Merit Publishers Cuba Che Guevara Pamphlet Lot Fidel Castro Vietnam

Description

Merit Publishers occupied a fascinating corner of radical American publishing during the 1960s, operating out of New York City and distributing inexpensive political pamphlets, speeches, essays, and revolutionary texts tied to socialism, anti-war activism, labor organizing, Black liberation struggles, and international anti-colonial movements. Their catalogs functioned almost like portable political libraries — cheaply printed, quickly distributed, and designed to circulate ideas rather than survive as collectible objects. Ironically, because they were handled hard, passed around campuses, stuffed into backpacks, and read in activist circles, complete surviving examples have become increasingly scarce.

This grouping captures the intense political atmosphere surrounding Cuba, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Vietnam, and revolutionary thought at the height of the Cold War. How Cuba Uprooted Race Discrimination examines racial politics through the lens of post-revolutionary Cuba, while Fidel Castro’s Tribute to Che Guevara memorializes Guevara shortly after his death in Bolivia in 1967. Che Guevara: On Vietnam and World Revolution pushes outward into international revolutionary strategy and anti-imperialist struggle, and The Revolution Must Be a School of Unfettered Thought reflects the ideological ambitions and educational rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution itself. Together, the four pamphlets form a compact archive of leftist political publishing from one of the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century.

An increasingly difficult grouping of late-1960s Cuba and revolutionary movement ephemera that belongs in any serious collection of radical publishing, Cold War history, or underground political literature.