Kirwin R. Shaffer. Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion. Global and International History Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Illustrations. xiv + 318 pp. $49.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-48903-4.
Reviewed by Frances Sullivan (Simmons University)
Published on H-LatAm (January, 2022)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In early 1911, California-based anarchists from the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) invaded the Mexican state of Baja California and held territory there for over six months. Anarchists from across the globe heralded this opportunity to “destroy authoritarianism, redistribute land, and give rise to a new era of freedom, autonomy, and egalitarianism” (p. 128). The Havana-based paper ¡Tierra!, which was the heart and soul of Caribbean anarchism in the early 1910s, urged readers to send money to the PLM and support legal defense for the Flores Magón brothers, PLM leaders who sat in US prisons for violating neutrality laws. ¡Tierra!’s readers came through, and “from 1911 to 1914, efforts to raise money for Mexico usually outpaced any single Cuba-based issue” among the paper’s readers (p. 132). The money came from fifteen Cuban towns and cities, but also from the Canal Zone in Panama, Puerto Rico, and as far as Hartford, Connecticut. Around this time, in Tampa, Florida, a New York City-based anarchist named Pedro Esteve was selling copies of the PLM’s newspaper, Regeneración,and working with the group Pro-Revolución Mexicana. Caribbean anarchists did not just support the cause financially and ideologically; some took up arms in the revolution, including Rafael de Nogales Méndez, who had fought for Spain during Cuba’s final independence war, commanded a column in revolutionary Mexico, and went on to join Augusto César Sandino’s insurgency against the US Marines’ occupation of Nicaragua.
As Kirwin R. Shaffer explains in his 2020 book, Anarchists of the Caribbean, anarchists had come “to see the Mexican Revolution as a step to worldwide revolution” (p. 130). Their rally cry around Mexico was just one of several internationally mobilizing causes for Caribbean anarchists in the early twentieth century. In another example, some ten thousand workers walked off the job on the US-run Panama Canal in 1916. The Peruvian-born anarchist Víctor Recoba had founded the Maritime Workers Union, which led the strike, and its meetings were “truly transnational affairs” (p. 190). White, mestizo, and Black workers from across Europe, Latin America, and the West Indies attended, delivered speeches in Spanish and English, and read bilingual manifestos. Even the repression was an international affair. After US and Panamanian authorities collaborated to force most back to work, the Panamanian government attempted to deport the strike’s leaders—who heralded from Costa Rica, St. Vincent, Greece, Peru, and other “underdetermined origins”—aboard a Peruvian ship, but Peru declined to accept them and the men were scattered (p. 194).
Shaffer’s book is a meticulously researched account of the transnational networks anarchists forged in the early twentieth century in the wake of—and opposed to—US economic, military, and imperial expansion. Well-known “celebrity” and less famous “rank-and-file” anarchists traveled throughout the region, some searching for work but others with the explicit aim of advancing anarchism (p. 23). In the face of a world increasingly dominated by transitional US capital and military might, anarchists posed an alternative, egalitarian, and internationalist vision for the Americas. While Shaffer’s subjects came from and voyaged to far-flung sites in the Americas and Europe, his book focuses mainly on Cuba, Tampa, Panama, and Puerto Rico. A vibrant and expansive anarchist press connected these “nodes.” “Between 1892 and 1929, Caribbean anarchists published over sixty newspapers and magazines” that were either entirely anarchist or that contained a strong anarchist influence (p. 31). Anarchists also published novels, plays, poetry, and short stories, producing a counterculture and “anarchist revolutionary imagination” condemning exploitation and offering internationalist, egalitarian morals (p. 275).
Shaffer’s narrative follows anarchists and their writing. His prologue tells the remarkable story of Spanish-born José María Blázquez de Pedro, who reappears throughout the book. Blázquez de Pedro fought for Spain during Cuba’s War of 1895 but was disillusioned and became an anarchist writer. He spent time in Spanish jails before moving to Panama in 1914. There, he participated in the 1916 strike and a major rent strike in 1925, when he was deported to Havana. A poet, essayist, and speechmaker, Blázquez de Pedro “functioned as a ‘middle-man’ of sorts” in anarchist networks, “translating the local for global consumption as well as applying the global for local interpretation” (p. 9).
Shaffer begins with Cuba’s final independence war, when anarchists on both sides of the Florida Straits—and as far as Argentina, Spain, and New York—were cautiously optimistic that ridding the island of colonialism would be a step in advancing social revolution but also warned against replacing one form of bourgeoisie rule with another. In Cuba, they encouraged Spanish soldiers to defect and planted bombs on bridges and gas lines. By the turn of the century, Tampa and the nearby tobacco company town of Ybor City emerged as a key node in this “anarchist straight” and strikes proliferated. The anarchist-dominated Sociedad de Torcedores de Tampa’s members hailed from the US, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, the Dominican Republic, England, and Germany (p. 76).
