Anarchist Cuba: Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century - Softcover

Shaffer, Kirwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629636371 ISBN 13: 9781629636375

Verlag: PM Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

In this volume, 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 perspective, embarking on a nationwide debate with the larger Cuban establishment about what it meant to be Cuban. To counter the dominant culture, anarchists created their own initiatives to help people, challenging both the existing elite and the occcupying U.S. military forces. While many of their ideals flowed from Europe, their programs, criticisms, and literature reflected the specifics of Cuban reality and appealed to Cuba's popular classes. Using theories of 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 helped shape the country's early leftist revolutionary agenda until the rise of the Gerardo Machado dictatorship in the 1920s.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kirwin Shaffer is professor of Latin American studies at Pennsylvania State University–Berks College. He has authored or edited several books on anarchist culture in Cuba and the Caribbean, including Black Flag Boricuas and In Defiance of Boundaries.

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Anarchist Cuba

Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century

By Kirwin Shaffer

PM Press

Copyright © 2019 PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-637-5

Contents

Tables, 
Acknowledgments, 
Preface to the PM Press Edition, 
Introduction, 
1. Anarchism, Cubanía, Culture, and Power, 
Part I. Anarchism, Nationalism, and Internationalism, 
2. Cuba for All: Anarchist Internationalism and the Politics of Cuban Independence, 
3. Symbolic Freedom: Anarchism and the Cultural Politics of Independence, 
4. The Cuban Melting Pot: Anarchism and Immigration, 
5. Anarchism in Black and White: Race and Afrocubanismo, 
Part II. Anarchism, Health, and Nature, 
6. Struggles for a Healthy Cuba: Anarchism, Health, and "White Slavery", 
7. Curing Bourgeois Ills: Anarcho-Naturism vs. Cuba's Medical Establishment, 
8. Rejecting Civilization: Nature, Salvation, and the Rural Ideal in Anarcho-Naturism, 
Part III. Anarchism, Education, and the Family, 
9. Freedom Teaching: Anarchism and Education, 
10. Guiding the Masses: Anarchist Culture as Education, 
11. Imagining Women: Prostitutes, Bad Seeds, and Revolutionary Mothers, 
Conclusion and Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Anarchism, Cubanía, Culture, and Power

Cuban society and culture were in a state of flux following independence from Spain. As noted in the introduction, numerous social actors competed to shape a free Cuba. Anarchists were one segment in this multigroup-contested terrain in which people from across the political spectrum and from all classes took to the streets, workplaces, newspapers, halls of government, the stage, and the page to debate what it meant to be Cuban and what path a free Cuba should take. In this context, both Cuban- and foreign-born anarchists acted as one component in the cultural and political struggles to define and create cubanidad, that is, what it means to be Cuban.

In recent decades, historians have become interested in the cultural and political struggles to define cubanidad in the early republic. Increasingly, scholars examine the conflicts and different ideologies that shaped Cuban political culture during those years. As Antoni Kapcia notes, a dominant feature in Cuban political culture is "the obsession with identity, which dominated politics and dissidence from late in the colonial period until the present day." In the minds of Cubans, and even much of the world, Cuba has been, as Kapcia puts it, an "island of dreams" where people of all political persuasions have been "mixing illusions with teleological visions, and creating 'real' plans on the basis of long-postponed but still believed 'dreams' of utopia."Anarchists were one such group of dreamers.

It is useful to explore Kapcia's ideas on cubanidad and cubanía ("the political belief in cubanidad") to understand the broader cultural and political Cuban contexts in which anarchists found themselves and which they sought to shape. Kapcia builds off Benedict Anderson's path-breaking book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991). Anderson began to reformulate how historians think about nationalism and national identity with his concept of "imagined communities." In the nineteenth century, newly independent countries throughout the hemisphere had to construct what it meant to be Argentine, Chilean, and so on. Following independence from Spain, leaders tried to create a sense of "nation." To this end, nationalism was not "awakened" in people within manmade borders; rather, nationalism was imagined and then constructed. Nations really had no clear identifiable birth, but, through the construction of national histories and identities, restricted political zones were imbued with a sense of creation, development, and tradition. Although it seems that a revolutionary war for independence and the signing of a document granting independence might mark such a national birth, these events are only part of larger processes that themselves often may have no more intrinsic importance than what later leaders or historians choose to give them. Following independence throughout Latin America in the first half of the nineteenth century, political borders were often reconfigured and new nations came into being even after separation from Spain. The creation of the Central American republics and the Dominican Republic illustrate the point. Thus, in such an environment, when can one say the new nation was "born"? It is easy to identify the birth of "national boundaries," but it is not nearly as easy to identify the birth of the "nation" or what it meant to be a citizen of that nation.

At first glance, Cuba seems to offer a different perspective. Not only was there a definable war for independence (1895–1898) from Spain, but also Cuba, as an island, would not have to construct new borders to separate it from its neighbors. Nature had taken care of that. Still, a number of events complicated this seemingly easy identification of the republic's birth. Cuba occupied a unique position in the world system of politics and economics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Central to this uniqueness was Cuba's geographical proximity to the United States and the role of sugar and tobacco in the island's economy. In the decades following the war, foreign, primarily North American, capital dominated Cuba's economy. This economic reality was coupled with the political reality of repeated, constitutionally sanctioned U.S. military interventions. Besides the occupation of 1898–1902, the United States returned under the provisions of the Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution first from 1906 to 1909, again in 1912, and then again from 1917 to 1922. In addition to these military, political, and economic impediments to a realization of the birth of nationhood, Cubans encountered large waves of immigration from Spain, Haiti, and the British West Indies. Also strong Spanish and African traditions, derived during the four hundred years of colonial rule and slavery, continued to influence the island's cultural environment; simultaneously, a new school system, modeled on a U.S. system, was being implemented, and cultural imports from the "Colossus of the North" increasingly found waiting customers. Within this context of diverse international influences, Cubans of different political persuasions struggled to imagine and forge a national identity. They attempted to define and construct what it meant to be "Cuban."

Not all agreed on this sense of community or national identity. Kapcia identifies three distinct competing cubanías: a "hegemonic cubanía" that sought closer formal political and economic ties with the United States; a "cubanía cultural" of primarily white, Eurocentric intellectuals seeking some vague regeneration of national values; and, a "cubanía rebelde" that, through the formal political system, sought "sovereignty" rather than "independence." The first and third are most critical. Hegemonic cubanía included the political and economic leaders in Cuba who saw the island's future (and their personal fortunes) tied to ever-closer relations with the United States. Some, looking beyond the economic motivations to cultural issues, believed that Cuba's adoption of North American notions of progress that contrasted with a perceived Spanish backwardness and African barbarity would elevate Cuba to become a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PM Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1629636371
• ISBN 13: 9781629636375
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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