2025/01/02 by Katherine M. Marino · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Cuban History and Society #Latin American and Latino Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/27708888.2025.2521996
openalex publication_date 2025/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This article explores Afro-Panamanian feminist and communist Felicia Santizo (1893–1965) and the connections she forged with the Eastern Bloc – aligned Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the 1950s and 1960s. After attending a 1952 WIDF conference in Vienna and traveling to Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union on a WIDF-sponsored tour, Santizo founded a WIDF-affiliated women’s organization in her home country. The ties Santizo maintained with WIDF members from Eastern Europe, especially Czechoslovakia, helped her boost leftist women’s organizing in Panama, despite anti-communist repression. As repression increased, Santizo turned to cultural activism by researching and promoting the African-diasporic dance and carnival tradition of the congo, which served the communist celebration of proletarian culture but was perceived as less political and threatening by Panamanian officials. The article situates Santizo and her feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and labor activism within a transnational feminist network between WIDF and Latin American and Caribbean women. Santizo’s mentees in Panama went on to lead protest and feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and she spent the last years of her life in post-revolutionary Cuba. Santizo and her WIDF-linked activism bridge the “old” and “new left” and illuminate socialist feminist solidarities between the Eastern Bloc and Global South in the long Global Sixties.