As this book argues, both the North Korean and Cuban governments essentially abandoned the Tricontinentalist project in the early 1970s in favour of new political narratives and foreign policy strategies. Cuba and Vietnam opted for a closer partnership with the Soviet Union, and North Korea reconciled with China, while at the same time re-branding itself as a member of the non-aligned Third World.

More consequentially, over the decades, Western scholarship has been slow in escaping a popular Cold War paradigm, which focused on superpower rivalry and assumed smaller socialist countries like Cuba and North Korea had little actual agency in their foreign policy. At the same time, it must be pointed out that if this history is largely forgotten in the metropolitan academy, that does not mean it is forgotten everywhere.

While North Korea’s rôle as an outspoken advocate of Third World solidarity during the Cold War strikes many people in the West as a surprising oddity, it is much more known and treated more seriously in many countries of the global South. The absence of this history in the existing scholarship, therefore, partly reflects the geographic and economic disparities and disconnects of global academic knowledge production.

Examining the story of North Korea and Latin America in the 1960s makes a crucial addition to past studies of North Korea’s foreign relations, which have focused on the Soviet Union, China, and events internal to the Korean peninsula. In contrast to the familiar narrative of North Korea as a “hermit kingdom” whose allegiance vacillated between Moscow and Beijing during the Cold War, this study reveals how the Cuban Revolution and the tumultuous political situation in Latin America during the 1960s were major influences on how the North Korean leadership viewed the world, and by extension, how it affixed its foreign policy priorities and strategies.

A tangential observation: anticommunist authors seem to shy away from the phrase ‘global South’, probably because it is more useful for discussing the Anglosphere’s neoimperialism than it is for discussing the Eastern Bloc, but I am sure that eventually they’ll misappropriate the phrase and rob it of any meaning.