This dissertation shows that during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) diverse Cubans organized to support the Spanish Second Republic, overcoming differences to coalesce around a movement they defined as antifascism. Hundreds of Cuban volunteers--more than from any other Latin American country--traveled to Spain to fight for the Republic in both the International Brigades and the regular Republican forces, to provide medical care, and to serve in other support roles; children, women, and men back home worked together to raise substantial monetary and material aid for Spanish children during the war; and longstanding groups on the island including black associations, Freemasons, anarchists, and the Communist Party leveraged organizational and publishing resources to raise awareness, garner support, fund, and otherwise assist the cause. The dissertation studies Cuban antifascist individuals, campaigns, organizations, and networks operating transnationally to help the Spanish Republic, contextualizing these efforts in Cuba's internal struggles of the 1930s. It argues that both transnational solidarity and domestic concerns defined Cuban antifascism. First, Cubans confronting crises of democracy at home and in Spain believed fascism threatened them directly. Citing examples in Ethiopia, China, Europe, and Latin America, Cuban antifascists--like many others--feared a worldwide menace posed by fascism's spread. Second, despite their recent anticolonial struggle against Spain, Cubans cared deeply about its fate for reasons of personal, familial, and cultural affinity. They interpreted the Republic as a "new" Spain representative of liberation and the Nationalists as seeking return to the "old" Spain of colonial oppression. Third, pro-Republican Cubans defined antifascism in Cuban terms. People of many different backgrounds and views united around a definition of antifascism closely related to their shared domestic political goals: freedom from strongman governance, independence from neocolonial control, and attainment of economic and social justice. Radical, moderate, and even largely nonpolitical individuals and groups in Cuba found in antifascism and support for the Spanish Republic a rallying cry with broad appeal that allowed them to strengthen solidarity at home and abroad. Cubans defined antifascism in both negative and positive terms, as a movement against fascism but also toward unity, democracy, sovereignty, and justice.

In “Documents of Revolution” I compare various non-fiction prose genres with incipient journalistic media, including scrapbooks, photographs, films and radio poems, to explore the new internationalisms that emerged during the Spanish Civil War. Many studies of the war have prioritized visiting authors and their experience of travelling Spain. By contrast, I show how local critics, writers, and poets, such as the anarchist filmmaker Mateo Santos, the memoirist María Teresa León, and the poet Miguel Hernández, were crucial intermediaries between Spanish working-class oral cultures and foreign visiting authors, such as George Orwell, Nancy Cunard, Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén. I describe three modes of relation between intellectual elites and the working class: occupying, broadcasting, and archiving. By reading for the living internationalism of the working-class, I unearth various internationalisms (anarchist, Black Hispanophone, and feminist-humanitarian) that have not received due attention. These overlapping networks and diasporas ensured that the revolutionary and multimedia documentary poetics of the war disseminated far beyond Spain’s borders.