Between Bandung and Havana: Emergent Solidarities and the Forgotten Poetry of Viva Cuba

In 1963, a group of prominent Indonesian writers contributed to a poetry pamphlet entitled Viva Cuba. This collection was published at a critical historical juncture: it was released after the 1955 Asia Africa Conference in Bandung, prior to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, and before the Indonesian left was eliminated in a 1965 anticommunist coup d’état. By analyzing the now-forgotten poetry of Viva Cuba and other contextualizing texts and translations from the period, this article identifies the poetic tools Indonesian writers employed to imagine possible forms of solidarity with leftist Latin America in the early 1960s. Viva Cuba reflects cultural relationships and solidarity networks in formation—what this article coins emergent world literary circulation, drawing on concepts from Raymond Williams (1977). Indonesian poets Sitor Situmorang and H. R. Bandaharo set Latin American politics as a horizon of potential anti-imperialist alliances and proleptically frame the region as already part of the Indonesian political and cultural body. Though Cuban writers do not show reciprocal attention to Indonesia, poets such as Nicolás Guillén craft solidarity poems with China that overlap with the geopolitical and aesthetic priorities of their Indonesian counterparts.