Fated in 1889 Through the Iconic Figure of José Martí, Cuban-Vietnamese Relations Emerged

The Elder and the Widow: Cuba’s Vietnam through Two Figures

Trinh Luu

Mentor: Charles Wheeler

Fated in 1889 through the iconic figure of José Martí, Cuban-Vietnamese relations emerged onto the hotbed of Communist revolutions with force, and sustained its pulse thereafter. With formal diplomacy established in 1960, relations between the two nations unfolded in a flurry of reciprocal praises, championing what Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Pham Van Dong called the benchmark of proletarian internationalism. Cuba saw in Việt Nam an archetype of the revolutionary zeitgeist and a rare niche for its radical foreign policy. For Cuban leaders, Ho Chi Minh’s liberation movement mirrored the quintessential principles of Fidelista radicalism. That is, Việt Nam seemingly shared Cuba’s stubborn cleave to ideological autonomy—one untempered by the hegemonic salt of either socialist powerhouses. Moreover, Việt Nam appeared to be a silhouette of Cuba in its desire for political pluralism within the socialist bloc, whence the less powerful would not be beleaguered by the more influential. Cuban quasi-novelistic journals and visuals provide a rich canvas for analyzing this affinity. The works of journalists Raúl Valdés Vivó and Marta Rojas, photographers Orlando Hernandez and Cristobal Pascual, and artist René Mederos portrayed Vietnam through two figures: the fighting-elder whose life is an unyielding devotion to national liberation, and the widow-mother who trades elegiac lament for armed struggle. What we see in these portrayals is a convergence of aged wisdom with maternal sensibility. That is, by imagining elders as rootstocks of revolutionary thought and widows as sources of the national sentimentality, the artists crafted an allegory wherein the elders grant a sense of historical rooting nourishing the flowering guerilla spirit embodied in the widow-mother.