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Title: Anarchist Cuba Author: SK Date: 2020, Winter Language: en Topics: Cuba, anarchist movement, book review Source: Fifth Estate #405, Winter, 2020, copied January 3, 2022 from https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/405-winter-2020/anarchist-cuba/ Notes: a review of Anarchist Cuba: Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century by Kirwin Shaffer. PM Press 2019
a review of
Anarchist Cuba: Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century
by Kirwin Shaffer. PM Press 2019
“…these anarchist rebels took part in a long tradition of imagining Cuba
as an ‘island of dreams’ where humanity could create a free, healthy,
educated, and egalitarian beacon for global liberation.”
—Kirwin Shaffer
Kirwin Shaffer’s new book helps readers understand what being an
anarchist has meant in Cuba during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Previous histories by other authors about anarchists on the island have
concentrated on their participation in the urban and rural labor
movement. However, in this book, Shaffer, a professor of Latin American
studies at Pennsylvania State University, Berks College, explores
several additional areas of involvement outside the workplace during the
past 150 years.
He describes the development of various projects during this period,
including writing and publishing of anarchist inspired fiction and
nonfiction, producing radical theater, visual art, music, alternative
health clinics, as well as schools for both children and adults free of
state and religious control and specifically dedicated to encouraging
independent thinking. Participants pooled their knowledge from a variety
of backgrounds—women and men, old and young, black and white, Cuban and
foreign-born, skilled and unskilled workers, poets, shopkeepers,
playwrights, and librarians.
Shaffer does not shrink from discussing the ambiguities and
contradictions within the various projects, or their internal squabbles
and differing points of view on several important issues. His care not
to idealize or exaggerate accomplishments enables readers to more easily
understand the dynamics involved.
The various undertakings are described in the context of how they were
intended to counter the authoritarian character and brutalities of the
Catholic and Protestant churches, the military and the Spanish colonial
administration that held sway until the end of the 19th century, and
then the nominally independent Cuban state—all of which contributed to
the highly exploitative and repressive conditions on the island.
Shaffer discusses how anarchist projects responded to, and helped shape
the popular understanding of concepts such as freedom, equality,
identity, and progress. Part of this involved fighting against racism,
for women’s equality, and uniting the working-class across racial,
national, and gender lines. By the 1890s, Shaffer tells us, anarchists
in the Cuban labor movement were able to play a major role in fostering
class ties among people of diverse origins and race, as well as in
excluding party affiliation from union activities.
He also delineates the major differences between anarchist and Marxist
groups, which were active in Cuba from the 19th century on, especially
the strategies for dissent each chose. Marxists concentrated on building
organizations to train and guide/supervise the proletariat at the work
place, in daily life, and at the ballot box. The anarchists were
strongly committed to means that coincided with desired future ends,
such as encouraging the independence and self-activity of students and
workers while fighting against unjust working and living conditions.
They recognized the struggle against domination as connected to the
immediate construction of the means of resistance. Anarchists designed
their projects specifically to improve the lives of women, men and
children in the present as well as to prepare them for a social
transformation sometime in the future.
Shaffer devotes three chapters to exploring the anarcho-naturist
influence among Cuban anarchists. The naturist movement, which developed
in Europe and North America during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, focused on alternative personal health and lifestyle
practices, such as adopting a simple, inexpensive and nutritious
vegetarian diet, getting lots of outdoor exercise, practicing nudism,
living in small villages where everyone can know each other, and doing
whatever possible to combat the effects of industrial mass society.
In Cuba, several anarchist writers and artists shifted the naturist
movement’s focus away from primarily individual health concerns to an
emphasis on social emancipatory themes by writing news stories, essays,
novels, plays and advice columns that were widely available beyond
anarchist circles. This cultural influence persisted into the 1950s even
as the anarcho-syndicalist movement was significantly weakened by
government repression and the consolidation of the Cuban Communist
Party.
