Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion by Kirwin Shaffer

Abstract

The notion of a burgeoning network of anarchists, working across the Caribbean to resist authoritarianism, fighting for workers and communal rights, and generally fomenting revolution, seems at first glance, fantastical. Yet, startlingly, such an alliance, if necessarily loosely constructed, did function with significant effect—especially in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Panama, Mexico, Tampa, Florida (among Cuban and Spanish tobacco workers), and New York City (among Caribbean immigrant communities)—during the first two decades of the twentieth century.As Shaffer outlines in his careful, even lovingly researched compendium of sketches of individuals, popular incursions, newspaper publications, and literary interventions, anarchists gained significant mass support, battled for cultural and political space with competitive radical trends (particularly Bolshevik/communist parties), and attracted the baleful attention and openly hostile reaction of local ruling elites and the United States. Meeting and organizing through nodal centers in Havana, Panama City, New York, Miami, and San Juan, individual anarchists like the flamboyant Jose Maria Blazquez de Pedro, Luisa Capetillo, Adrian del Valle, and Marcelo Salinas wrote poetry and essays, criticized bourgeois politics, initiated rent strikes, spent time in prison and, in the process, built networks of like-minded revolutionists. By the 1930s, however, with significant moments of repression in Panama, the United States, and particularly in Cuba after the 1934 military coup that brought Fulgencio Batista to power, anarchism dissipated as a significant force and largely faded from history.Why did a movement that seemed to address so many burning issues—trade-union activism, hostility to centralized power, advocacy for individual self-realization, resistance to arbitrary authority, and even an occasional embrace of veganism—and which did at times have popular support, almost vanish from the historical narrative? Did the earliest disciples, who came from culturally distant Spain, fail to understand and respond to foundational matters of Caribbean plantation history, particularly race and color? Did the anarchists’ instinctive fear of organization and hierarchy, which lay at the very heart of the philosophy, ironically hamper them in competition with more highly organized Leninist parties and increasingly authoritarian states? Or was the siren song of nationalism, as spurred by the easily available and seemingly inevitable opposition to U.S. hegemony, more powerful than the far more abstract international brotherhood that the anarchists espoused? And why did so many Black, English-speaking Caribbean workers, particularly in the Canal Zone, who constituted a significant part of the workforce, keep their distance from the anarchists?Shaffer’s rich, thoroughly researched, and enlightening history brings anarchism and the anarchists to the centerstage of early twentieth-century Caribbean history, but it leaves many of these questions frustratingly hanging or only partially answered. Although it takes readers to the point of appreciating that at one time, a lively and active anarchist movement flourished, it leaves them in a quandary about why, in the end, it failed to gain momentum and eventually disintegrated.