International Diplomacy

In December of 1968, following a clash with Oakland police, BPP Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver fled to Havana where he was received by one of his greatest inspirations: Fidel Castro. Cleaver's ambitions in Cuba were grandiose, with plans to broadcast over radio and train a guerrilla army to eventually go back to the United States in force. However, by May of 1969 relations between the revolutionaries had broken down severely. A key reason for this was due to conflict within Cuba’s leadership between a faction led by Che Guevara that urged support for all revolutionary movements, and another faction which was more moderate and wished to avoid US reprisals, which would surely come if it was discovered the Cubans were harboring African American radicals. (Reitan, 1999, 217.) The moderate faction prevailed and Cleaver was confined essentially to house arrest and under surveillance by Cuban government minders. Frustrated with their troublesome guest, the Cuban government cut ties and put Cleaver on a plane bound for Algeria.

Cleaver and various Black Panther delegations met with Arab and African revolutionaries on multiple occasions in Algiers, as Algiers hosted a variety of resistance groups like the Palestinian Fatah, the African National Congress, and the Vietnamese NLF. His goal was always to assemble a guerrilla force to return to the States, a goal that was unrealized in Cuba. No meetings with revolutionary movements got him closer to this goal, as they did not have the financial or logistical capacity to support the Black Panthers. So, by mid 1969 Cleaver turned his attention to Asian countries which were already established Marxist regimes. (Malloy, 2017, 150-151.) He was approached in Algiers by members of the North Korean embassy with an offer to attend the World Conference of Anti-Imperialist Journalists in September of 1969. There, he was inspired by the North Korean example of a revolutionary state which remained freee from the Sino-Soviet infighting and was openly hostile to the United States. Kim Il-Sung's philosophy of Juche was attractive to the Black Panthers since it combined the interests and conditions specific to the nation with the the class-based approach of Marxism-Leninism. Cleaver explained that Juche was "a concept of self-reliance that justifies the independent existence of each party and gives it some ideological defenses against the type of domination that is traditional in the Socialist movement." (Malloy, 2017, 155.)