Alejandro Pedregal and
Alberto García Molinero

Tricontinental Ecologies:
Anti-Imperialist Media and the Struggle for a Sovereign Social Metabolism

Introduction

In the second half of the twentieth century, anti-imperialist movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America grappled not only with political and economic domination but also with profound ecological challenges. The Cuban Revolution, and particularly its cultural and media institutions, became a central hub where these struggles intersected. Through the Tricontinental magazine of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) and the Noticiero Latinoamericano newsreels of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), revolutionary media articulated a radical critique of colonial and neocolonial exploitation. At stake was not only sovereignty in political and economic terms, but also the restoration of the social metabolism—the relations between human societies and nature disrupted by capitalist production and consumption, as well as by the asymmetric regimes of dominance and dependency that they embody.

This article examines the socio-ecological dimensions of Tricontinental and the Noticiero between 1966 and 1971, showing how they expressed insurgent visions of sovereignty, self-reliance, and, even if often implicitly, ecological justice. At the same time, it highlights how these media, and particularly Noticiero, portrayed the contradictions within the Cuban revolutionary process, most notably the centrality of sugar production, which both underpinned national survival and perpetuated ecological vulnerabilities. By situating these cultural productions in dialogue, we can uncover how revolutionary media anticipated ecological debates that would only later gain traction on institutional platforms, while revealing the dilemmas of building socialism under conditions of dependency.

Tricontinental: Revolutionary Media as a Tool for Socio-ecological Imagination

The launch of Tricontinental magazine in 1967 marked a turning point in the cultural struggle of the Global South. Published in multiple languages and distributed worldwide despite frequent censorship and bans, the magazine combined essays, reportages, manifestos, testimonies, and striking graphic art. Its posters, designed by Cuban artists such as Alfredo Rostgaard and Helena Serrano, became iconic images of Third Worldism. But beyond visual power, Tricontinental conveyed a revolutionary vision: sovereignty over land, resources, and production was at the core of national liberation.

Although not always articulated in explicitly environmental terms, ecological questions permeated its pages. Articles highlighted the plunder of natural resources by multinational corporations, denounced the persistence of colonial landholding structures, and advocated agrarian reform as the foundation for genuine independence. Josué de Castro, the Brazilian nutritionist and geographer, warned in its pages against monoculture and latifundia as obstacles to social and ecological well-being. Contributors linked sovereignty to resource nationalization—from Algerian oil to Congolese agriculture—emphasizing that without control of land and raw materials, political independence remained hollow.

One of the magazine’s most innovative strategies was the use of “anti-advertisements.” These subverted the language of capitalist marketing to expose the brutal realities of neocolonial exploitation. A mock advertisement for Ethiopian Airlines replaced images of exotic landscapes with references to prisons, mines, and U.S. military bases. Another parody of South African Airways promoted a “holiday in the land of apartheid and slave labor.” These visual devices did more than denounce injustice; they revealed how imperialism commodified nature, land, and labor, turning tourism, mining, and agriculture into tools of domination. In so doing, they anticipated later critiques of “ecological imperialism.”

The ecological underpinnings of Tricontinental’s anti-imperialist rhetoric resonated strongly with debates on what we could call a sovereign social metabolism. To restore a sovereign metabolism between societies and their environments, liberation movements argued, required delinking from the structures of unequal exchange and dependency. For OSPAAAL and its magazine, this vision was inseparable—by any means necessary—from radical internationalism, which sought to construct an alternative to the predatory logic of transnational capital.

ICAIC and the Noticiero Latinoamericano: Film as a Revolutionary Weapon

If Tricontinental represented the printed voice of Third Worldism, the Noticiero Latinoamericano embodied its moving image in Cuba. Founded in 1960 under of revolutionary documentary filmmaker Santiago Álvarez at ICAIC, the weekly newsreel combined archival material, bold montage, and satire to produce films of extraordinary communicative force. Álvarez’s maxim—“give me two photographs, a moviola, and some music, and I’ll make you a film”—captured the ingenuity of turning scarcity into creative abundance.

