Encyclopedia
The
Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America ', abbreviated as OSPAAAL, is a
Cuban political movement with the stated purpose of fighting
globalisation,
imperialism, neoliberalism and defending
human rights. It publishes the
magazine Tricontinental is a leftist [i] quarterly [i] magazine [i] founded during the 196 ...
. The OSPAAAL was founded in
Havana in January 1966, after the
Tricontinental Conference, a meeting of leftist delegates from
Guinea,
the Congo,
South Africa,
Angola,
Vietnam,
Syria,
North Korea, the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Cuba,
Puerto Rico,
Chile and the
Dominican Republic. Mehdi Ben Barka, the Moroccan leader of the Tricontinental, was murdered the year before, allegedly with complicity of the
CIA.
One of the main purposes of the organisation is to promote the causes of freedom fighters in the
Third World; for example, OSPAAAL strongly supports
Hugo Chávez and demands that the
Cuban Five be released. Social development is a recurring theme in OSPAAAL publications, it is called a human right by the organisation.
History and context
The OSPAAAL was born out of the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, which Mehdi Ben Barka was preparing before his October 1965 assassination. The OSPAAL had gathered itself for the first time in
Accra in 1957. 500 delegates from 35 countries represented there national liberation movements and parties rather than states. It was led by Ismaël Touré, the brother of
Ahmed Sékou Touré, president of
Guinea. Ismaël Touré presided the board responsible of the solidarity funds, assisted by three vice-presidents, among whom Mehdi Ben Barka. The OSPAAL was debating about the inclusion of Cuba, the Caraibes and Latin America to the group, a question posed again in
Cairo in June 1961 by the new commission, named Commission on neocolonialism, which was presided by Ben Barka.
While the Casablanca group, founded in 1961, gathered "progressive states" , the OSPAAL was an organization of movements, which aimed at creating national economic development plans for the newly independent states and break national isolation through internationalism. Until
Boumédienne's 1965 coup in Algeria, Alger was the capital of anti-imperialists movements. In exile, Ben Barka resided there six months in 1964;
Amilcar Cabral and
Malcolm X also lived in Alger, as well as
Che Guevara in spring of 1965;
Henri Curiel, on the other hand, was organizing there "Solidarity networks", which trained in particular
African National Congress activists . In Alger, Mehdi Ben Barka projected to create an anti-colonialist review, titled "The African Review", but he decides to enlarge the union to
Cuba and Latin America.
After the failed
Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961,
Fidel Castro started getting closer to the
Soviet Union. In February 1962, Cuba was expelled from the
Organization of American States . On October 3, 1965, Ben Barka declared in a press conference prior to the Havana conference that the "two currents of the world revolution would be represented there: the current born with the October Revolution and the national liberation revolutions' currents."
The fourth congress of the OSPAA, in Accra , from May 6 to May 9, 1965, finally agreed on including Latin America and to take in account the founding January 1966 conference in Havana. Medhi Ben Barka, who was presiding the preparatory council, assured himself of
China and the USSR 's support in July 1965, and defined the objectives of the new organization, summed up as "total liberation": aid to national liberation movements ; intensification of
armed and pacific struggles on all three continents; support to the
Cuban Revolution; suppression of foreign military bases; support to the nuclear disarmament option; opposition to
apartheid and
racial segregation. End of September 1965, Ben Barka went to Havana to prepare the opening up of the conference on January 3, 1966. But on October 29, 1965, he was "
disappeared" in Paris, abducted by Moroccan secret agents, allegedly with support of foreign intelligence agencies . The Havana Conference thus took place in January 1966 without him, and the OSPAAAL officially founded.
Posters
From its foundation until the mid
1980s, OSPAAAL produced brightly coloured
propaganda posters promoting their cause, however, financial difficulty and
ink shortages forced the organisation to stop producing these posters. However, in 2000, these posters began to be printed again.
These posters, as they intended to be internationalist, usually had their message written in
English,
French, Spanish and sometimes
Arabic. As opposed to being put up on walls around Cuba, these posters were instead folded up and stapled into copies of
Tricontinental, so that they could be distributed internationally. This allowed OSPAAAL to send its message clearly to the several hundred thousand
students around the world with subscriptions to
Tricontinental.
The brightly coloured posters, with their
revolutionary slogans, have become
collector's items, even amongst political
conservatives. However, because of the highly sensitive nature of the issue, many of the posters that praise the
Palestinians in the
Arab-Israeli conflict are not so highly sought after.
Contact
OSPAAAL's address is Apartados 4226 & 6130, Havana, Cuba. Their
fax number is 537 333 985.
External links
