Anarchism and Countercultural Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba

The bridge between Cuban scholarship and its foreign counterparts can be likened to the hanging rope bridges of the high Andes: a daunting but necessary journey for those who choose a Cuban subject for their research. Like those tenuous but firm rope crossings, too, is the relationship in Cuban historiography between periods marked off by radical ruptures. Scholars within and without Cuba tend to stay inside the perimeter of a given period, and the study of the republican period has bloomed in Cuban academia only since the 1990s.This valuable study merits a place alongside other worthwhile contributions that transit these geographic and thematic chasms. Shaffer proposes to do for anarchism something like what K. Lynn Stoner did for feminism: that is, to restore to its rightful place in Cuban history a movement often neglected by historiography. This engaging and often passionate overview of anarchism as a social, political, and cultural movement draws on an eclectic and exhaustive bibliography mined from collections in the United States, Havana, and Amsterdam.Shaffer defines clearly and precisely where his own study differs from key works on anarchism and on the Cuban republic, specifying which lacunae he expects to fill. Whether refuting Murray Bookchin’s idea of an “unbridgeable chasm” between sociopolitical and “lifestyle” anarchism (preferring to stress the commonalities of the anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-naturists in Cuba) or pointing out how the works of pro-anarchists in exile overestimate the contribution of anarchists in Cuba, Shaffer’s criticism is measured and not something he wields just to score points.Still, the book is divided into three sections that reflect conventional divisions in the study of anarchism. The first five chapters, dedicated to nationalism and internationalism, address the issues around the struggle for independence, immigration, and race. Chapters 6 – 8 deal with anarchists’ concern with the unhealthy conditions of the working classes, anarcho-naturists’ opposition to the medical establishment and the return to nature (epitomized in Del Valle’s novels), and the defense of the countryside, where the expansion of sugar estates had upset a livable balance. Finally, chapters 9 – 11 treat “freedom teaching,” culture for the masses (theater and newspapers), and the role of women (victimized prostitutes, model revolutionary mothers).A useful taxonomical choice (p. 22) is Antoni Kapcia’s classification of three “distinct and competing cubanías” during the first republic: the hegemonic and largely pro-U.S. version, that of Eurocentric intellectuals and artists who proposed “some vague regeneration of national values,” and the Cuba rebelde that advocated sovereignty rather than nominal independence. Although Kapcia omits the contribution of anarchist culture, his classification is broad enough to include the anarchists in the Cuba rebelde family. The anarchists “proposed a non-hierarchical and egalitarian nationhood”; they challenged the elite’s project for a Christian and capitalist society and participated in the debate about Cuban sovereignty and about the very identity of the nation. The way Shaffer presents them, the anarchists were the one uncompromisingly consistent political movement.Shaffer focuses on the twofold success of Cuba’s early counterhegemonic struggles. First, anarcho-syndicalists laid the foundations for a militant labor movement, which assimilated their ideas and integrated them into its program. Anarchists also fought tenaciously for racial equality (though they were limited by Afrocubans’ mistrust of Spanish immigrants and by their own racism) and women’s rights (though their idealization of motherhood is familiar: women transmit doctrine and supply new militants). They advocated a critical, rational, and secular education; called for universal health care; and saw literature and drama as vehicles for promoting a sovereign nation and a just society.Schaffer traces anarchist history through the 1940s, when the Libertarian Alliance was formed to maintain a militant presence in the unions, and up to the 1950s, when anarchists focused on armed resistance to Batista. It is ironic that the anarchists’ contribution to the rebels’ vision of revolutionary transformation would be “airbrushed” out of official history after 1960; although the pioneering work of certain individuals and publications has always been recognized, their political affiliation has been subsumed into their activity within the labor movement or as individual activists or organic intellectuals.Shaffer cites specific cases of anarchist influence; for example, they held José Antonio Mella and other student-founders of the Universidad Popular José Martí to the stated egalitarian principle of working with the workers for whom it had been established (p. 192). He also details the anarchists’ educational and health projects, part of the broadly based countercultural experiment that president Gerardo Machado (1925 – 33) all but wiped out.The chapters on anarchist culture and on the role of women detail a surprising puritanism. Anarchists condemned homosexuality, prostitution, and pornographic the-ater (echoing the conservative newspaper Diario de la Marina) while praising the family as the basic unit of society. They criticized public monuments that perpetuated militarism and scathingly condemned carnival as a safety valve controlled by the upper classes, which benefited from selling liquor to the poor.The beauty of this book is that it charts a path seamlessly through biographies, novels, plays, social and labor histories, and intellectual history to analyze the foundational role of Cuban anarchism in “a war between competing paradigms” (p. 223) and to rescue it from conflicting revisionist views. Anarchism modeled a counterhegemonic project to resist both Cuban elite and U.S. hegemony, eventually to replace them with an inclusive political culture. In documenting the struggle to make this idea materialize, Shaffer gives historical immediacy to the intense activity of half a century and marks the lasting relevance of its protagonists

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Criticism · Historiography · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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