Transnationalism, class and national identity in the Cuban labour movement (1898-1902)

Abstract

ABSTRACT For a Cuban anarchist movement intent on promoting harmonious class relations, attachment to national identity within the working classes was a divisive wedge which limited this objective. Transnationalism – understood here as the process of Spanish migration to Cuba, as well as the anarchist network between the U.S. and the Caribbean – combined with this divisive context; it intermeshed with a Cuban working class marked by their recent emancipation from Spanish colonial rule. On the one hand, this article will show how transnationalism was instrumental to building the strength of the anarchist movement in Cuba. Simultaneously, my intervention destabilizes conventional assumptions about transnationalism: rather than simply a generative process which inexorably led to the growth of anarchism in Cuba, it was constrained by, and at times reinforced, antagonistic relations on the basis of national identity. In doing so, this article furthers understandings of how transnational processes impact social movements, particularly in the context of imperial hegemony. Moreover, by foregrounding the domestic situation in Cuba and questioning the benefits of transnationalism, it reasserts the agency of Latin America in labour histories, rather than adopting the common framing of the continent being a passive recipient of influences from mainland Europe.