Historical

How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This is the final part of the socialism series, and it follows the revolution out of Europe and into the colonized and formerly colonized world, where socialism and national liberation fused. The stories here run from Cuba and Allende’s Chile through Sandinista Nicaragua and Evo Morales’s Bolivia, and across Africa from Sankara’s Burkina Faso to Nyerere’s Tanzania and Nkrumah’s Ghana, to the brief revolution in Grenada. They are stories of extraordinary hope and, often, of siege, coup, and implosion, and this lens tells them from more than one side. It builds on the national-liberation histories in Imperialism and the Global System and continues the series from Revolution in Power.

Anchor questions

• What did these revolutions promise the poor of the Global South, and where did they deliver?
• How much of each story is internal, and how much is coup, blockade, and the long arm of empire?
• Grenada’s revolution destroyed itself before the US invaded. Nicaragua’s turned authoritarian. What do the implosions teach?
• Why do we know Che and Castro but not Sankara, Cabral, or Bishop?
• Whose telling of these histories have we inherited, and who wrote it?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable loan. Standpoints are noted; the sources are meant to be read against one another.

Cuba, Chile, and Venezuela

• The Cuban Revolution (The Cold War, 2022, 19 min). A mainstream video baseline on Batista’s fall and Castro’s rise. Free: youtube.com/watch?v=kDeKySs_nxw
• Peter Winn (b. 1942), Weavers of Revolution (1986). Chilean workers who pushed Allende further than he wished to go, the peaceful road against worker self-activity. Free to borrow: archive.org
• George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez (2013). The Bolivarian process as decades of grassroots movement-building, not one leader’s project. Not free; publisher page.

Central and South America

• Matilde Zimmermann, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution (2000). How the Sandinista revolution was made, from 1961 to 1979. No borrowable copy exists, and no honest free companion was found. Paywalled: dukeupress.edu
• Mateo Jarquin, “Reckoning with Revolution in Nicaragua” (2020). The line from 1979 to Ortega’s authoritarian turn, without romance or demonization. Free: ageofrevolutions.com
• NACLA Editorial Board, “On the Coup in Bolivia” (2019). The 2019 removal of Morales named as a coup, the MAS government’s own failures named too. Free: portside.org

Africa

• Thomas Sankara (1949 to 1987), Thomas Sankara Speaks (1988). The Burkinabe revolution in his own voice, to his assassination. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Julius Nyerere (1922 to 1999), The Arusha Declaration (1967). The founding program of Tanzanian Ujamaa, the vision as stated. Free: marxists.org
• Sojourner Truth Organization, The Fall of Kwame Nkrumah. Ghana under Nkrumah and his 1966 overthrow, sober about the one-party state’s own limits. Free: marxists.org

Bolivia

• Jeffery R. Webber, Red October (2011). The long-form narrative this theme has been missing: the water war, the gas war, the revolt that carried Morales to power, and what the MAS did with that power once it had it. Webber is sympathetic to the indigenous movements and sharp about the party, which is the combination the lens needs. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Oscar Olivera and Tom Lewis, Cochabamba! (2004). The water war told by the shoemaker and union leader who helped lead it: how a city threw Bechtel out. First-person, from inside the movement that began the cycle Webber narrates. Free to borrow: archive.org

The Portuguese-African revolutions

The theme reads Cabral and stops at the border of what came after. Mozambique and Angola won, governed, and were destroyed by war, and the argument about which of those did the killing is the argument to stage here.

• Dan O’Meara, The Collapse of Mozambican Socialism (1991). A Marxist post-mortem locating FRELIMO’s failure in its own strategy and its rural policy rather than only in South African destabilization. Twenty-two free pages. Free: transformationjournal.org.za
• Joseph Hanlon, Mozambique: Revolution Under Fire (1984). The sympathetic reading, which puts the crisis down to war and external destabilization by South Africa and Rhodesia. Read directly against O’Meara: between them the room gets the argument rather than a verdict. Free to borrow: archive.org
• David Birmingham, Frontline Nationalism in Angola and Mozambique (1992). A short history taking the MPLA and FRELIMO together, from the Portuguese collapse through the wars that followed. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Piero Gleijeses and the Cold War International History Project, Bulletin 8/9 (1996). Declassified documents on Cuba’s intervention in Angola, the largest act of armed internationalism a small state has ever attempted. Archival sources rather than argument, so take a section rather than the whole. Free: wilsoncenter.org

The Caribbean

• National Security Archive, The Walter Rodney Murder Mystery in Guyana, 40 Years Later (2020). Twenty declassified US cables on the 1980 assassination of Walter Rodney, killed by a bomb at 38. This school reads Rodney in four themes; here he stops being an author and becomes a man the state of Guyana blew up for organizing. Free: nsarchive.gwu.edu

• Review of African Political Economy, On Walter Rodney’s Legacy (2021). Rodney as an organizer with the Working People’s Alliance rather than as a reading, and what the WPA was building. This host blocks automated checks but is live. Free: roape.net

• Village Voice News (Grenada), “Maurice Bishop’s Execution” (2025). The 1983 Coard-Bishop split and the executions that killed the revolution from within, days before the US invasion. Free: villagevoicenews.com

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially Guinea-Bissau after Cabral, and Angola from Angolan rather than Cuban or British sources: the Portuguese-African material added here is written largely from outside. Bolivia, Mozambique, and Guyana are now covered.