The Noticiero was conceived as agitation and propaganda, but its aesthetic innovations made it much more. Fast-paced editing, ironic juxtapositions, and biting humor transformed newsreels into cinematic weapons. From coverage of the Vietnam War to denunciations of racial violence in the United States, Álvarez and his team articulated an internationalist perspective rooted in Cuba’s revolutionary ethos.

The links between ICAIC and OSPAAAL were not accidental. Both institutions occupied a heterodox space within the Cuban Revolution, often clashing with more dogmatic currents. They shared a commitment to Third World solidarity and cultural experimentation. Joint productions such as Hanoi, Martes 13 (1968) or Madina Boe (1969) exemplified their collaboration, combining documentary urgency with an internationalist and anti-imperialist discourse.

Socio-ecological concerns were integral to this cinematic language. Some newsreels highlighted agrarian reforms in Cuba and other Third World countries, denounced the devastation of chemical warfare in Vietnam, and portrayed protests against U.S. military bases in Okinawa. The Noticiero’s satire also paralleled Tricontinental’s anti-advertisements, as in the parody of MACE chemical sprays marketed in the United States—products used both in Vietnam’s ecocidal war and domestically against Black and student activists. By blending ecological critique with anti-racist solidarity, these films underscored the entanglement of imperialism, exploitation, and environmental harm.

Socio-ecological Dimensions of Anti-Imperialist Media

Both Tricontinental and the Noticiero placed the agrarian question at the center of their vision. Land redistribution, food sovereignty, and autonomous production were portrayed as essential to liberation. In this sense, media became a space to imagine and represent a sovereign social metabolism: a system in which societies of the Third World could regulate their exchanges with nature free from imperial domination.

The critique extended beyond agriculture. Tourism, depicted as a neocolonial industry, was shown to transform landscapes and economies for the benefit of foreign elites. Industrialization was presented not as mere modernization but as a struggle for autonomy, as when Cuban and Korean thermoelectric plants were contrasted with unemployment and misery in capitalist Seoul. Military complexes were denounced not only for their geostrategic role but also for their ecological footprint, as in the exposure of how U.S. bases in Okinawa consumed farmland, forests, and water.

This convergence of ecological and anti-imperialist discourse was not always systematic or explicit. Yet it represented a pioneering moment: well before environmentalism entered the global public agenda, this revolutionary media linked sovereignty to ecology, resources to justice, and land to liberation. These were early articulations of some kind of insurgent political ecology.

The Sugar Paradox: Contradictions within the Cuban Revolution

Despite these insurgent visions, contradictions abounded within the Third World and Cuba itself. In the latter case, nowhere were they perhaps clearer than in the centrality sugar occupied in the process of socialist capital accumulation. Since colonial times, Cuba had been shaped by monoculture plantations and export dependency. The Revolution inherited this legacy but also sought to transform it.

From the early 1960s, debates raged over development strategy. While some advocated diversification and industrialization, consensus emerged that sugar remained indispensable. Agreements with the Soviet Union guaranteed stable prices and markets, allowing Cuba to finance its socialist project. The Revolutionary Offensive culminated in the ambitious “ten-million-ton harvest” of 1970, which mobilized the entire nation.

For the Noticiero, sugar was portrayed as a symbol of collective effort. Images of workers, students, and even leaders like Fidel Castro wielding machetes celebrated the harvest as both labor and liberation. War metaphors linked the sugar campaign to the historic struggle against colonialism, turning economic survival into a patriotic duty.

Yet this strategy carried profound socio-ecological contradictions. The drive for record production placed enormous strain on already degraded soils. Monoculture deepened ecological vulnerability, while the failure of the ten-million-ton harvest exposed the limits of voluntarism. Reliance on Soviet support increased, embedding Cuba in a “planned dependency” that differed from colonial subjugation but still curtailed autonomy.

