A New Political Dawn: The Cuban Revolution In The 1960s

Abstract

It seems that time compresses when we examine it from the future. As I write these lines in the spring of 2008, we look back 40 and 50 years ago at events that rocked the world and defined the twentieth century, prompting us to reflect on the meaning and legacy of those years and the events that framed them. The creation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1958 and the Aldermaston marches that followed—a political campaign spawned from the British New Left that brought the CND to the world’s attention—continue to claim relevance today. Ten years later, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; in 2008, we remember King’s “I have a dream” speech on the fortieth anniversary of his assassination in Memphis. Later, a global explosion of anger took hold of students and workers in Paris, London, Rome, Berlin—as the famous chant went—and in every major university campus across the United States. Forty years later, many of the main players in those events occupy prominent intellectual and media spaces that link us to those days.