Abstract

SALAZAR REBOLLEDO, Juan Alberto. The Rose and the Thorn: Musical Expressions of Anti-imperialist Solidarity in Latin America. The First Protest Song Meeting in La Habana, Cuba, 1967. Secuencia [online]. 2020, n.108, e1809.  Epub Feb 17, 2021. ISSN 2395-8464.  https://doi.org/10.18234/secuencia.v0i108.1809.

Anti-imperialism in the 1960s had significant artistic and cultural components, including protest songs. Young people from various Latin American countries began to make music to denounce, as well as confront, United States imperialism. These musical expressions brought together declarations of solidarity and the accompaniment of revolutionary struggles such as the Cuban Revolution and even those in other places such as the Vietnam War. This article aims to explain this through one of the earliest examples of this phenomenon in Latin America: the First Protest Song Meeting in 1967 in La Habana, Cuba. This event set the tone for what would become as an almost programmatic form of political engagement based on artistic creation. As this paper shows, the meeting on the island constituted a watershed in shaping the political position of solidarity in several of the young musicians who attended, such as the Mexican Óscar Chávez.

Keywords : anti-imperialism; international solidarity; protest songs; Cuban revolution; Óscar Chávez.

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