This situation, which has been described as “the sugar paradox,” illustrated the tension between revolutionary ideals and material constraints. While Cuba promoted images of self-reliant development, its ecological reality was marked by the persistence of monoculture. The aspiration to restore a sovereign metabolism found its limits in the necessity of navigating global structures of trade and power.

Legacies and Contemporary Resonances

The revolutionary media of OSPAAAL and ICAIC left a lasting imprint on global political culture. To some extent, they anticipated many themes of today’s radical environmental justice movements: resource sovereignty, critiques of transnational corporations, opposition to ecological imperialism, and the search for alternative development models.

The legacy of this type of socio-ecological approach can be traced in later initiatives such as Nicaragua’s ecological programs after the Sandinista revolution, Thomas Sankara’s reforestation in Burkina Faso, Cuba’s turn to organic agriculture during the Special Period of the 1990s, Zimbabwe’s land reform, or Venezuela’s communal experience. More broadly, they contributed to shaping a tradition of ecological thought in the Global South that challenges Eurocentric environmentalism and places sovereignty, solidarity, and socio-ecological justice at the forefront.

At the same time, their contradictions remain instructive. The sugar paradox reveals how radical projects navigating the world-economy under imperial threat or siege can reproduce ecological dependencies when caught between survival and sovereignty. These tensions resonate today, as many countries of the Global South confront the twin pressures of climate crisis and colonial, neocolonial, or neoliberal dependency.

Conclusion

Between 1966 and 1971, Tricontinental magazine and the Noticiero Latinoamericano forged an insurgent media sphere that connected anti-imperialism to, among other realms, ecological concerns. Through posters, articles, satire, and films, they articulated a vision of sovereignty grounded in land, resources, and self-reliant development. They envisioned a sovereign social metabolism for the Third World, even if the changes would have to confront and address the limitations of economic dependency.

By placing socio-ecological concerns at the heart of internationalist solidarity, these cultural productions preformed contemporary struggles for climate justice, food sovereignty, and decolonial ecology. And as such, they remind us that the fight for liberation has always been ecological, and that restoring a metabolic relationship between societies and nature, delinked from the imperatives of unequal exchange, remains inseparable from resisting and confronting imperial domination.

This piece synthesizes the research carried out for our papers ‘The Early Socio-Ecological Dimensions of Tricontinental (1967–1971): A Sovereign Social Metabolism for the Third World,’ Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13(3), 368–400, and ‘Moving between Tricontinental Hopes and Sugar Dependency: The Early Socio-ecological Dialectics of Noticiero Latinoamericano’ (forthcoming)

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Alejandro Pedregal

Independent researcher, he has been part of the Fossil Aesthetics project of the Art History and Visual Culture Research Group of the Institute of History of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), lecturer at the University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) of the Aalto University (Finland), and Postdoctoral and Visiting Researcher at the Department of Film, Television and Scenography of the same institution, Department from which he also obtained his Doctor degree.

He has published the books Evelia: testimonio de Guerrero (Foca/Akal, 2018) and Mientras los hombres conquere el Luna y D vueltas alrededor del Tierra: Rodolfo Walsh, el pastor de Guerrero (Foca/Akal, 2018). He has published the books Evelia: testimonio de Guerrero (Foca/Akal, 2018) and Mientras los hombres conquistaban la Luna y daban vueltas alrededor de la Tierra: Rodolfo Walsh, el pastor de Girón (Patria Grande, 2017), and, as co-editor with Emilio Recanatini, La esperanza insobornable: Rodolfo Walsh en la memoria (Patria Grande, 2017), in addition to chapters and articles in indexed publications such as Alphaville, Re-visiones, Kamchatka, Rab-Rab: Journal of Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, VIS: Nordic Journal of Artistic Research or Crítica y Resistencias, among others.

He is a founding member of Critical Cinema Lab (Finland), founded and directed Lens Politica Film and Media Art Festival (2005-2011), and is a film director and screenwriter of several international award-winning fiction and documentary film works.

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