This article examines the transnational activism of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Revolutionary Student Directorate, DRE), a group of exiled Cuban anti-Castro students. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, with CIA funding, the DRE attempted to challenge student support for the Cuban Revolution in Latin America and elsewhere in the global South. This article uses the DRE's trajectory to rethink the 1960s as a period of anti-communist, as well as leftist, youth ascendancy. It challenges the idea that Cuba garnered universal youth support, stressing instead that the Cuban Revolution helped turn student politics into a key battleground of the Cold War.

This article presents an entangled history of Argentina and Egypt in the years surrounding the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. It combines diplomatic, migration and anti-imperial activism histories to delineate the intellectual and institutional links between these nations from the late 1940s to the 1950s – from the rise of Peronism through to Nasser's management of the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Diverse Argentine social and political sectors saw parallels between the anti-imperial struggles in the Arab world and in Latin America. Though with differing and sometimes competing agendas, these groups learned and deployed the language of non-alignment and South–South solidarity in the escalating Cold War.