apparently in 1972 every member of the Venceremos Brigade (US leftists going to Cuba to cut sugar cane in solidarity) got a gift from the North Vietnamese volunteers cutting cane: aluminium rings made from the wreck of the 3,000th US military plane shot down over Vietnam

Latner's book on US leftists in Cuba is generally really interesting but things like this or the Venceremos Brigade woman who met and cried while talking to a North Vietnamese woman while in Cuba are really fascinating

another interesting aspect of it is the apparent tension he tries to document between armed struggle activists within the left, like the Weathermen faction of SDS, and the Cubans, who were supposedly not very supportive of armed rebellion, at least by then.

Cuban position on this was not monolithic or always consistent, for sure. Latner also cites a passage from C. Wright Mills' 1960 book Listen Yankee talking about how one day Americans might rise up and have their own revolution, using the Rocky mountains as a base.

also, apparently over 10k African Americans tried to join the Ethiopian struggle against the Fascist invasion of Italy in 1935?!

Per Latner, most were prevented because the State Department threatened to strip them of US citizenship if they went

is the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 analogous for the African diaspora to what the Spanish Civil War was to much of the Spanish speaking world?

apparently there was Cuban gov aid to the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, per Eldridge Cleaver, who says he got weapons training at a site near Havana, though no permanent site for training was ever built