OSPAAAL
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Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, Africa y América Latina (Spanish: Organisation for Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America), OSPAAAL, is a Cuban political movement with the stated purpose of fighting globalisation, imperialism, neoliberalism and defending human rights. It publishes the magazine Tricontinental.
OSPAAAL was founded in Havana in January 1966 after the Tricontinental Conference, a meeting of leftist delegates from Guinea, the Congo, South Africa, Angola, Vietnam, Syria, North Korea, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Chile and the Dominican Republic.
One of the main purposes of the organisation is to promote the causes of freedom fighters in the Third World; for example, OSPAAAL strongly supports Hugo Chávez and demands that the Cuban Five be released. Social development is a recurring theme in OSPAAAL publications, it is called a human right by the organisation.
Curiously for a political organisation in a communist state, OSPAAAL has willingly cooperated with ecologists and religious organisations in the past.
Posters
From its foundation until the mid 1980s, OSPAAAL produced brightly coloured propaganda posters promoting their cause, however, financial difficulty and ink shortages forced the organisation to stop producing these posters. However, in 2000, these posters began to be printed again.
These posters, as they intended to be internationalist, usually had their message written in English, French, Spanish and sometimes Arabic. As opposed to being put up on walls around Cuba, these posters were instead folded up and stapled into copies of Tricontinental, so that they could be distributed internationally. This allowed OSPAAAL to send its message clearly to the several hundred thousand students around the world with subscriptions to Tricontinental.
The brightly coloured posters, with their revolutionary slogans, have become collector's items, even amongst political conservatives. However, because of the highly sensitive nature of the issue, many of the posters that praise the Palestinians in the Arab-Israeli conflict are not so highly sought after.
Contact
OSPAAAL's address is Apartados 4226 & 6130, Havana, Cuba. Their fax number is 537 333 985.
External links
- Official site (in Spanish) (http://www.ospaaal.org/)
- New situation demands unity: OSPAAAL (from Green Left Weekly) (http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1995/177/177p21.htm)
- A collection of OSPAAAL posters (http://www.ospaaal.com/)