity, popularising a Third World consciousness, spawning an activist culture in the New Left, and tracing alternate pathways open to international socialists.

However, the enduring message of this episode is, as the author points out, one that derives from the “river of blood” that connects past and the present. From the daily insults to Palestine, permanent war in Congo, humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, the illegal embargo of Cuba, and the continuing division of Korea.

As Taylor writes: “The direct or indirect role of the US government in all of these crises brings us back to the question of US imperialism, raised so vociferously by North Korea and Cuba in the 1960s. 

“Washington has not been forced to account for the crimes against humanity it committed during the Cold War.”