Although anarchists from all tendencies were interested in ways to
improve health, anarcho-syndicalists (especially in the cafe and
restaurant unions) and anarcho-naturists were particularly focused on
aspects of daily life that disproportionately affected the young and the
working poor. They emphasized learning and teaching alternative medicine
to help people deal with health problems of modern society, including
ill-health brought about by harsh factory and field work, as well as
diseases caused by cramped and poorly ventilated living quarters.
Some went even further and offered deep criticisms of modern
civilization—sometimes from an idealized perspective on pre-modern
conditions and other times from a more sophisticated point of view
involving a critique of the modern city as the direct consequence of
industrial exploitation of the natural world, approaching the breaking
point.
Other anarchists criticized what they viewed as the anarcho-naturists’
idealization of nature, and the concepts of what were supposedly
nature’s laws as tending toward mystification.
Although they were internationalists, many anarchists played a
significant part in inspiring and fighting for Cuban independence from
Spanish colonialism in the 1890s. It was their hope that the struggle
against injustice and imperialism would be the prelude to a domestic and
later international social revolution.
Some anarchists warned it was a mistake to put hope in a nationalist
struggle. Sadly, the U.S. government with the cooperation of local Cuban
elites proved them correct. After the war of independence, capitalist
exploitation on the island was intensified.
Nevertheless, anarchists in Cuba continued their various projects,
advocating decentralized self-organization, and challenging the
authoritarian practices of the foreign and domestic elites who were
blocking the way to the broad social change that so many desired. They
continued to criticize centralization and the concentration of wealth,
along with the degradation of the environment and human physical and
mental health caused by the greed of those in power.
There were major crackdowns against radical activities in Cuba from 1914
on, and the anarchist movement was severely impacted. However,
anarchists continued to be influential because they refused to
compromise with the ruling powers, persisting in militantly advocating
and disseminating perspectives that challenge their authority.
On the other hand, beginning in the 1920s operatives of the Cuban
Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular, PSP) chose to make
compromises with the various dictatorial governments in order to be
allowed control of the labor unions and other perks. The
Communist-dominated Cuban Workers Confederation (Confederación de
Trabajadores de Cuba, CTC) purged anarchists and other militant labor
activists.
In response, anarchists formed the Libertarian Association of Cuba
(Asociación Libertaria de Cuba, ALC) in 1943. The ALC challenged the
government and the Communists, while working to resurrect independence
and autonomy within the labor movement. In the 1950s, the ALC joined
other revolutionary groups in armed resistance to the dictatorship.
By the time that Castro’s men landed in Cuba in 1956, the ALC had groups
functioning throughout Cuba—in Havana, Pinar del Rio, San Cristóbal,
Artemisa, Ciego de Avila, and Manzanillo. Anarchists challenged the
dictatorship in the cities through their participation in revolutionary
movements such as the Directorio Revolucionario and the Federation of
University Students.
In addition, the ALC meeting hall became a center for the distribution
of information related to the struggle as well as a place where some of
Castro’s July 26th Movement members trained to use firearms.
In response, the right-wing Batista dictatorship imprisoned,
disappeared, and tortured ALC members.
Immediately following Castro’s takeover in 1959, anarchists joined in
what they hoped would be the long-awaited social revolution. But they
became increasingly disturbed about the new government’s top-down,
centralized, bureaucratic solutions to Cuba’s pressing social problems.
By March of 1961, it became impossible for anarchists to voice their
concerns openly as their publications and organizations were shut down
and activists imprisoned. Many, but not all, chose exile where they
could continue to openly advocate anarchist alternatives.
Kirwin Shaffer’s contextualized history makes it clear why and how
anarchist inspired oppositional activities have never been extinguished
on the island, despite ongoing government supervision and surveillance,
along with periodic political crackdowns.
As long as anarchist rebels in Cuba are able to dream of and create
autonomous, non-authoritarian projects, the future holds multiple
possibilities for individual freedom and social solidarity.
SK is a longtime supporter of Cuban anarchists.