Queer Harvests: Homosexuality, the U.S. New Left, and the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba

Resumen: Early in 1969, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest white student organization of the sixties in the United States, stood teetering at the brink of implosion, torn apart by competing factions. Confronted by the potential collapse of SDS, its leaders launched a project that they hoped would rejuvenate the movement. Inspired by Cuba's material advances and resistance to U.S. policy since the 1959 revolution, SDS began mobilizing hundreds of Americans to travel south to cut sugarcane, contributing their labor to the island's export harvest. On these Venceremos Brigades,1 participants would, in the words of organizers Sandra Levinson and Carol Brightman, "gain direct experience with a Third World socialist revolution and a greater understanding of 'revolution' as something which entails much more than guns in the hills, something which means hard work every day."2 Brigade organizers in the United States recognized that the daily work of harvesting sugarcane and living together in the new socialist Cuba offered norteamericanos(North Americans) the potential of sowing a new revolutionary culture to import back home.

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Año: 2004

Como citar: Lekus, I. (2004).