“The years of wrath”. A critical approach to the socio-cultural context of the 1960s in Cuba and Latin America

Abstract

This paper proposes a critical analysis of the major political, social and cultural aspects that formed the reality of the 1960s in Cuba and Latin America. The author of this article makes references to the characteristic features of a period characterized by the boom of social struggles, the guerrillas, the student protests, and the assertion and recognition of the peoples of Latin America as members of the historically marginalized Third World. This rebellion, a response to the profound social inequalities in the continent, appropriated an anti-bourgeois and anti-imperialist rhetoric which was for the first time shared by all the nations of the “developing world”. The author attempts to offer an original take on the role of culture in our continent which should help to enrich the pool of available explanations of the phenomenon of alternative symbolic production.