Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939 by Margaret Steven

Abstract

Reviewed by: Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939 by Margaret Steven Sandra Pujals Margaret Steven. Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939. London: Pluto Press, 2017, 303 pp., ISBSN 978 0 7453 3726 5 (Paperback). In his 1998 ground-breaking book, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936, Mark Solomon opened the way to a new historiographical trend, pointing out communist internationalism's outstanding role in the struggle for African American racial equality and social justice. Although not an altogether new subject, the work offered an innovative look at the black-and-red phenomenon, corroborated by the voluminous documentation of the Comintern archives [End Page 225] in Moscow. Since then, a great number of publications have added a variety of angles and approaches to the topic, from ideological analysis and literature to gender (i.e. Cedric J. Robinson, William J. Maxwell, Carole Boyce Davis). Most recently, the transnational component has inserted a global character to the discussion, emphasizing the impact of the Spanish and British, Afro Caribbean diaspora experience as a major catalyst for Black radicalism particularly between the 1920s and 1930s (Winston A. James, Hakim Adi). In addition, a focus on immigrant hubs like London, Paris, and New York as "revolutionary emporiums" or "Black" metropolises and meeting points for Comintern-sponsored Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist radical networks also expanded the scope of a transnational crossbreeding of "people-goods-ideas" that later contributed to the making of a "Soviet" Caribbean (Barry Carr, Minkah Makalani, Marc Matera, Michael Goebel, Jason Parker, Gerald Horne, Oscar Berland, Sandra Pujals). Margaret Stevens' Red International and Black Caribbean attempts to move beyond the now traditional historiographical fusion of red and black, by placing "black workers in the Caribbean at the center of a narrative about Communism…," (p. 3) rather than "great men" or iconic episodes such as the Harlem Renaissance. The work's main contribution is mapping Black radical networks and anti-imperialist activity in the Caribbean Basin as a unit, by pointing out the systematic interconnection between simultaneous and apparently disconnected movements and struggles throughout the Spanish, French, and British Caribbean. The book offers a complex panorama of local radical incidents in both the Caribbean and the U.S. mainland in their regional and international context, as points of departure for other campaigns in radical nuclei in the U.S. mainland, Mexico, and Cuba, as well as metaphoric components for a larger radical imaginary of capitalist exploitation, racial injustice, and imperialist hegemony. In most cases, chance and coincidence have little to do with events, since many of them were supposedly orchestrated and managed by communist activists or organizations in the region with the help of the U.S. communist party in New York. The book also discusses the subliminal context of this history, i.e. tropes and imaginaries that helped bridge and merge ideological, racial and geographical disparities, and national sensibilities. For example, the struggle to liberate the nine Black youngsters accused of raping two white girls in Alabama, the "Scottsboro nine," (Chapter 4), lynching, and the "Black Belt" as logotypes for inhuman exploitation and abuse both at home and abroad (Chapter 5), signaled Communists' "focused, deliberate and coordinated campaign" at the local and global levels "to organize movements between parties in the 'colonial countries' like the U.S. and those in the colonies and semi-colonies like Cuba (p. 110)." [End Page 226] The "Hemispheric aspect of the 'Negro Question', (p. 149)" as the author defines this extrapolation of concepts related to the racial issue in an antiimperialist context, also served as foundation for subsequent anti-imperialist and labor offensives in other radical scenarios such as Haiti and Puerto Rico. The work affords awareness as to the underlying connections between Communist organizations in distant geographical points and the creation of a more systematic organization for radical and communist activity in the Caribbean periphery. It also provides an assessment of regional radicalism from a racial perspective. Most significantly, it contributes insight concerning radicalism in usually overlooked domains such as British Guiana, St. Kitts, and Trinidad, where periodic labor unrest...