Thousands of universities have made climate emergency declarations; however the higher education sector is not rising to the collective challenge with the urgency commensurate with scientific warnings. Universities are promoting an increased focus on sustainability through their research, teaching and their own institutional footprints. However, we suggest that such initiatives will be insufficient to catalyse the required transformations in our societies and economies because of (i) the time lags inherent in education and research pathways to impact, and (ii) their failure to address either real-world political processes or the forces invested in maintaining the status quo. We therefore suggest that academics should move from publications to public actions and engage in advocacy and activism to affect urgent and transformational change. We discuss the barriers to engagement in advocacy that academics face, and propose a number of actions that universities should adopt to help overcome them. These include explicitly recognising advocacy as part of the work mandate of academic staff by altering work allocation models, facilitating engaged research sabbaticals, altering hiring and promotion policies, and providing training to enhance the effectiveness of engagement. In addition, universities must defend the right of academics to engage in protest and push back against emerging threats to academic freedom. Such actions would strengthen a rich tradition of academic protest and enhance the contribution of universities to the public good in areas well beyond sustainability, for example race and social justice (Black Lives Matter, decolonising education) and public health.

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This article follows two lines of inquiry. First, it provides a rereading of the novel Memorias del subdesarrollo (Desnoes 1965), suggesting that the protagonist, Sergio, is affected by the threat of nuclear war throughout the novel and that this fear dominates the text from the outset, and not just the novel's ending during the Missile Crisis of October 1962. It argues that Sergio's state of anxiety and inertia derive as much from this fear as from his intellectual detachment and problematic relationship with the Cuban Revolution, where critical attention has tended to focus. This rereading gives texture to Sergio's inaction and nihilism, revealing a coherent response of an individual to the threat of catastrophe. Secondly, this article sets this rereading against a new context of catastrophe: that of climate change, ecosystem collapse and species extinction. In this context an overlooked revolutionary fervour is detected in Sergio that provides a reading of hope in the narrative that, when read analogously against the present, may reflect a sense of hope against calamity.

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Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, visiting Cuba in 1960, met Ernesto Guevara and were struck by his personal and political presence. Sartre praised Guevara as the embodiment of existential freedom, referring to his ability to be led by his own assertive will, and not by the will of others, and allegedly described him as 'the most complete human being of our age' (Anderson 1997a: 468). From the time of his death until the present, Guevara has been cast in a wide array of historical reconstructions with varying degrees of fi ctional distance from biographical historicity. In particular, he has repeatedly appeared as a fi ctional character in novels, sometimes showing an alarming degree of poetic licence, betraying strong ideological motivations behind the fi ction. Th is article analyses the ironic relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre's praise of Guevara as someone who has fully embraced the freedom of being and the fi ctionalization or categorization of Guevara as a novelistic character.