The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family
Michelle Chase | Isabella Cosse
Moderator: Aldo Marchesi
16 March 2026 | 6:00 PM Gulf Standard Time (3:00 PM CET) | Zoom (Webinar)
What role did the Cuban revolution play in the formation of the global New Left? How can this history shed light on the strengths and crises of Cuban socialism? These questions have become urgent in light of Trump's new “Dunroe Doctrine” and the current US oil embargo on the island, leading to speculation that the Cuban government is on the verge of collapse.
The Cuban Revolution and the New Left, edited by Michelle Chase and Isabella Cosse, offers a new social history of the revolution’s transnational impact from the ‘60s through the ‘80s by focusing on gender, sexuality, family, and daily life. It finds that Cuba’s formative influence on the global left endured, despite the strains and tensions inherent in transnational solidarity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Michelle Chase is an Associate Professor of History at Pace University. She is the author of Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952–1962 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). She co–guest edited Radical History Review issue no. 136 (January 2020), Revolutionary Positions: Gender and Sexuality in Cuba and Beyond, with Isabella Cosse, Melina Pappademos, and Heidi Tinsman.
She is currently writing a book about transnational expressions of anti-Castro activism in the Cold War.
Isabella Cosse is an independent researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and Professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín.
She is the author of Rotos Corazones: Amor y Política en los setenta (Siglo XXI, 2025), Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America’s Global Comic (Duke University Press, 2019), Pareja, sexualidad y familia en los años sesenta (Siglo XXI, 2010), and Estigmas de nacimiento: Peronismo y orden familiar, 1946–1955 (FCE, 2006), among other books.
She co–guest edited Radical History Review issue no. 136 (January 2020), Revolutionary Positions: Gender and Sexuality in Cuba and Beyond, with Michelle Chase, Melina Pappademos, and Heidi Tinsman.
MODERATOR
Aldo Marchesi is Professor of History at the Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Over the last decade, he has worked on the transnational history of the new left in the southern cone of Latin America. He recently published Latin America’s Radical Left: Rebellion and Cold War in the Global 1960s at Cambridge University Press. His new project is tentatively titled An Intellectual and Political History of Poverty in Contemporary Uruguay (1943–2010). Also, he is working on a history of the Latin American Left during the twentieth century.