In many ways, Shaffer picks up where Benedict Anderson left off with his book Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2007), republished as The Age of Globalization. Where Anderson focuses on anarchist struggles against Spanish colonialism, with an emphasis on the Philippines, Shaffer moves the picture to resistance against rising US imperialism in the Americas. As he explains, “Caribbean anarchists became the first global anarchists to confront US foreign policy” (p. 65). They condemned Washington’s hollow expressions of representative democracy and liberty, speaking not only of US meddling in the affairs of sovereign states but also from the perspective of workers who had personally experienced repression. This was especially true of anarchists in Tampa, who lived under the thumb of the Anglo business community and local authorities.
This discussion of early anarchist anti-imperialism is a significant contribution to the literature on radicalism in Latin America during the era Barry Carr has called “the red years of the Caribbean and Central America.” Much of the existing scholarship focuses on international communism.[1] Inspired by the Bolshevik victory in Moscow and often led by the Communist International’s Caribbean Bureau in New York, an interconnected network of Latin American communists struggled against imperialist capitalism and its “lackey” dictators in the 1920s and 1930s.[2] But, as Shaffer details, anarchists were “the original leftists in the region,” who “established some of the first transnational anti-imperialist solidarity networks in the Caribbean years before any orders to do so arrived from Moscow” (pp. 13, 21).
Many of Shaffer’s Spanish-speaking Caribbean subjects did join the famous International Worker of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) and in fact played a key role in spreading IWW unionization along the East Coast. And Wobblies collaborated with anarchists to help Puerto Ricans evade the draft by fleeing US territory during the Great War. Rather than focus on the amply covered US-based IWW, however, Shaffer highlights anarchist institutions indigenous to the Caribbean, especially ¡Tierra!. In operation for over a decade in the early 1900s, the Havana paper showed readers across the region that “their struggles were not isolated,” funneled money to various causes, and served to introduce prominent anarchists as they traveled (p. 122). Similarly, a chapter on the “anarchist concept of Pan-Americanism” explores Spanish speakers’ celebration of Latin American culture and vision for a united Americas, “where labels, ethnicities, and national origins mean nothing” (p. 222). Plans for an Inter-American Continental Congress of Anarchists, to be held in Panama in November 1925, however, were foiled in the violent aftermath of a rent strike that began in the Canal Zone but spread to the republic. On October 10 that year, the police opened fire on a gathering of strikers. The next morning, Panama began deportations of the international leadership and called in US military support. By the time the anarchist conference was to begin, US and Panamanian authorities had deported prominent figures and were on the lookout for anarchists attempting to disembark. The congress never happened.
In other words, Shaffer tells a story that comes full circle. US transnational military, political, and economic expansion set in motion the pathways that would facilitate anarchist travel and network building across the region. And, in turn, the repressive powers would collaborate internationally to move against the radicals. Shaffer reminds us that Charles Magoon was busy keeping anarchists out of the Canal Zone as US governor in 1905 before he was busy trying to keep them out of Cuba as governor during the 1906 US occupation. And interstate collaboration squashed plans for the anarchist congress of 1925.
But the movement itself was not crushed. Anarchism held on longer in Cuba and Panama than it did in Puerto Rico and Tampa, where US authorities “used the full weight of the federal government” to uproot the movement (p. 185). In Cuba, anarchists had been able to operate more or less autonomously—without collaborating with Marxists or reformist groups, like unions dominated by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The Cubans persevered even in the face of repression. Shaffer concludes with the strange tales of two Cuba-based writers, Marcelo Salinas and Adrián del Valle, who continued to publish, see their plays performed, and receive literary prizes during the late 1920s and early 1930s rule of General Gerardo Machado, who determinedly crushed radicalism.
In short, Shaffer’s book is a most welcome contribution to the study of the early twentieth-century Latin American Left. His scrupulous research (he consulted archives spanning five countries!) reveals the deep transnational connections that sustained anarchism in the region while never losing sight of the particular local and national contexts in which his subjects operated. As in his previous work, Anarchist Cuba: Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century (2005; republished 2019), Shaffer takes just as seriously the (often quite fun) literary imaginings of anarchist writers and reveals a counterculture that “had a different internationalist romance and dream for the region” (p. 289).
Notes
[1]. Barry Carr, “‘Across Seas and Borders’: Charting the Webs of Radical Internationalism in the Circum Caribbean, 1910-1940," in Exile and the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, ed. Luis Roniger, Pablo Yankelevich, and James Green (Brighton: University of Sussex Press, 2012), 233.
[2]. See, for example, Sandra Pujals, “A ‘Soviet Caribbean’: The Comintern, New York’s Immigrant Community, and the Forging of Caribbean Visions, 1931-1936,” Russian History 41, no. 2 (2014): 255-68; Margaret Stevens, Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939 (London: Pluto Press, 2017); and John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930-1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pt. 1.
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Citation:
Frances Sullivan. Review of Shaffer, Kirwin R., Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55925
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