From Revolutionary Warfare to Humanitarian Internationalism: Cuba, African Liberation, and the Evolution of Revolutionary Legitimacy in the Global South

Comparative scholarship on revolution has largely emphasized insurgency, political rupture, and the seizure of state power, whilst paying less attention to how revolutionary legitimacy is reconstructed internationally after armed struggle recedes. This article examines that problem through Cuba’s evolving engagement with African liberation and Global South humanitarian internationalism. It develops the concept of Humanitarian Revolutionary Legitimacy (HRL) to explain how revolutionary states reconstruct claims to moral authority by translating histories of anti-imperial struggle and sacrifice into humanitarian solidarity and South–South cooperation. Tracing Cuba’s trajectory from guerrilla revolution through military internationalism in Angola and the anti-apartheid struggle to post-Cold War medical diplomacy, the article argues that revolutionary legitimacy can endure through changing practices of solidarity. Yet this legitimacy remains contested: humanitarian commitment coexists with state interests, economic benefits, labour tensions, and domestic racial inequalities. The Cuban case therefore reveals revolutionary legitimacy not as inherited moral authority, but as an evolving and contested historical process.