In December 1961, Nakhlé Mutran and Yusuf Khattar al-Helu, members of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP), were invited by the newly founded Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) to celebrate the second anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Having recently created the “Solidarity Committee with the Cuban Revolution” in Beirut, they left the island with a token of friendship: an anthology of contemporary Cuban poetry including “colloquial poems” by Roberto Fernández Retamar and Fayad Jamís. A few months later, these poems would appear in Arabic translation in al-Tariq, a cultural journal associated with the LCP, and one of the most important vehicles for the regional circulation of global anticolonial literature. Almost exactly two years later, in the midst of intensifying relations between Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, the ICAP received a delegation from Algeria. To celebrate their arrival, the Francophone Algerian poet Jean Sénac published a poem in the newspaper al-Chaab. A multilingual panegyric titled “Salam Hermanos! La paix soit avec Cuba,” it concluded with the line: “Libertad! Houria! La Casbah salue La Havane!” This paper recovers the significance of the ICAP for the development of Third-Worldist poetics by examining the literary aftermaths of these two visits to Cuba from Lebanese and Algerian delegates. Despite its formative role during the early 60s, the ICAP has received little to no substantive attention from scholars of either Cuban cultural policy or Third-Worldist internationalism. Unlike the OSPAAAL (the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America), which it preceded and outlived, the ICAP has been uncritically reduced to an apparatus of propaganda; its cultural effects outside of Cuba––despite the great number of delegates who visited the island thanks to its efforts––treated as if nonexistent. This paper seeks to rectify this omission less by reconstructing the institution’s functioning within the Cuban state than by illuminating the types of poetic work and imagination that its activities made possible outside of Cuba. A focus on the genre of the panegyric and colloquialism as a style, in particular, can help us rethink the parameters of influence that tend to dominate conversations about literary contact and exchange across the Third World.