Anarchism and Countercultural Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba

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This is the first critical in-depth study of the anarchist movement in Cuba in the three decades after the republic’s independence from Spain in 1898. Kirwin Shaffer shows that anarchists played a significant–until now little-known–role among Cuban leftists in shaping issues of health, education, immigration, the environment, and working-class internationalism. They also criticized the state of racial politics, cultural practices, and the conditions of children and women on the island.

            In the chaotic new country, members of the anarchist movement interpreted the War for Independence and the revolutionary ideas of patriot José Martí from a far left standpoint, embarking on a nationwide debate with the larger Cuban establishment about what it meant to be “Cuban.” To counter the dominant culture, the anarchists created their own initiatives to assist people–schools, health institutes, vegetarian restaurants, theater and fiction writing groups, and occasional calls for nudism–and in consequence they challenged both the existing elite and the U.S. military forces that occupied the country.

Shaffer also specializes in what anarchists did to prepare the masses for a social revolution. Whilst many of their ideals flowed from Europe, and in particular from Spain, their programs, criticisms, and literature reflected the specifics of Cuban reality and appealed to Cuba’s popular classes. The use of theories on working-class internationalism, countercultures, popular culture, and social movements, Shaffer analyzes archival records, pamphlets, newspapers, and novels, showing how the anarchist movement in republican Cuba contributed to shaping the country’s early leftist revolutionary agenda.

             Shaffer’s portrait of the conflict between anarchists and their enemies illuminates the a couple of forces that pervaded life on the island in the 20th century, until the upward thrust of the Gerardo Machado dictatorship in the 1920s. This important book places anarchism in its rightful historical place as an important current within Cuban radical political culture. 

 

 

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